I’ve been pretty bad at balancing side projects and giving myself downtime in my off hours. After Christmas I got in a good habit of unwinding with a video game, but lately I’ve been tinkering with Claude Code. Simon Willison (via Manton Reece) perfectly captures how I’ve felt the last week:

I’m frequently finding myself with work on two or three projects running parallel. I can get so much done, but after just an hour or two my mental energy for the day feels almost entirely depleted. … they’re finding building yet another feature with “just one more prompt” irresistible.

I made a big investment this past month and gave Anthropic $20 to use Claude Code. In that time I made a daily step tracker for my dad, a local events aggregator for my wife, refined a coffee-strength logging app, and an app for monitoring hourly energy rates.

Some of these ideas scratch my own itch and some will hopefully be useful to the people I love. The thing is, I have had been collecting and thinking about ideas for apps for years but I never had the time to make them.

I learned how to code to build MapKeep and it was a lot of work. I had some help here and there from LLMs but I pretty much made that app one keystroke at a time.

Claude Code is something else: I feel like I have a superpower. Design skills combined with just enough technical know-how to be dangerous. Now when I have an idea for an app I open Drafts and just start dictating my thoughts on how the app should work and eventually that becomes my prompt.

My one-month subscription with Claude is lapsing soon and I’m gonna take a break for a bit. I want to come back fresh when I have a few more ideas ready to go and between then I want to kick the tires with Codex or try try some locally-hosted solutions with my Mac mini. It is certainly addictive and I must shut off the firehose.

It’s an exciting new world and I’m ready for software to get more personal.

(I almost spent more time dealing with submitting one app in App Store Connect than I did building it. I need to start thinking of Mac app ideas so I can distribute directly.)