As my next project, I thought it would be fun to use AI to generate memes. For many years I have used imgflip to generate memes. And they have an API! Unfortunately, they don't have an official Python library (that I could find, I found a bunch of one-GitHub-star unofficial ones).
So I thought, why not let Claude write one.
I created a CLAUDE.md that just said
# imgflip
This is a python library that wraps the imgflip API in a type-safe way.
The imgflip API is described at:
https://imgflip.com/api
We use httpx to make API calls and provide a type-safe interface for all the API features.
And then I started claude in live-dangerously-mode and told it to write the library. Which it did.
(It made a couple of bad design decisions, like asking the user to specify whether they had a paid account, rather than just error-handling that case properly, but we corrected these in short order.)
Once it was done I ran its sample script, and this was what came out:
(On Twitter someone criticized this for not being a "correct" use of the meme, which it isn't, but that's because the sample script just calls "list all memes" and captions whichever one is first.)
I uploaded it to pypi so that I can use it in projects, which means you can too:
uv add pymgflip
(All of the obvious names on pypi were taken, pymgflip was the best I could do.)
The example from the README is actually pretty good:
from pymgflip import Client
client = Client(username="your_username", password="your_password")
# Create a meme
result = client.caption_image(
template_id="61579", # "One Does Not Simply" template
text0="One does not simply",
text1="Use the Imgflip API without pymgflip"
)
if result.success:
print(f"Meme created: {result.url}")
