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Reflections on coding with Claude: How this technology is changing everything.

Ewan MacLeod

Ewan MacLeod

— 2 min read
Reflections on coding with Claude: How this technology is changing everything.

Earlier this afternoon, I realised that my WisprFlow subscription had expired.

This is a fantastic app that sits on your desktop and is activated when you press a couple of keys that you define on your keyboard. So, for example, I press CTRL and SHIFT and the app immediately starts listening, I then speak and within less than a second my speech is transcribed directly to wherever my cursor is on my computer. It makes the task of getting text out onto the page very, very quick.

Now, I noted that my trial subscription had expired. I was just about to sign up for the $15 a month subscription and think no more about it.

But then I paused.

You see, I have an OpenAI API key. I have a Claude API key. In fact, I've got API keys and subscriptions all over the place.

I wondered to myself, how easy would it be to make my own little speech-to-text transcription app, just for me?

So that's what I did.

Within 5 minutes, dear reader, I had the capability, live and operating, thanks to Claude. I asked it for its advice, and it simply decided that I should use a Python script. I am no Python expert at all. My language of preference is PHP. But I played the game.

The only thing I had to do was go and look up and create an API key for OpenAI's whisper capability. And the most difficult thing I had to do was actually paste that into the script.

This whole process just astonished me.

Just 5 minutes and I had a little script on my computer listening to me speak and then pasting the text via an API call to OpenAI.

But it wasn't as satisfying With the Python script. I didn't want to keep on having to run the script every time I wanted to use it. I asked Claude to help productionize it and create the script into some kind of app that could run persistently in the background. That was a bit hit and miss because the various different solutions didn't quite work and there were all sorts of bugs and issues.

So, I thought, let's use Xcode.

Now, dear reader, as you may surmise, I am a bit of a geek. So I have a head start on many people because I have been a techie for the longest time. I asked Claude to create the initial Xcode script, and within 30 minutes of having the original idea, I had my little app working in my taskbar.

Absolutely astonishing.

So, I recorded a podcast to narrate this and to discuss the impact and implications of this.

You can find it wherever you get your podcast feeds, just search for Conversational AI News or find the links below:

And I should point out that I dictated this post using my little app!

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