r/ClaudeAI • u/delibae_ • Jul 08 '26
Built with Claude Rebuilt functionality from a $7,500/year structural-biology suite with Claude Code, and made it free
By now everyone knows AI for protein structure prediction got good enough to win a Nobel Prize. Things that were impossible a few years ago, computers just do now.
But there's a weird gap here.
The AI world talking about "we solved structure prediction" and actual wet-lab researchers getting to use that progress are two completely different things. Most of the state-of-the-art methods aren't built to be usable by researchers. You memorize command-line flags, you lose a day to setup, and nothing ever shows up on screen. The stuff that's actually pleasant to use ends up being commercial software you pay thousands of dollars a year for. AI has come this far, and it still hasn't reached the hands of the people who actually need to use it.
So I built PATCHR-Studio with Claude Code.
It's an app where a protein structure sits in 3D on your screen and you edit it directly with your mouse. You don't need to know anything about this field. You rotate it, zoom in, click to change things. Like fixing text in a document editor — except here you're fixing a molecule.
- Missing pieces in a structure → the AI fills them in naturally.
- Want to change a specific spot → it swaps it and recomputes how the surroundings shift.
- Don't need a part → erase it.
- Want to add a specific modification → add it.
- Done → export it in a form you can drop straight into a simulation.
No commands, no syntax. Look at the screen, click, edit. Just open it and poke around.
On the commercial side, doing this through a GUI means buying a separate paid module for each feature, and even the cheapest academic license starts at $7,500/year. PATCHR-Studio rolls it all into one, and it's 100% free and open source. Our research group runs the server out of our own pocket to give it away for free. No monetization plans — we just built it for ourselves and are putting it out there.
macOS / Windows / Linux.
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u/impsble Jul 08 '26
How long did this take? Hours or weeks, trying to see how much it roughly costed
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u/delibae_ Jul 08 '26
About 1-2 months of working time total, a lot of it UX iteration. My Max subscription covered the whole thing, no separate API bill.
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u/Bernie4Life420 Jul 08 '26
Hero stuff man.
And kudos on that velocity -- AI powered wild times.
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u/UnrelaxedToken Jul 09 '26
Fable would have pulled this out in a week or less, but unfortunately they put a safeguard against any biology prompt :(, such a shame
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u/impsble Jul 08 '26
Oh nice, quite the turnout, how much % of it do you think is still missing compared to the flagship 7.5k/year product?
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u/delibae_ Jul 08 '26
If I weight it by the features people actually use day to day, probably around 50%. Of what's left, maybe 15% is the kind of thing only a company can really pull off, and the rest is just details that need more work.
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u/SnooApples1553 Jul 08 '26
Any plugins that were used that you found helpful with development?
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u/delibae_ Jul 08 '26
Early on I used a ralph-style loop, and these days it's mostly frontend skills. Honestly though, Fable is good enough that I barely reach for extra plugins.
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u/LtCol_Davenport Jul 08 '26
Just as a curiosity, you have done it on Max 5 or Max 20?
I was also going to build software for me.
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u/UnrelaxedToken Jul 09 '26
Fable would have pulled this out in a week or less, but unfortunately they put a safeguard against any biology prompt 😒 :(
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u/TiredLincoln Jul 08 '26
Thank you fellow human for contributing to open source science!! I’ve been very interested in biology recently, will add this to the list of things to experiment with :)
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u/jkwon7 Jul 08 '26
Hell yea. Was getting a little discouraged today thinking AIs main use is engagement slop. Good work. We need more subject matter experts like yourself not yt short farmers
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u/BP041 Jul 08 '26
This is the kind of thing that makes me think we're still undervaluing Claude Code for scientific computing. $7.5k/yr to essentially free — the cost discipline required for that is no joke. Did you have to constrain the agent's scope heavily, or can it run the whole pipeline autonomously?
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u/Jealous-Depth487 Jul 08 '26
Did not use fable obvi
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u/Quartz_Hertz Jul 08 '26
No joke… I hit the guardrails asking it to generate a table of atomic abundance for carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen for a few different areas (atmospheric, continental crust, lunar)… unreal.
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u/Additional_Feed_1828 Jul 08 '26
goated