It’s tough out here for a dev/tech writer.

Back in the before days (that is, about two months ago), you could always find a variety of topics to write about. “Seven ways to improve your database design,” say. Or  “Five things I never do in code.”  There were a ton of things that developers were concerned about when it came to writing code. The study of clean code and how to write it was a constant struggle for improvement. Diligent developers were eager for new ways to be better.

Now? You aren’t writing code, and you aren’t designing databases. Your coding agent is. 

So here I am, writing about coding agents again. Which, I guess, is a good thing, because, oh my, this is all quite electrifying.

I’ve had a bunch of ideas for websites, some for fun and some that could potentially generate a modest revenue stream. This past weekend, I decided to implement one of the revenue-generating ideas. It’s up and running today. (I’m not shameless enough to post a link here.) Suffice it to say, it’s a small tool to help developers do something that no one likes to do. 

Along the way, I learned an interesting lesson.

What Claude did

The whole experience was astonishing. I’m a Claude Code user. I feel comfortable that he (and yes, I anthropomorphize him) knows what he’s doing. Plus, I have an Enterprise account that I use with a client’s project. I have a pretty solid Claude.md file that I use as a base. I gave a pretty thorough description of the project that I wanted, and told Claude to get to work. 

And in about 20 minutes, he had a website up and running, doing exactly what I wanted. Exactly. Precisely. Correctly.

It was dumbfounding.

Then, being a man of entrepreneurial spirit, I told Claude to figure out a way for me to charge for the service. He suggested a system of credits—one credit, one transaction—and a common third-party service to do the credit card work.

Claude then gave me a set of instructions to set up the credit card service on the provider’s website. And because now, given Claude’s capabilities, I am far too lazy to do all this myself, I asked him to do it all. And he did. Yes, I realize I’m giving personhood to an abstraction that is doing what humans used to do.

But what Claude did was a real eye-opener. He downloaded the service’s command-line interface and used it to do all the work (except logging in—I had to do that). He couldn’t (yet, I suppose) use the website itself. But a CLI? Child’s play. 

And then it hit me: My website was not what potential customers would be looking for. Although what the site did was useful, no one in the age of agentic coding was going to use it. Instead, they would want some way to have their coding agent, or their build process, or some other automated thing, use my system. 

What I learned

So I told Claude to build a command-line tool to do the process. In about 20 more minutes, tools for Mac, Windows, and Linux, as well as variations for Arm and x86, were all built and ready. He changed the website to make the CLI the main thing and presented the correct download to the user depending on the OS that the incoming browser request was running on.

Again, all on a Saturday afternoon.

The lesson here isn’t that you can build a website in an afternoon—we already knew that. The lesson here is that much of what we are doing now is not coding for humans—we are now coding for other agents. (Inasmuch as what we are doing can be called “coding” anymore.)

In the coming days, and I think “days” is literal here, we will be spending a whole lot less time worrying about the usability of our websites and more time considering the efficiency of our APIs and CLIs. 

I didn’t want to deal with that credit card processor’s website. Instead, I wanted Claude to do it via their CLI, and he did. No one will want to go to my website to do the task I provide; they’ll want Claude to do it with my CLI. I imagine Claude soon will prefer to deal more efficiently with a REST API, and so I suppose I’ll have to build that. 

Or rather, Claude will build it for me. Maybe that’s why I call him “he.” It’s easier to be replaced by a someone than by a something.