Disposable applications

As we enter into the final stages of the editorial processes for randomthebook.com, yesterday I found myself with a creative challenge.

Each of the stories in the book will be illustrated with a pop art-style collage. I’ve been struggling to get into the task, so wanted to break it down into more manageable steps. In particular I wanted to create a set of palates at random, but with some sort of artistic integrity. And so I turned to Claude.

I started by feeding it the twenty or so images I’ve already created, and then asked it to create 100 sets of three colours which would allow me to create new images in a similar style but with unique hues.

It created a list of palates, including the RGB values for each of the constituent colours. I then started to create Photoshop files with colour reference blocks that could be a starting point for the images.

By the seventh I realised that this was going to be a long and very tedious task. I’m willing to suffer for my art, but not to be bored senseless.

I considered creating some sort of application to churn out the psd files automatically, but that felt like it could take forever, even with the assistance of Claude writing the code. But I realised that all I required was small image files that could act as colour swatches, and recent experiments with writing html apps for the browser meant I knew that this could be achieved pretty easily.

Two prompts in Claude later and I created this: https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/c49ff423-0216-4a8f-bec3-e0cf737903fa

It’s not perfect (the download functions don’t work, but that could be because it’s not on it’s own proper server and some security thing is getting in the way) but that doesn’t matter. I can copy and paste each of the palates into Photoshop and I’m up and running.

There’s lots of talk about generative tools replacing developers at the moment, and a lot of counter arguments about how “production code” needs experienced professionals, not just vibe coding.

But I find myself again reaching for my drum machine analogy – my collection of drum machines doesn’t replace drummers. It allows me to do things that otherwise simply wouldn’t happen.

And so it is with using Claude to write code. It’s allowing me to create things that I simply otherwise wouldn’t write. Things that don’t need to be production ready or heavily tested because they are probably only ever going to get used once and then thrown away.