"Practical and hands-on full-stack lead", those are the first words I have in the "About section" on my LinkedIn profile. Followed by my attempt to point out why I am good at my job and what proof there is of that from the past. A bit more than the past twenty years.
Today I concluded that I have to re-evaluate this text in ways I did not expect to see in my lifetime. Good ways.
The trigger for this evaluation comes from the past two weeks I spent with Claude. Those were two remarkable weeks in which I had an awesome time. Claude is awesome. And Claude is AI.
But really. An awesome I have not seen often in my lifetime. An awesome the size of the invention of the internet. An awesome so much bigger than blockchain. A society shaping awesome. That awesome.
Claude begs you to rethink a plethora of topics you probably settled on a long time ago when looking at the space you work in. It does for me in Software Engineering. And this rethinking touches your skills, your experience, your career. You personally.
With a bit more than a week of Claude on the meters I am overwhelmed by the sensation of how dramatically profound the change is. The new king of disruption is in town.
We are about to witness the reshaping of the complete Software industry. All of it. And this is going to happen in a fraction of the time it took to build that same industry.
The thing is, Claude makes things possible in a fraction of the time it used to take.
Exactly that is the big shocker change. Time. The fraction of time needed to do things that would take so much longer in the past. We spent the past decades designing processes, job profiles, frameworks and a vast amount of other ways to help us decide what to do when.
This help was mostly needed to decide on spending and keeping track of the most valuable business assets, time and money. Well, I think that changed. For good. For many.
Let me tell you how I arrived at this conclusion.
Looking for a reason to give Claude a spin we decided that my wife who loves Samba needs an app to organise her Samba classes. She started in the friends circle sending dm's to juggle the who, what, when and where.
That became tricky fast, a first sign the Samba classes were a good idea together with a first sign she needs a way to handle this more efficiently. Samba App it is. This idea came to light nine days ago. A bit less than two full workweeks, to spell it out.
To paint the picture, in these nine days, Claude built a full functional planning & booking web app, front and back, making use of what I consider the modern web stack; Typescript, React, Material-UI, NodeJS, GraphQL and MongoDB on a Vite build environment.
And with full functional I mean:
- Authentication and Authorisation (email and popular Oauth. user and admin roles, JWT, industry App security standards)
- User profile with booking overview, purchase history, wallet balance & topup, friend system and privacy controls.
- Multi-language support (6 languages) and translation management with auto-detection of new keys during development and environment sync features
- Payment system with Stripe integration (Card/iDEAL) + credit wallet with packages and automated refunds
- Class booking system with capacity management, cancellation policies and social discovery
- Review system with ratings, admin response, and post-class prompts to request a review
- Admin panel for user, class, booking, credit, review, template, translation and system settings management
- Email system with templates for booking confirmations, reminders, and notifications
- Job scheduling for tasks like the daily backup and automated emails.
Useful things. From scratch.
To get this up and running I used Railway for the api and Vercel for the web app. Those environments took one cup of coffee to set up, as always.
We are talking about a 20 dollar Claude subscription and a Railway and Vercel deployment environment for similar pricing. So let's say all in all the build investment is 20 dollars for Claude and two weeks of my time. The operational cost is south of 20 dollars while the App is not flooded by going viral.
And it works. I mean, she is now able to manage her multi-language content, her users, configure pricing packages, plan the classes, receive payments, track bookings and have some social interactions with her audience in the App.
Within 2 weeks. Vibe coded.
For those wanting to get a feel for the result visit Reggie's Samba
Sure the performance can be improved, sure there were bugs that took iterations to fix, sure there will be more bugs to fix and sure the organisation of the code can be done better. But with what I have seen Claude can do, it can also learn how to do all these things better and I have not seen it fail at fixing any of the bugs we encountered. At a fraction of the time it used to take with an experienced human brain tackling it.
LLM's like Claude are just getting started and are merely scratching the surface of what will be possible if I look at recent progress made.
We have some new areas of interest that emerge out of the AI empowered way of working. With its own questions and challenges. Many of the concerns I have been reading about, revolve around the quality and maintainability. Levels of control need to be defined and understood.
For one I am looking forward to diving into how we can best harness the Claude power to not destroy running businesses while being able to unleash its full potential. What an interesting time to be alive.
We have to reshape how we work, how we decide. Redefine feasibility. Vibe Coding means so much more than baking code, it means Revibing your time.
Realising your ideas in such a short space of time at an affordable price means accessibility for so many people to utilise the great things they do.
It seems the friction between Agile and Gantt might belong to the past.
I will be writing a completely fresh "About section" in the coming days. I have some extra time on my hands since I was done with my App ahead of time.
See you around.
And a shoutout to Anthropic for this awesome work.
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