OK a bit more agent wrangling on the two apps. over the weekend. Just a remind 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 so for now at least went with npx – that means the any user can just :
npx @richsharples/a11ybot@beta ornpx @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 couple of goals 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 and 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.
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 – 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 4.6 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 notices 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.
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