Today was something else entirely. I sat down with the idea of messing around — not really planning anything serious — and somehow ended up building, deploying, and using a full-stack workout app across web and iOS… all in a single day. And the craziest part? I barely wrote any code.
I started playing with Claude Sonnet and the Zed editor, and the experience just completely blew me away. I’ve been trying to build this same app for nearly a decade now — rewriting it in maybe five or six different frameworks, tools, and stacks. Always unfinished. Always a little too unpolished. Never launched. I’d play with it for a few weeks at most and then move on when the next shiny dev toy came along.
But today? Something changed.
Building with Words, Not Code
Using Claude Sonnet inside Zed is like pair programming with a senior dev that listens carefully, writes code, makes decisions, and improves based on feedback — instantly. I’d describe how I wanted the app to look, feel, and function, and it just… did it. It was iterative, conversational. Almost collaborative.
The end result? A fully functional workout web app written in JavaScript, using local storage, deployed to GitHub Pages. It even has user registration, session persistence, and data saved per user. Not a prototype — a real app. And it only took a couple of hours.
One More Thing…
After that, I thought, “Why not build the iOS version too?” I’ve always wanted to build something in SwiftUI, so I asked Claude to translate the app. It did. Seamlessly. I spent four or five hours tweaking and playing with the iOS version and honestly? It’s gorgeous.
Even wilder — I used the app right after building it. Did a workout in my office using the gear I had there. It felt surreal. I was using something I made, something that looked and behaved the way I imagined it, and I made it in under a day.
The Bigger Picture
This wasn’t just a fun coding day. It felt like a milestone in my development journey. For the first time, I didn’t feel blocked by tools, frameworks, or unfinished ideas. I wasn’t context-switching between editors and terminals. I wasn’t battling with the same old roadblocks that’ve stopped me for years.
And the craziest part? I didn’t even touch half the generated code. I’d glance at it. Sometimes it made perfect sense, sometimes it didn’t. When I questioned it, Claude would correct itself — or correct me. That back-and-forth taught me more in one day than some courses I’ve taken.
What’s Next?
Right now the iOS app stores data locally using either SwiftData or CoreData — honestly, I missed which — and I don’t even care. It just works. But the next step? I want to create a bidirectional sync between the web app and iOS app. That means turning the current storage into JSON and syncing it across both platforms.
If that works, this might actually be the first project I release publicly. I’ll use it for a week or two, squash some bugs, discover what’s annoying, and iterate. But this time… it feels real.
Final Thoughts
I haven’t written a blog post in nearly half a year. But today feels important enough to document. Like I just stepped into the future of development. Maybe it’s just the high of a good day, but I think this is more than that.
I used to think we were years away from this level of tool-assisted development. I now believe that any dev not using tools like Claude or ChatGPT will be left behind. We’ve made a huge leap — and yeah, maybe we’re approaching that 99% asymptote where the last 1% gets prohibitively complex — but even where we are now is extraordinary.
And I’m here for it.