Claude-built PDF tool reportedly performs competitively with ILovePDF on 1,000 papers

The user wanted to match ILovePDF’s performance and says Claude suggested 15 techniques, including image resizing, font merging and metadata removal. Their plan was to have Claude assemble about 5,000 PDFs from open-source test suites, then prompt it to build the tool.

They say they returned from several hours of hiking to a working codebase with competitive performance against ILovePDF on the 1,000 papers they wanted it for. They call the approach “evaluation-driven development”: build a comprehensive test suite that covers edge cases, then fire off a prompt. They say the project used half their week’s token budget.