Tweet This Text
A common flow made easier...
This is 3Bits & Change, an email about building a service and retail business. This one was written to the muted sounds of the French Open in the background.
I’ve been out of day-to-day software for years. However, I attended Minnebar this year and was reminded of a Minnedemo on Lyndale in Uptown 10+ years ago where Neil and I showed a little browser extension called Tweet This Text.
//no.1 - Problem
Back in the early days of Twitter, I was working at Hello Viking, an agency that made a bunch of internet stuff for brands and marketers. I used Twitter nearly every day, all day, to keep up with internet musings and people I met at conferences. At the time, it was magical.
I would regularly, read an online something, and want to share it. So, I’d copy some text, switch to Tweetdeck, paste, go back to the article, copy the url, back to Tweetdeck, paste, AND finally craft the tweet. And that’s not all of it. Remember needing to shorten the URL (bit.ly?) in an effort to stay under a 160 characters?
There ware a lot of steps in that user experience.
//no.2 - Solution
I approached a friend, who was also a fantastic developer, to write a little browser extension. We called it Tweet This Text and the idea was to highlight some text, click a button and have it all go, preformatted, into a tweet.
Neil worked on it on a few nights and weekends. We had a sweet extension on the Chrome Store. A few days later we went under the hot lights of Minndemo and shared our extension for a room full of hundreds(?) of techies. Folks used it. It made a tedious thing easier. Success.
Twitter morphed… and morphed… and again in to X. I mostly forgot about the extension.
//no.3 - A side project, again
I’ve recently returned to Twitter/X for the first time in years, and somehow the 1200 followers on the account. My goal is basically the same as before, to stay up-to-date on the frontiers of the internet. And, I’ve again found the same friction point I experienced a decade+ ago. I wanted that extension again.
But, now there are coding agents.
I talked to Granola for a bit to describe the context, the problem, the pain points and a rough user story. I took that summary and asked Claude to both research how this might be built in today’s world AND to ask me questions about my preferences on the build and outcome. After some back and forth I prompted for a project brief to be created as a markdown file.
I uploaded that file to a projects folder. Named it XTHIS. Pointed Claude Code at the folder. I then asked Claude to go get smart about the brief and come back with a proposed build plan. I approved it and went on to work on something else.
When I returned, there were permission hurdles to jump. I followed some instructions, installed the extension in Chrome and it worked.
It worked. I had a massive grin. I sat back, a bit astonished, as I reflected on what it used to take to build a portion of code like that vs what it’s like to build it now. Times 10 or 100 or 1000 faster.
Today, Neil deploys these coding agents at rates many multiples of what I can in a given month and is rapidly iterating with the team at hey.gg. Great leaps forward there. And, note, he is very happy to let Claud and I work on small stuff like this.
Sum
It was just over a year ago that Claude Code released. Just over 6 months since it became serious. And, like a month since the 4.7 update, now 4.8 last week. Saying the change is fast is an understatement.
Change
On Your Way
Building things is just so much fun!
Follow Vivront.com on TikTok, Instagram and Facebook.
Follow Sharpow.com on Instagram
Follow @josephrueter on Instagram or Linkedin.
Thank you for reading Three Bits & Change.
This post is public. Share it with someone who comes to mind.