Agentic

The next big feature is integrated the PullBook App with the Half Decent scale so I can completely automate the “pull a shot” workflow in the app but due to a shipping delay from Hong Kong all I have is a rough implementation and a simulator as shown below :

Status report – I gave the web site a bit of a makeover and improved the automation but nothing major. I also fixed a few minor bugs in the app and ended up in a bit of a merge hell. I have a branch open for the scales integration on one machine and working on bugs on another machine and at one point I just wanted the two Claudes to connect to each other and figure out how to move forward – relaying GitHub instructions through me was just slowing the whole process down and I don’t think I was adding much to the discussion. Anyway – everything got synched and committed and a new Apple TestFlight build is on its way.

I’m still manually onboarding beta participants – we’re talking small numbers so it’s entirely manageable but would love to automate this but away as well. My long term goal is to automate everything and reduce my role to design authority, product strategy, release planning / feature prioritization and any task that still needs a pair of hands to complete.

What this experiment has show me so far is :

I think my PM background and distance from the underlying tech is an advantage – there’s a strict division of labor between me (the what) and Claude (the how). I occasionally have to wade in with an opinion (usually in the form of a question) if I think the implementation may not be optimal. I’m equally open-minded and generally interested in Claude’s opinion of the what.
Everything is falling into place for self-improving / self-adapting software. Take the feedback, prioritize it, implement it, test it, ship it. Rinse and repeat. An external API changes or some other catastrophic bug – find it, fix it, ship the fix. All implemented with Claude in a local loop. There needs to be name for this.

At some point I need to invest a bit of time in automating the App store distribution – right now that’s very manual and requires XCode – my suspicion is that I will have to pay GitHub (for the OS/X images) or Apple – XCode Cloud and that would violate one of my requirements for this project that I don’t spend any money (beyond Anthropic tokens).

Reminder, if you are an Espresso aficionado, you might find the app very useful, more information here :

https://pullbook.app

OK a bit more agent wrangling on the two apps. over the weekend. Just a reminder : there’s a semi-serious app for producing 508 Compliance VPATs (A11yBot) and my lifestyle project 9Bar – which is basically an Espresso co-pilot / log book. For both projects I needed an easier way for people other than yours truly to access and run them without a build environment, so for now at least I went with npx – that means the any user can just :

			
npx @richsharples/a11ybot@beta
 or
npx @richsharples/9bar@beta

For 9Bar – I plan to eventually convert it into a native wrapped iOS app and push it through the Apple AppStore with a hosted backend but for now a rea ct web app running on a machine on the local network works fine while I finesse the UX and the espresso pull logic / AI. For A11yBot – running locally with npx is probably good enough – people rightly have issues letting hosted scanners access their IP.

When I started on this journey I had a few of goals / principles in mind:

I’m not interested in looking at code, learning new frameworks, or remembering language syntax. When I was a full time developer many decades ago I took pride in knowing more then my peers and have always had a high tolerance for getting into the details. Not any more – I just don’t think that stuff matters any more.
While I’m a problem solver at heart – I don’t have a high tolerance for all of the accidental complexity and yak shaving that comes with modern software development – Git Syntax, GitHub actions, access tokens, npm publishing – it’s all incredibly awesome but like all good technology it just needs to fade into the background.
Have fun and learn something.

There is no doubt that Claude knows code, knows frameworks, can make good technology and architectural decisions and can work the local loop fine, but it is much less competent at understanding the more complex outer loop. I had to do a little research on the state of the art of publishing node packages from GitHub and provide a bit of direction. Not full on yak shaving but still a little frustrating and a lot of tokens burnt in vain. I do wish LLMs would occasionally pause and ask for help or guidance rather than just brute force ahead.

But let me put this in perspective – I spent a couple of hours on a Sunday afternoon, spent enough time on each project to implement a few more features – some trivial, some not so trivial, open sourced the A11yBot project under ASL 2.0, did a security and A11y review, wired up GitHub to build, scan and publish to npmjs.org when I cut a new release of either app. Without Claude – I probably would’ve got bored and given up at some stage – probably trying to fix some n00b syntax error. I certainly could not have achieved all of this within a few hours. This really is democratization of technology in action – right now, you still need to know a bit about the process of making software, but I’m sure all of this stuff will be significantly easier in the next 6 months.

Claude Opus 4.8 dropped on the Friday and I did switch over for a few sessions but whether it’s overloaded with users or has bigger issues I had to switch back to 4.7 for better stability. At one point Claude apologized that it had spent a lot of tokens on a design change that wasn’t needed and had to roll back the changes.

I’ve noticed I’m burning through tokens at an impressive rate – I’m not really tracking the costs it right now but suspect I’ll need to move to the Max 5x ($100 / month) plan and look at some of the tools for optimizing Claude code usage – I’m sure my current use of claude looks something like the picture above. But I’m having fun and that was one of my goals.

Diary of an Agentic Wrangler (part 5)

Diary of an agentic wrangler (Part 2)