Things that happened - January 2026, Week One

Claude builds a UI

I did a sketch on my iPad, showing a dashboard in both desktop and mobile layouts.

I gave it to Claude, with a short description (for example "the hero section has a fixed height, so the news articles there have a vertical scroll bar in desktop layout; but the service sections have variable height so all announcements can be seen without scrolling") and asked it to generate an HTML mockup, using Tailwind classes.

Claude took my crappy sketch and produced a Tailwind HTML page that matched it perfectly. I gave the HTML to the developer and said "follow this template so the scrolling and responsiveness works correctly, but rebuild it using our standard components". Which in turn means she doesn't waste her time getting the CSS right, which is something she's not so good at.

Specification driven development

I love "outside in" development - starting with a feature specification, then working from the user-interface (the outside of the application) to the database (the inside of the application). It helps me because my starting point is describing the functionality of the application in English, so I'm not even thinking about code. Then I write the individual steps as code and start working inwards.

Simon Willison has been talking about conformance suites and how coding agents can write better code than humans, if they have a specification to work to. I've already found that if I give Claude RSpec tests it sometimes writes better implementations that I would have. So the next step is to try this with a whole feature. My first go at this will be me writing the steps and saying "make this pass". Then, if it's good at this, I'll just give it the feature and say "one at a time, write a step, then make it pass".

I went to my daughter's graduation

Not work-related but I'm very proud of her.