Handcrafted isn’t always better

Twenty years ago, posting an article to the website I managed took 30 minutes. Not 30 minutes of writing but 30 minutes of work after the writing was done.

Creating the raw HTML page. Updating the HTML on every page that linked to it. Fighting with Internet Explorer 6.

And that was after I’d already paid for Dreamweaver to simplify site management and spent months learning ASP and HTML well enough to not break everything.

It was handcrafted. And it was awful.

Last week I built an entire web app on my commute. My family has been watching films together for years, and I wanted something that would track what we’d seen and suggest what to watch next.

From idea to working app: 30 minutes. The whole train ride was spent on the thing I actually cared about — the feature set and the experience. Not painstakingly centering divs, or debugging a CSS error, or digging out solutions from the snippiness on Stack Overflow.

At one point, I asked my AI collaborator to add a custom date picker. At another, I asked it to create an import-export function for the database. Each change took 20 seconds to type and only slightly longer to execute. Almost magical.

The cost of entry? Twenty dollars a month.

Some people will say it doesn’t count if you didn’t write the code yourself. My kids, discovering a film they love on a Friday night, would disagree.

The tools used to eat your time. Now they give it back. That’s genuine progress.