PyTheory: Breaking Through Five Years of Creative Block with AI

This article details the creation of PyTheory, a Python library for music theory that models tones, scales, chords, and fingering charts with an intuitive API inspired by the Requests library. The author describes a five-year creative block caused by decision paralysis, which was overcome by using AI (Claude) as a thinking partner to sanity-check music theory, catch edge cases, and write effective documentation. The library supports Western harmony, Indian ragas, Arabic maqam, Japanese scales, and more, emphasizing a compassionate API design that matches musicians' mental models. The article is a technical case study on AI-assisted software development and music theory programming.