In a previous post, I mentioned that my first AI project was to develop an application to create a archive of US newspapers based on RSS feeds. I initially used Claude Code to review a list of US newspapers from Wikipedia to search for websites and RSS feeds. As I posted earlier, this took several sessions to complete this task, and I had doubts that I would be able to create an app without hitting my Claude Pro token limit.
My next step was to create a Markdown document describing the app for Claude to use as starting point. I looked at several example product requirement documents (PRDs) and frameworks for developing apps using AI (Get Shit Done, Superpowers) to find a way to get started. Eventually, I decided to follow Peter Yang’s advice on developing apps:
- Don’t know what to build? Just tell AI your problems. Ask it: “What are some simple apps that we can build to help me take time back?”
- Create a robust plan first. Ask it to “Create a plan with 3 clear milestones” to avoid mistakes during coding. Spend half your time planning with AI.
- You’re the manager, AI does the work. Give it feedback and direction like you would a human employee. Be patient with it
I created a initial plan based on some PRDs I found in Peter Yang’s Github repo. I then asked Claude to review the plan and see if there was anything missing or not clear. Claude responded with a set of 12 things to change and 4 questions before starting any build work – wow! I accepted Claude’s suggestions, provided answers to the 4 questions, and Claude updated the plan (see here).
In the updated plan, four milestones were identified. Claude was prompting me to say “start building milestone 1”, so I did it. Claude then took 10-15 minutes to create code and tests for the Milestone 1 content. I decided to have Claude confirm steps with me as it went, so I could see issues firsthand (and there were issues, but Claude figured them out). If I had “let it run”, it might have finished quicker. During the Milestone 1 work, Claude was able to figure out that I had Wampserver installed on my local machine (which has MySQL, a specified part of the app tech stack), and used that to create the MySQL database for the app. When Milestone 1 development was complete, I did some operations with the app, then told Claude to create a handoff document (handoff.md) in case I hit a token limit during the session.
I then repeated this cycle for Milestone 2, 3, and 4. The handoff document was updated after each milestone. It turned out that I did not encounter any token limit. When the development was complete, Claude then added all of the code/files to a Git repo in the working directory. Here are some screenshots:
App admin screen
App search screen
To me, this was very impressive. It took less than 2 hours to get to this point – a fully functional application with 79 passing tests – amazing! I will post more when I have a version of the app running on a server.
PS – I have created a new category for these posts (AI for Smart Old Farts), if you want to just read these posts.