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Coding - me & Claude pt 7
Has Claude broken certain types of business models, or were the models always broken and only easier to exploit with Claude? I needed a simple 'contact us' form and Claude recommended a free-tier, online form-builder service. The implementation was quick and easy. So far, so good. After the initial implementation, I wanted to redirect to a custom 'thank you' page aligned to the design of the rest of the site. This feature was not available on the free-tier, but Claude had a s
Grant McKenna
5 days ago2 min read


Coding - me & Claude pt 6
What kind of team member is Claude really? ⛳ A keen junior developer that wants to do exactly what it is asked. It knows a lot (everything?) about the language and has near-perfect recall of syntax—but still makes odd mistakes. For example, I asked it to update one user flow based on changes in another—and it did the reverse, overwriting the newer version with the old one. ⛳ A mid-level developer with more experience, but still lacking domain knowledge. You see this when crea
Grant McKenna
Apr 102 min read


Coding - me & Claude pt 5
Don't debate, don't pontificate, don't procrastinate; just do! We all the scenario: the dev team is circling a gnarly problem and everyone is divided as to the best solution. We would breakout whiteboards and complete some sketchy diagrams with lines going everywhere, or paper an internal office for event sourcing sessions. What we didn't do was write code. Writing code felt like a commitment, whereas talking about it could be endless. I recently managed to procrastinate abou
Grant McKenna
Apr 31 min read


Coding - me & Claude pt 4
I have done something I didn't think I would have to do. I thought, if I were pairing programming with Claude code, that I would be developing features so quickly that I would never need to implement 'feature flags' in the codebase. In reality, it was easy to code, but it was significantly harder to make secure. The 'Analyse your round' feature is an AI-powered interactive, question-and-answer session to help a golfer diagnose their biggest issue (for example, too many 3 putt
Grant McKenna
Mar 271 min read


Coding - me & Claude pt 3
"Makes me think of taxis." Great if I was building an app for taxis, and not an app for golf. Feedback from users (beyond the above), indicated that the UI did not align to their expectations for a golf app: the colours were generic, there was too much yellow, and the buttons/clickable areas were unclear . Design is obviously something of a capability gap for me, so I needed a solution. Claude has helped me to deliver a cross-platform app that is distributed via the App Sto
Grant McKenna
Mar 202 min read


Coding - me & Claude pt 2
Users, eh, got to love them. I created at app to explore agentic coding, help structure my golf hobby (obsession) and to learn more about React Native - see previous post . I then released it to the world and have received unsolicited feedback in return. Responding to feedback exposed capabilities gaps in my workflow. In my workflow, I had fallen into the oldest trap of all: Claude (mostly) amending the code I would review the code and suggest improvements (repeat step 1) Whe
Grant McKenna
Mar 132 min read


Coding - me & Claude
I’ve been building a React Native app recently with Claude Code. Not because the world needs another golf app, but because I wanted one. Golf is my hobby and over the years I’ve read/learned a lot about how to play and practice better (despite evidence to the contrary on the course). The app is my way of coordinating all of my thinking into something structured. For example: * Score entry is designed to be ‘enter score and move on’ - focus on the present, not the past or proj
Grant McKenna
Mar 62 min read


AI & legacy code refactoring
What is legacy code? The term legacy code has many connotations and about as many definitions. All the connotations boil down to one thing one: the code is bad. Developers might say it ‘smells’, or ‘is not very pretty’, or other subjective terms but essentially legacy code is: Difficult to read and/or understand Difficult to maintain and/or adapt Difficult to tackle with confidence and/or speed. Code does not have to be old, which in software development is relative, to be le
Grant McKenna
Aug 21, 20245 min read


Waitrose is confusing!
Waitrose is confusing me, and not just because of their price promotion: "New lower prices on hundreds of everyday items." As well as...
Grant McKenna
Mar 1, 20243 min read


Outcomes NOT outputs
Melissa Perri’s Escaping the Build Trap articulated so many of the things I have experienced, and have been thinking about, that every...
Grant McKenna
Feb 19, 20242 min read


Kill it with fire!
Marianne Bellotti's Kill It With Fire is a great book with invaluable insights into why software ends up in the state it is in, and why...
Grant McKenna
Feb 9, 20242 min read


Looking over the horizon...
The Post Office/Fujitsu Horizon debacle commentary has rightly focused on the corporate level shenanigans and the resulting human misery;...
Grant McKenna
Jan 20, 20241 min read


Big data (mal)algorithms
I have just finished reading Cathy O’Neil’s Weapons of Math Destruction and it provides some interesting thoughts about how to avoid...
Grant McKenna
Jan 6, 20242 min read


Bridging the communication gap
This is a great book by Gojko Adzic about the closing the gap between business users and developers – and builds on his Specification by...
Grant McKenna
Dec 2, 20231 min read
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