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 project forward

* The “7 Deadly Sins” (other sins are available) provide data-driven hindsight answering “why?” behind the score, and foresight to make better decisions on the course (sometimes bogey is a good score)

* Easy access to distance and wedge charts to pick the right club.

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/c1e4cd_e918e44bc036434685349fafab02c56d/1080p/mp4/file.mp4

The 'Play" features of the app - inputting your score, finding your distances and showing your wedge chart

The other motivation: I didn’t really know React Native and this felt like a good excuse to learn it properly.

I’d defined the UI, service and storage layers, but progress had stalled. Test coverage was patchy. The architecture was there, momentum wasn’t.

That’s when I started using Claude Code to help move it forward. Some things it genuinely helped with:

* Fixing annoying Jest warnings I’d been ignoring

* Building features directly from epic.md files

* Implementing UI layouts when I wasn’t sure how to structure the controls

* Following the TDD rules I wrote in Claude.md (ironically, more consistently than I do).

For example, Claude designed the UI for the wedge chart

It’s particularly good at getting you unstuck. That said, it’s not magic.

Sometimes implementations are overly complicated (tracking multiple bits of state when one would do). Tests occasionally get tied to specific UI wording instead of behaviour. Refactors don’t always cascade properly across the project.

You still need judgment. Probably more of it, not less.

For me, the biggest shift wasn’t speed, it was momentum. The project is progressing again. And as someone comfortable in multiple codebases but relatively new to React Native, that’s been valuable.

Still learning. Still pruning back complexity. Still enjoying building something that makes my own play and practice better.

⛳ 🏌‍♀️ 🎉 #ClaudeCode #RN #AppDevelopment

PS I might do a follow-up post about getting through the App Store and Google Play processes. As someone used to deploying multiple times per day/week the ‘delays’ are something to get used to and planned for.