Since the AI train left the station a few years back, I have been using ChatGPT a bit to help with my coding. I definitely didn’t integrate it into my work as much as some people. I never downloaded cursor, sparingly used co-pilot, and found the chat and code integration in IntelliJ and vsCode left a lot to be desired.

My main usage workflow would be something like:

  • code like normal
  • see some error during some troubleshooting
  • paste the error into ChatGPT
  • go back and forth manually between the IDE and ChatGPT until I fixed the issue

Very manual, but I felt pretty good about it. I wasn’t depending on AI too much, I was still doing most of the coding, so I felt that using ChatGPT to step in to get me unstuck was a perfectly good thing.

I was speaking to a recruiter, who asked me what my experience was with using AI in my work, and I basically said the above. But it was clear they were after someone who uses AI much more than I do. It wasn’t that they were trying to develop some MCP functionality for their product, they just want developers who are fluent with the tools they think are worthwhile.

So last week I downloaded Claude Code. Unbeknownst to me, they had launched v2.1.0 the day before. So I came in at just the right time. After using it for a week, I am super impressed! I have done work on my side project, and on this website in particular. The pace at which Claude can do things in the repo is astounding. For eg. the fun terminal window on the home page with the ascii button for the blog was created by Claude in about 5 minutes. Could I have done that myself? Yea sure, but it would’ve taken like 10-20 times longer.

And it’s not just the speed at which Claude can produce which is impressive. I have also used it to go back through some old work project, to help me understand and remember the complexity, in order to be well-prepared for my next few interviews. It has produced some super helpful documents, which I really wish I had when I was actually working on the project! When making complex changes, it automatically goes into plan mode, where it will create a step-by-step plan and then get agreement, then execute. There are also plugins and skills which can really expand and improve its capabilities, and this repo has some neat ideas around making Claude behave in your work repo.

And finally, looking forward, this is going to be such an amazing tool for everyone. I really believe the time of democratised coding has arrived. Sure, the code it produces for coding beginners isn’t going to be production ready, but does that really matter?

How many people have wanted to scrape a website to track price changes, or build a quick script to organize thousands of photos by date, or create a custom dashboard to track their side hustle metrics? Before, you’d need to either learn to code properly (massive time investment) or pay a developer (expensive for a one-off thing). Now you can just describe what you want and iterate with Claude until it works.

These aren’t apps that need to scale or be maintained for years. They’re tools that solve immediate, personal problems. Someone might want to analyze their poker session data from multiple apps - would’ve cost them £500 to hire someone for a weekend, took him an afternoon with Claude instead. Or another may need to batch convert and rename files for their small business - something that would’ve taken them hours manually, Claude knocked out in minutes.

Yea, some people will try to build the next big SaaS (lol good luck with that 😅), but most people are just going to automate annoying parts of their life or work. And that’s actually huge. That’s the real democratisation - not everyone becoming a software engineer, but everyone getting access to custom software for their specific needs.

Or they download the new Claude Cowork and the possibilities are endless. This is still just the beginning…

✌️x