Meeting Claude

I've played with ChatGPT and Dall-E a few times since they came out in 2022.

I've ran Ollama in a podman container on my gaming PC with a 3080. It was good fun and impressive what it could do but still felt like a gimmick. Until after a friend suggested I'd take a look at Claude Code. Hooked it up to VS Code and used it to analyse a bunch of not so consistently structured data in a stack of 15 years of json-ish files but not quite. The simpler free model I had tried on Ollama was showing a promise of what it could do but kept confusing it for JSON and tried working the files with a Python JSON parsing lib even though I'd told it a couple of times that it looked like it, but was something else.

Enter Claude Code. It allowed me to fix what could have easily cost me a week in half a day. The rest of the day was spent making it into something that was optimized and looked a bit like a product and would not immediately break on the first anomaly. I was blown away.

You know flying a helicopter sounds cool when someone tells you about it, but doing it yourself still feels way more exciting than I could imagine.