Have Claude make you one.

I just posted about Claude making me a custom LLM agent.  The produced agent is working pretty well as I work through teething issues, however it’s slow due to hardware limitations.  Totally blows my mind away.

Proprietary software’s days may be numbered.  Someone said software is becoming a throwaway item.  I have to agree.  It’s no longer a problem to create custom software for one-off situations and throw it away when you’re done with it for the cost of some of your time and a Claude subscription.

Two examples of the throw away software thing was a license key finder I wrote to find two digits unknown to me of a Windows license key.  I had received a new license key on paper and got a little too excited scratching off the scratch off stuff covering part of the license and inadvertently scratched off two of the digits.  The distributor was no help and neither was Microsoft.  My solution was to have AI (probably ChatGPT at the time) write me a powershell script that iterated through all the combinations and tried activating windows with the key each time.  I gave it the alphabet of characters to try, which is shorter than 36 characters, and it went to town.  About 10 minutes later it stumbled on the missing digits.  Problem solved.  Throwaway item.  I’ll never use that code again.  I also don’t know powershell.

Some months later, my wife was doing genealogy work with a specific website that had a treasure trove of data.  She tried reaching out to the owner of the data set to get a copy only to find out he died literally a week earlier.  Figuring he was unlikely to complain about slowing his site down, I instructed Claude to create a scraper to scrape all the data from the site before it disappeared.  After some iterations over a day or two, the scraper downloaded everything from the site we needed and stored it all in JSON format so we can do whatever we want with it.  Again, a throw away item.  We’ll never use it again because it was completely customized for this website which itself was custom.

I’ve been using Claude to write a lot of stuff lately for personal and work use.  It’s good and fast.  I’ve mostly been using the Sonnet models, with Sonnet 4.6 being quite good.  Opus 4.6 is better, but it also costs 3x as much to run for not anywhere near 3x results over Sonnet 4.6.

For better or for worse, we are at a serious turning point in the world because of these systems.  You might as well make it work for you because it’s not going away.