WB077: Claude Code
Developed by Anthropic - the AI company behind the popular Claude AI chatbot - Claude Code is an AI application that can build a software application based on a user's prompts.
For example, you can tell Claude Code to: "Build an application that summarises the documents I upload", and it will proceed to do just that.
I became curious to give Claude Code a try as I have always wanted to automate repetitive and tedious administrative tasks using code that I can run on my own computer. However, doing this proficiently takes a lot of time, skill and persistence. So could Claude Code be the silver bullet?
I also believe that a hands-on approach is the only way to convince yourself what is fluff and what isn't.
So to find out, I signed up to a US$20/month Claude Pro subscription.
From my early experiments, I can say there is some truth to the general consensus online - that Claude Code is quite good at coding. I would, however, caveat that this is only the case when put in the hands of the right user.
Building a data extraction tool
Case in point, I got Claude Code to build a user interface that extracts financial statement data from a company's Annual Report to text files.
For some perspective, an Annual Report PDF - such as the one below - usually has around 200 pages, of which only under 10 pages are the relevant financial statements.
Annual Reports are usually large PDF files. This one is 200 pages long.
From the 5.6MB, 206-page PDF, Claude's code generated three text files totalling around 70KB in size, or 1.3% of the original PDF's size (1 MB is 1000KB).
The main purpose of this PDF-to-text file process is to build smaller-sized files that can be more efficiently processed by Claude AI (the chatbot) or other AI applications. More on this last step in a future article.
From the 206-page PDF, only five were relevant to my needs
Garbage in, garbage out
Things look good so far. Question is - can Claude Code really build anything?
For example, can it build a SalesForce Customer Relationship Management platform or a Bloomberg Terminal? Some people have even asked Claude Code to build a software application that can make x amount of money based on an AI-generated marketing plan.
Well, technically Claude Code is smart enough to build what you tell it to. But whether the quality of the output is at the level of an enterprise-level software platform is another story.
Upon reflection, I think the Claude Code experience is similar to dealing with a real-life Software Engineer. You need to provide him or her with detailed instructions, and work together to achieve the desired outcome.
In other words, the "garbage in, garbage out" principle still applies.
The user interface above, which looks simple, took quite a number of iterations and back-and-forth with Claude Code to achieve.
One thing is clear to me: Claude Code has definitely lowered the barrier to entry for building software applications. An expensive IT vendor is probably not your only option now, if you're a budget-conscious SME looking to digitalise your business with some simple software tools.
For those in Product Management, Claude Code is an extremely useful tool for quickly building working prototypes for demonstration purposes.
On the flip side, you will be in for a world of disappointment if you're expecting Claude Code to quickly build you the next unicorn with a single prompt. I find these types of use cases of technology frankly a waste of resources and click-bait.
At the end of the day, Claude Code is only a tool. And a tool is only as useful as the person using it.
--Ends
