In late 2023 and early 2024, I was experimenting with creating GPT / LLM powered AI apps, and made ChatLibs, a Mad-Libs style story generator game where you have a base story and a partner gives you words based on parts of speech to drop into it, which creates an often-hilarious (or at least incongruous) story. The original project was created over the Thanksgiving and holiday breaks in 2023, and I put the site up in early 2024.
It worked great, and has been running in production ever since. It was big fun, and I learned a ton.
As the capability of AI-based infrastructure has increased exponentially in the last 2.5 years, the original ChatLibs was due for an update. The underlying models for both text and image generation were long-since deprecated, and were not longer supported. More importantly, capabilities like Claude Code have been released in the interim.
Over the weekend, I decided to update it. The original project was up in Github, so I aimed Claude Code at the repo and asked “what is this project?” Claude came back, explained the architecture, and reverse-engineered the original spec.
I then said “ok, time for a full re-write — do it.” And it did. Rearchitecting, refactoring, and making the underlying code 10x better in 10% of the time it took to originally create the app. Additionally, I’d been logging issues in GitHub the entire time since 2023. It worked through the backlog as well, and added a number of features I’d had on the “I’ll get to it someday” list.
Net: If you are able to clearly articulate what you want, and can create a clear, clean, and concise spec, any straightforward(-ish) app or tool you need can be created, on-demand, oftentimes in a matter of a few hours. For most individual, consumer-grade needs, the limit really is imagination and clarity of communication at this point, not technical capability.
Want to check out ChatLibs? It’s over at https://chatlibs.xyz.
