I'm a frontend developer with about three years of experience. Until a few months ago, "publish an npm package" lived on my someday list — the kind of thing you assume requires a deeper relationship with build tooling than you actually have. Then I built one. It's called daterly, it's a React date picker, and it's already running in internal projects at the company I work for.
The twist: I wrote most of it with AI — specifically Claude Code and the wider Claude toolset. This is the honest version of how that went. Not "AI built my startup overnight," but a real account of where the AI carried me, where it slowed me down, and what I'd actually keep from the experience.
Why build another date picker
The internet does not need another React date picker. I know. But we needed this one.
At work (sima-land) we lean on react-hook-form everywhere. It's the backbone of how we handle forms across projects. The date picker we were using — react-datepicker — kept getting in the way of that. Two things drove us up the wall:
