It started with a 3 a.m. favor
A colleague asked for something simple: turn some iOS and macOS screenshots into a mockup, with the UI rendered on an iPhone and a MacBook. The clock read 3 a.m. PST. My design team was asleep. The usual online tools? Either locked behind a Canva subscription or a credit-buying scheme. And they only offered a handful of presets — boring ones at that.
So I turned to Anthropic’s Claude. Thirty minutes later, I had a screenshot-to-mockup editor ready for the whole team. I called it Framely. It runs in a browser tab, works offline, and never uploads anything to a cloud server. Privacy? Handled. Drag a screenshot, pick a device, export as JPEG. That’s it.
I never saw the code. The whole thing weighs 8MB. When I needed to fix a bug or tweak a feature, I just described the change — Claude did the rest. I even gave it a native macOS look using Apple’s Liquid Glass design language, complete with a dark/light mode toggle.
Building becomes addictive
Framely wasn’t a one-off. So far, I’ve used Claude to build Chrome extensions, a Mac menu-bar app that replaced Grammarly, and an AirPods motion-sensing utility that monitors my posture. More projects are in the works.
I am not a builder. I don’t code. I don’t know UI design. I just know what I want to make, and I tell Claude — often by voice — to build it. That’s the whole workflow.
This feels like a real shift in how we interact with computers. I talk more. I type less. And I have a few arguments for why this new mode — building your own software — is worth your time.
Full control, zero bloat
When you build an app for yourself, you decide what goes in and what stays out. No redundant features. No UI decisions made by a product team in another time zone. You own the experience.
Take the Grammarly replacement I built. It lives in the menu bar, uses the Harper engine for grammar checks (Claude suggested that), and never sends my writing to a server. I got exactly what I needed — no subscriptions, no data harvesting, no hidden trackers.
Privacy is baked in
Free software almost always comes with a privacy compromise. You’ve heard the adage: if it’s free, you’re the product. When you build your own tools with Claude, the code stays on your machine. Nothing goes to the cloud unless you want it to. That alone is worth the effort.
Updates on your schedule
No waiting for a developer to patch a bug or add a feature. I just tell Claude what to change — a voice command or a short text prompt — and it makes the edits in real-time. The code lives on my device. The turnaround is minutes, not weeks.
Two hours to a word processor
Earlier today, I built myself a minimalist word processor. The brief: core features only, nothing I never click. The prototype ran in a browser tab on an aging Intel Core i3 Mac, using under 200MB of memory. The whole package came in at less than 20MB.
After using it for a bit, I asked Claude to give it the macOS 27 Golden Gate Liquid Glass treatment — rounded UI, gradient backgrounds, dark/light mode. The result looked like something Apple’s own designers cooked up.
I did all of this without writing a single line of code. I just described what I wanted. And I didn’t even use Claude’s most powerful model — the Opus variant handled it just fine.
The nightly ritual
Here’s how it works for me now. Each night, before bed, I brainstorm a product idea with Claude on my phone. We discuss feasibility, sketch out plans. The next morning, I open the Claude desktop app on my Mac, type “build,” and within an hour, I have a working app or utility.
The time I used to spend doomscrolling is now spent building. That’s a trade I’ll take every time.
What’s next? I just turned my iPad into a digital diary — the kind Tom Riddle had in Harry Potter. I scribble a question, it vanishes, and an answer appears one word at a time, as if the diary is talking back to me.
Fun times, indeed.
