Is the Strait of Hormuz open?
A yes-or-no answer to one question, checked by Claude every 30 minutes.
- Role
- Design and code, solo
- Platform
- Web
- Stack
- Next.js, Claude Haiku 4.5, Upstash Redis
- Timeline
- April 2026
- Status
- Live
When the Strait of Hormuz closed in April 2026, there was a lot of chatter online about whether it was open, so I built a site to answer that one question. It may seem simple, but it came out of a thesis of mine: AI doesn’t always need to be a chat interface. Every 30 minutes, a cron job pulls the latest news about the strait from GDELT and Google News. If anything new comes in, a Claude agent reviews it against a set of heuristics and needs at least 0.8 confidence to call the strait closed. The heuristics filter out biased rhetoric and opinion, so it judges only the facts.
01 · Every 30 minutes
A cron job pulls the latest news.
02 · Headlines
The last hour of Strait of Hormuz news from GDELT and Google News.
03 · Claude Haiku 4.5
If anything’s new, Claude classifies it: open or closed, a confidence and its reasoning.
04 · Rules
Closing needs 0.8 confidence. Reopening needs three open results in a row.
05 · The page
The answer is stored in Redis and cached at the edge.