[tashian]

I used Claude to help me build a side project in 4 hours that I would never have built otherwise. Essentially, it's a morphing wavetable oscillator in React (https://waves.tashian.com).

Six months ago, I tried building this app with ChatGPT and got nowhere fast.

Building it with Claude required a gluing together a few things that I didn't know much about: JavaScript audio processing, drawing on a JavaScript canvas, an algorithm for bilinear interpolation.

I don't write JavaScript often. But I know how to program and I understand what I'm looking at. The project came together easily and the creative momentum of it felt great to me. The most amazing moment was when I reported a bug—I told Claude that the audio was stuttering whenever I moved the controls—and it figured out that we needed to use an AudioWorklet thread instead of trying to play the audio directly from the React component. I had never even heard of AudioWorklet. Claude refactored my code to use the AudioWorklet, and the stutter disappeared.

I wouldn't have built this without Claude, because I didn't need it to exist that badly. Claude reduced the creative inertia just enough for me to get it done.

[masklinn]

What was your workflow for doing that? Just going back and forth in a chat, or a more integrated experience in a dedicated editor?

[tashian]

Just copy/paste from the chat window. I kept running into token limits. I came away from it wanting a much better workflow.

That's the next step for me in learning AI... playing with different integrated editor tools.