The AI revolution has come at last to my computer… and boy am I like a kid in a candy store.
I finally went and subscribed to one of the AI services to be able to use it in earnest, and boy am I using it in earnest. I went for Claude as from all I’ve heard, that seems to be the best all-rounder for coding, and pretty good for regular chat stuff as well - including the key stuff around tool use and the MCP architecture.
So initially, I started out looking at getting an MCP up and going, and how I’d go about creating an MCP for a service which didn’t have one, and that was interesting… and then I’ve been entirely driven to distraction building new things to solve problems I had in mind. I completely revamped my dad’s site (Lean Pursuit) in a way that helped me move it to Hugo, and with a custom design to boot - stuff that I used to charge good money for, the AI was able to get done in a session or two. If you’re a kid these days, it’s not enough to be able to code up a site to get a bit of side-hustle income, you’re going to have to be able to keep up with or beat the AI tools, or (more likely) learn how to use and leverage them.
Anyway, that was a fun start, and now I’ve managed to code up an iOS app and a Mac app in a couple of quick fire sessions - and one of the key things holding me back is actually not paying for more than the base level US$20/month access; if I’d gone for the higher levels, I’m sure I’d be even further along, and I’m not even using the most capable models. If I was doing this for my job I’d be looking to max out my spend for damn sure.
I’ll have a look at how I actually make those apps happen - it is tempting to chuck it into the App Store and earn a hopeful couple of bucks on the side, if only as an exercise in learning. I’m certainly not inventing something entirely new, but as usual with programmers, it’s new enough for me, and that’s good enough for me.
One thing I’m realising as I’m doing this is how much I do enjoy the tinkering and thinking around ideas, though historically I’ve been far too lazy to turn them into action and actually build something out. So this is very handy to actually have something to translate those half-assed ideas into something which becomes very real, very quickly. Tinkering in this way (“Vibe coding”) is super fun; it won’t be accessible to everyone, but it will make it more accessible than it has been for many years, and that can only be a good thing.