I haven't felt like writing in a long time, and once again there's friction at the very start. I want to write something, but I also want the content to be complete, the writing to be correct, the images to look good, everything to be tidy, the page to load fast, and so on... and by then I have neither the time nor the energy left to actually write.

Back in 2022 I had good intentions, and I even started writing a little. But I couldn't keep it going. So this time, instead of writing an "I'm back" post, I'm just carrying on as if I'd been writing every week, exactly 4 years later.

I wanted the first post to be about Claude. For the past month I've been working with Claude intensively. I say "working with" because it's the first assistant that got me out of the "ask a question, read the answer, ask for improvements, see the result, start over" loop I'd experienced with ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot. It feels as if I have a technical team member next to me, and I'm the big brother describing what I want done and giving feedback on the results. Sometimes it's the other way around;

Of course, other companies' models are at least as powerful as Claude. We shouldn't think of them as just chatbots in a web browser anymore. Just as you need the right tool and the right accessories to do a job quickly and well, you also need to choose the right assistant, model and working environment for the job at hand.

For example, the site you're reading this on was designed entirely with Claude in half a day. I described what I wanted by giving it URLs of example sites, explained what my hosting plan could and couldn't do where needed, it told me about the alternatives, I made choices that matched its suggestions with what I wanted (or did we make them together?), and it produced a dynamic site — one that might have taken 1–2 weeks of conventional human effort — with a Markdown editor built in. And all the while it didn't hold back on telling me how brilliant I was 😊

When you work through the desktop app, it really gets its hands on things. In a web browser it just answers you, but with the desktop app it can work on your files to the extent you allow, visit sites on your behalf through the Chrome extension, and reach into your apps that offer an MCP integration, reading, changing or adding things within the permissions you give it.

For instance, if I had tried to move this website off WordPress and rebuild it myself with PHP + SQL + JS, I would have had to pull every post and image from the old site one by one and add them by hand on the other side, or write a script to do it. Claude just asked me to take a backup file, read all my posts, comments and pages from it, and wrote them straight into the newly built database. That's genuinely practical.

In future posts, I hope to write more about the micro-projects I've been able to build with Claude and enjoyed. See you in the next one.