Claude’s capabilities are truly astonishing. He has profoundly demonstrated to me that the future fundamentally rests with APIs and CLIs.
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</div> Being a dev/tech writer has become increasingly challenging.
Just a couple of months ago, in what now feels like a bygone era, there was an abundance of topics to explore. One might discuss “Seven strategies for optimizing database design” or “Five coding practices I always avoid.” Developers were constantly seeking insights into code creation, with a strong focus on refining clean code methodologies. Eager developers consistently pursued new avenues for improvement.
Today? You’re no longer the one crafting code or designing databases. Your intelligent coding agent is handling it.
So, here I am, revisiting the subject of coding agents. Which, truth be told, is quite fortunate, as this whole development is incredibly exciting.
I’ve nurtured several website concepts, some purely for enjoyment and others with the potential for a modest income. This past weekend, I decided to bring one of the revenue-generating ideas to life. It’s fully operational now. (I’ll refrain from linking it directly.) Simply put, it’s a specialized utility designed to assist developers with a task generally considered unwelcome.
During this process, I stumbled upon a profound insight.
Claude’s Contribution
The entire endeavor left me awe-struck. I’m a dedicated user of Claude Code. I trust that he (and yes, I do attribute human qualities to him) possesses strong capabilities. Furthermore, I leverage an Enterprise account for a client project, supported by a robust Claude.md configuration file as my foundation. After providing a comprehensive outline of my desired project, I tasked Claude with commencing the work.
In roughly 20 minutes, a fully functional website was deployed, performing precisely as I envisioned. Exactly. Meticulously. Flawlessly.
It was utterly bewildering.
Subsequently, driven by an entrepreneurial spirit, I instructed Claude to devise a monetization strategy for the service. He proposed a credit-based system—one credit per transaction—and integration with a widely used third-party payment processor for handling credit card transactions.
Claude then furnished me with a detailed set of instructions for configuring the credit card service on the provider’s platform. Given Claude’s advanced capabilities, I found myself too unmotivated to perform these steps manually, so I requested that he handle it all. And he did. Yes, I’m aware I’m attributing consciousness to a concept that now performs tasks traditionally handled by humans.
However, Claude’s actions were a true revelation. He downloaded the service’s command-line interface and utilized it to manage all the necessary operations (excluding the login, which I had to perform). He couldn’t (yet, I assume) interact with the website directly. But a CLI? That was trivial for him.
Then, the realization struck me: my website wouldn’t be the primary interface for potential users. While the site’s function was useful, in this era of agentic coding, hardly anyone would engage with it directly. Instead, they would seek methods for their *own* coding agents, build pipelines, or other automated systems to interact with my service.
My Key Takeaway
Consequently, I instructed Claude to develop a command-line tool for this entire process. In approximately another 20 minutes, tools compatible with Mac, Windows, and Linux, including variants for Arm and x86 architectures, were fully generated and prepared. He then revamped the website to prominently feature the CLI and dynamically offer the appropriate download to users based on their incoming browser’s operating system.
Remarkably, all of this was accomplished in a single Saturday afternoon.
The core insight here isn’t simply that a website can be constructed rapidly—that’s old news. The crucial lesson is that much of our current work is no longer about coding for human interaction; it’s about developing for other intelligent agents. (And one might even question if we can still call it “coding” in the traditional sense.)
In the very near future—and I mean “days” quite literally—we will be considerably less focused on the user-friendliness of our websites and far more on optimizing the efficiency of our APIs and CLIs.
I preferred not to engage with the credit card processor’s website. Instead, I desired Claude to manage it via their CLI, which he successfully did. Similarly, no one will want to visit my website to perform the task I offer; they will expect Claude to handle it using my CLI. I anticipate that Claude will soon demand more efficient interaction via a REST API, which I suppose I’ll then need to develop.
Or rather, Claude will construct it for me. Perhaps that’s why I refer to him as “he.” It’s more comforting to be superseded by a ‘someone’ than by a ‘something.’
