Claude Code

A few words of amazement about Claude Code...

In a pet project at home, I had a little app that rendered something on the screen, and one day I decided to rewrite it to use a different rendering technology. The rewrite went well, but it was very difficult, so by the time I was done, I was tired and fed up with it. One little visual thing was missing from the new app, but I did not want to bother with it. I just put the whole project on ice.

That was before the A.I. boom.

Now in the era of A.I., I decided to revisit that project, and to ask Claude Code to add that little visual thingy for me.

As the case usually is with A.I. prompts, if you make them detailed and technical you are likely to get what you want, whereas if you make them high-level you might save time in formulating the prompt, but you might not be satisfied with the results you will get. I tried to test this by going very high-level.

I gave Claude Code a screenshot of the old app and a screenshot of the new app, I used a couple of words to identify the little visual thingy that was present in the old app, and I asked her¹ how she would go about adding it to the new app. Amazingly, she understood the screenshots and offered an approach for achieving what I asked.

I found the proposed approach very reasonable, so I typed:

Excellent! As Captain Piccard would say, make it so!

She responded:

Engaging...

After working on it for a few seconds, to my astonishment, Claude launched the new app, and took a screenshot to see the results of her work. The results were off by a few pixels, so Claude reported this, and asked me for the go-ahead to fix it. I agreed, so she worked on it for a few more seconds, and then she launched the new app again, and took another screenshot to confirm that she had done it right.

I also checked every single line of code that she wrote, and everything was perfect.

That entire interaction was nothing short of mind-blowing.

Then, Claude showed me a prompt asking me how she did in that session: good, medium, bad. I clicked "good" of course. Then she showed me a text box asking me whether I would like to give some feedback. This is what I typed:

I am very amazed. I had been promised flying cars. They were not given to me. But this is even better.