We are not in Kansas any more

Take a look at the two screenshots above. They show my Thingmaker program editing a cyberdeck design. The top one is the Python program that Claude and I (mostly Claude) have been writing over the last few weeks. Below it is the JavaScript version. I created it yesterday morning before coffee. All I had to do was point Claude at the folder containing the Python version and ask it to implement all the same behaviours using NodeJS and JavaScript. It asked a few clarifying questions, and half an hour later I had a fully working clone of the original. It reads and writes the same design files and provides exactly the same user interface, even down to the colours of user interface elements and the behaviour of the image processing.

I like to think that I could have performed the conversion myself. On the plus side, I’d have learned a lot about how JavaScript graphics primitives map onto Python, and how the user interface is build, On the negative side I’d have lost a few weeks doing it. We are now in an age where “whim coding” is a thing. I only did the conversion because I had some effort left on my Claude subscription for the week and I didn’t want to waste it. Projects that nobody would have had a go at are now within reach as long as you can properly explain what you want.

Programming is no longer about making a program that works. It is about describing your requirements and understanding what you get back from the system that built it.