February 2026
I am a Leica M shooter and I use both film and digital cameras. Everyone has their own reasons for shooting with Leica cameras. Mine are manifold: first, access to the huge native lens library and second, the view through the finder of an M camera is for me superior to an EVF. I like manual controls, in particular manual focusing. The M has all those things in spades. So here I am.
Sometimes shopping for M or LTM (easily adaptable to the M-mount) lenses can be a long process. The same goes for cameras. Browsing this search engine you can see there is no shortage of used Leicas if you only knew where to find them.
Searching for lenses or cameras could become a hobby in its own right for the amount of time it takes to find exactly what you are looking for. For many years I had wanted to build a search engine, just like this, to make the hunt a little bit more efficient. I didn't build it because of the amount of time it takes to get everything built, then the troubleshooting and ongoing maintenance could become a real chore.
This is where a conversation on New Years Eve changed everything. I was talking to a mathematician software developer about AI and how it has changed his profession. For him the last two years has been a revolution: in a good way. Implementing AI CLI tools into his workflow had made him many times more productive. He recommended Claude Code, an AI-powered CLI tool, as a great way to learn how to integrate AI into a coding workflow.
So I did. This is one of those times where an idea was waiting for the right tool. I started working on this site in early January 2026 with some basic concept testing. That looked pretty good, so I just shifted into overdrive with Claude Code and started in earnest.
My programming life started back in 1978. In those days programming could be an arduous task not infrequently involving assembly language coding to maximize the performance of the meager computer power of the day. Troubleshooting took all the time and patience in the world. New programming languages were emerging to answer the call of the PC world and that helped, but ultimately programming was a time consuming task.
Enter AI. Today with Claude Code as an AI agent, I can control the architecture and concentrate on the details of the UI in a way that would have taken ages before. In fact, I am sure that I'd still be writing test code right now instead of having a full public implementation of the site. The efficiency is quite astounding!
Not just a story about how great AI is at helping write code, this is about an idea that met the right tool at the right time and became real. Now browsing listings just for entertainment is hugely satisfying. I built it and here it is.
The project continues to grow. I've since launched a companion site, Used Lens Tracker, which covers a Leica lenses in the same way this site covers Leica cameras. There is always more to do: more sources to add, more filters to refine, and more ways to make the hunt for that perfect glass just a little bit easier. Stay tuned.
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