5 Things I Learned About AI On My Summer Vacation

Like most people in my country, I take several weeks off every summer to spend time with family, travel, and relax. This year, something special happened.

I caught the AI bug.

It started with my brother Mats’s dental practice. In his office, drills are an ongoing problem. A dentist needs the right drill at the right time, and it needs to be sharp and in good working order. The challenge is that there are many drills a dentist might use, and there is typically little to no structure in how they are ordered and stocked, and the supply chain can be a nightmare. This creates an ongoing problem: sometimes the drill the dentist wants isn’t available, and sometimes multiple versions of a drill the dentist needs less often are on hand.

This is a frustrating and expensive issue that Mats had an idea how to solve and I thought perhaps AI could help build. So, I decided to play around with coding.

Now, as the founder of a tech company, I know a lot about software, but I am not a coder, and never have been. I work closely with coders like our head of development, who has been absolutely instrumental in the success of Membrain. But the act of actually coding a product has always been beyond my skills.

But, I kept hearing how great Claude is at writing code, so I thought it would be fun to see if I could use it to build a software solution for my brother.

1. Claude Shocked Me In the Best Possible Way
   I expected coding with Claude to be easy, but also buggy and clunky. I did not expect what actually happened. As the founder of Membrain, I know what it takes to build a new software platform. Development and testing occur across weeks and months – not hours. The speed and effectiveness of coding with Claude shocked me. Here are five things I learned from building that app.
2. Claude Is Good at Coding. Really, Really Good
   I expected to find a lot of “hallucinations,” bugs, and tangled logic in the code produced by an AI. I found almost none. Instead, within a few days, I had built an app that my brother could put to work almost immediately, with code that, according to a friend who’s a developer, could easily compete with code written by a human.
3. It checks its own work and solves its own problems
   Not only was the code clean, Claude also checked its own work, identified conflicts and bugs, and solved them often before I even knew there was a problem. I’d be working on one aspect of the code and receive a notice that Claude had found a conflict, but had already resolved it.
4. It’s Easy to Make Changes and Updates
   When suggesting changes to already written features, Claude identifies not only what needs to be written to make the change, but also the dependencies that will be affected by the change, provides solutions, and writes the code to ensure the original purpose of the software isn’t derailed by the updates, when solid guidelines have been defined.
5. It’s Good at Teaching, Too
   Since I’m neither a coder nor a dentist, I had a lot to learn while building this app. I discovered that even as it is producing the code, Claude can educate along the way. When I had a question or didn’t understand something, I could ask, and Claude could provide me with resources and teaching material that would have taken me hours to chase down on my own.
   
   You Still Need to Structure Your Thinking
   Claude can program most anything you ask of it, but you still need to understand what you want before you ask, and preferably plan several steps into the future . This requires structured thinking and investigation. I needed to ask my brother good questions to understand both the problem and the desired outcome. And, because a dental office is not a one-person show, I needed to understand the rest of the team as well.
   
   

   The dentist needs to know that the exact drill they need will be in stock and sharp. The owner (who may or may not be a dentist) wants to reduce costs by maintaining only the inventory that is actually needed. The admin responsible for ordering supplies needs to know what they have and what they need, and for it to be easy to find and purchase. The nurse who hands the tools to the dentist needs to know that everything will be stored so the tools are easy to find each day.
   
   

   I needed to know all of that, and also needed to understand vendor perspectives and how their price lists and ordering systems work, so I could design a solution that would interface with them effectively.
   
   Salespeople in complex sales environments need to be able to structure their thinking in order to develop a shared mental model among key stakeholders. Likewise, in order to develop a piece of software for my brother’s business, I needed to be able to structure my thinking around the perspectives and needs of the business, creating a shared mental model of what the solution would look like. In this way, Claude wasn’t replacing my expertise or thinking. It was augmenting and multiplying my capabilities
   
   AI isn’t going to replace humans, and currently cannot replace the need for structured thinking by a human with full context. But I was impressed this summer by how much it can do. Have you tried Claude for coding? Have you had a similar experience?