Billboards in Silicon Valley are world famous. And, to put it mildly, insane!

For locals, they're just life as usual in the Bay Area, but for visitors from around the world, they are mind bending artifacts of the tech domain — often striking, unintelligible, absurd, vague and dissonant. They're dedicated to very small groups of decision makers who commute daily on the main highway that connects it all: US Route 101, or, as locals call it, the 101. They're also breadcrumbs of the state of the art of Silicon Valley. They are culture.

I drive up and down the corridor weekly, alongside millions of fellow Bay Area residents, and marvel at the billboards too. Visitors take photos of them in disbelief and post them on X. Stuck in rush hour traffic, they become conversations in the car — or distractions from crawling traffic.

I vibe coded this site with Claude because I wanted a snapshot of all the world famous ads, with some stats on the types of companies behind them (unsurprisingly, yes — AI & Tech). Browse along the 101, each dot color representing a category, or tap any billboard card for details.

To collect the data, I asked Claude to build an iOS app using Vision to analyze frames as I'm driving — snapping photos, cropping them, running OCR, and publishing to 101ads.org with minimal input from me. I just had to do the driving. Or use Waymo.

This is a fun project. I'll do my best to keep it fresh roughly every month.

To visitors from around the world — I hear you. This is Silicon Valley billboard insanity and I'm happy to take you along.