Thoughts and Applets
About a month ago, I realized I need to start learning how to use AI tooling. I was pretty ambivalent in the past about it – for a number of reasons, but it hit me that if I don’t hurry up and start learning, I’m going to get left behind real quick.
So, I spent some time evaluating the major AI providers and weighing the pros and cons of what models are currently out there. Eventually (right around the time I discovered the bee-write-back project, which had a Claude terminal built-in) I settled on Anthropic.
Now, I don’t think Anthropic is that much better than most of the other providers from an ethical perspective. But from what research I have done, they at least check a few boxes. And to be honest, my experiences with Claude have been pretty good thus far.
Since then, I’ve found myself integrating Claude into quite a lot of my workflows. From goal-setting to planning to hardware projects to just general life coaching, I’ve found it’s very good at helping me organize my thoughts and develop effective strategies to accomplish tasks.
One of the neat things we’ve just started is developing some very simple HTML/JS applets, which I’ll be posting on this repo.
These applets are designed around single tasks, and meant to be a minimal way of cataloguing data or enhancing productivity. For example, we’ve added a minimal job application tracker that records applications you’ve sent and displays them in a Sankey visualization.
It’s a really neat way of prototyping ideas with AI; the applets are simple enough that we can iterate quickly, and I become more of a QA tester than the actual developer. In just a few hours we can usually have a working viable prototype.
That being said, Claude isn’t perfect. Sometimes it misses things or needs a little guiding touch/encouragement. But that’s okay. I find that working with it also helps me practice my communication and management skills – I often imagine it as a subordinate and ask myself how I’d like to be treated in its position.
Some other applets that are coming down the pipeline:
- Pomodoro timer
- Weighted decision matrix
- Loan/mortgage explorer
- Whatever else we dream up
I remember when AI was really taking off how people use to talk about this as a future possibility – that it’d be so simple to stand up simple apps. It’s exciting to see that’s now reality, and I think it could really change the mobile/web application space in the future.
In the meantime, we’ll keep dreaming of ideas and (excitedly) trying them out.
That’s all for now. Happy Friday and I hope you have a great weekend.
-Carter