I got one of those horrid grants.gov PDF files today. The type that only opens in Acrobat. So I dutifully checked if I had Acrobat. I did not. Went to download it …

Holy hell, Acrobat is a 900 MB download?! We truly have lost the plot here.

Homer Simpson's monstrosity of a car, "The Homer" — a famously over-engineered design

I’ve been spending a lot of time with Claude Code, and… what’s the point of doing these things if not to make our lives better?

A few prompts later, I present

the grants.gov pdf secret decoder ring

This is a ~900× cheaper solution (1MB, single HTML file, client side only) for my problem.

I loved the clipped speech patterns of one of the characters in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, so I had Claude write it up in that voice for a public page. The first pass was crude - so I had it back off a bit while keeping it short. I don’t have time to write it better.

I’m an academic, so I also had the LLMs do the literature review for me:

Has anyone done this before? Evidently no one. There were some half-finished Python libraries for decoding XFA. There was also an attempt to get PDF.js to render these forms. But nothing for these annoying grants.gov files specifically.

Until now!

PS. ChatGPT wanted to call this XFAorcist.

PPS. Writing this note and publishing took longer than “doing all the work” to build the tool.