Ship Log

At the beginning of the year, I had a goal to ship something every week. Life got busy and while I started with great intentions, I haven’t shipped anything for months because my focus has been on my hourly contracting roles and making $. My solve — a public log of things I make.

Problem I am solving

It is an effort to give myself a kick in the pants and some accountability. I hope to look back on it at the end of the year with a wistful sense of pride. With each thing I create, I learn something, use new tools, get a little sharper.

What I learned from this build

With a simple prompt, Claude is more likely to overbuild than underbuild. A lot of coming to something decent is stripping stuff down.

That being said, I always underestimate how long it will take to build a “simple” feature. Classic example — just a weekly log of what I shipped. But maybe also a visualization of the weeks… maybe the visualization could be animated… maybe the visualization could have a streak associated with it… maybe it should show what tools I used… maybe it should impact the dialog tree on the homepage. It goes on and on! But that is the fun of building products.

Also, confirming that I really dislike having Claude write for me. Despite building a custom skill that is supposed to help Claude learn to write in my voice, I just haven’t cracked the code on that. It is always too clever, too choppy, too something.