What can I build without touching the code?
This year we had our second AI conference at the institute where a number of companies showcased what their models are now capable of. I found myself pin balling between being very excited about what is possible, and an existential crisis centered around the question "what are human's even for?". The system at the time that seemed the most powerful was Claude Code. The representative I met with at the demo told me he no longer writes any code himself.
I was curious to test what the system was actually capable of. And I have had an idea for a personal project for a long time: visualizing the areas of Seattle where it's the worst to try to travel by public transportation. But I hadn't worked on because it required interacting with a number of APIs and that is usually time consuming and often requires a lot of troubleshooting.
I used Claude Code in the CLI, with the /frontend-design plugin. The experience eased my existential crisis considerably. While I was really impressed with that it was capable of building, I also found I needed to guide it very clearly with my ideas. It felt like collaborating with a less experienced developer. It was also maybe the most fun I've had creating something in a while because it took away a lot of the bottlenecks that often make development tedious.
It removed the distance between having an idea and testing it, which meant more of my time went into the decisions of how it should communicate the data.