In the last few weeks, I've been playing around with the newest version of Claude Code, which wrote me a read-it-later service including RSS, email newsletters and an Android app.

Software engineering experience was useful, since I did plan out a lot of the high-level design and data model and sometimes push for simpler designs. Overall though, I mostly felt like a product manager trying to specify features as quickly as possible. While software engineering is more than coding, I'm starting to think Claude is already superhuman at this part.

Narrating an article from an RSS feed in the web app. The Android app can do this in the background and supports media controls from my car.

This was a major change from earlier this year (coding agents were fun but not very useful) and a few months ago (coding agents were good if you held their hands constantly). Claude Opus 4.5 (and supposedly some of the other new models) generally writes reasonable code by default.

And while some features had pretty detailed designs, some of my prompts were very minimal.

After the first day of this, I mostly just merged PRs without looking at them and assumed they'd work [...]

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Outline:

(01:48 ) Selected Features

(01:51 ) Android App

(02:18 ) Narration

(03:01 ) Selected Problems

(03:05 ) Not Invented Here Syndrome

(03:23 ) Bugs in Dependencies

(03:58 ) Other Observations

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First published:

January 4th, 2026

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vzaZwZgifypbnSiuf/claude-wrote-me-a-400-commit-rss-reader-app

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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