A few weeks ago I started playing with Claude Code, which is an AI tool that can help build software projects for/with you. Like ChatGPT, you interact with the AI conversationally, using whole sentences. You can tell it what programming language and which software packages to use, and what you want the new program to do.

I started by asking it to build a mortgage calculator using Python and Dash. Python is one of the most popular programming languages and Dash is an open source Python package that combines Flask, a tool to build websites using Python, and Plotly, a tool that builds high-quality interactive web plots. The killer feature of Dash is that it handles all the nasty and tedious parts of an interactive webpage (meaning Javascript, eeeek!). It deals with webpage button clicks and form submissions for you, and you, the coder, can write things in lovely Python.

With a fair amount of back and forth Claude Code built this advanced mortgage calculator, which is only sorta kinda functional. It does a fair amount of what I asked it to do, but it also doesn't do a fair amount of what I asked it to do, and it has a decent number of bugs. The good things it did was handle some of the tedious boiler plate stuff like creating the necessary directory hierarchy and files, including a README.md detailing how to run the software. Creating a Dash webpage requires writing Python function(s) and a template detailing how to insert the output of the function(s) into a webpage, and Claude Code handled that with aplomb.

What it didn't handle well was more complicated things, like asking it to write an optimizer for funding/paying off a mortgage considering various funding sources and economic factors. It also didn't write the code using standard Python practices. The first time I looked at the code using VS Code and Ruff, Ruff reported over 1,000 style violations. If I found a bug in the code, some of the time I could tell Claude to fix it, and it would, but other times, it would simply fail. Altogether there's about 6,000 lines of code, and as the project got bigger it was clear that Claude was struggling. Simply put, there's a limit of the size or complexity of a codebase that Claude can handle. Humans are not going to be replaced, yet.

At this point I'm not sure what I'll do with the financial calculator. I don't think Claude can help me any more, so I'd have to manually dive in to fix bugs and improve it, and I haven't decided if I will. In summary, my impression of Claude is that it's decent at creating the base of a project or application, but then anything truly creative and complicated is beyond what it can do.

Claude Code isn't free (they give you $5 to start) and I had to deposit money to make this tool. I still have a bit of money to spend, so let's try a few tasks and see how Claude does. I've uploaded all of the code generated below to this repository.

Simple Calculator

I asked it to create a simple web-based calculator, and at a cost of $0.17, here is what it created that works well (that's not a picture below, try clicking on the buttons!).

Simple C Hello World!

Create a template for a program in C. Include a makefile and a main.c file with a main function that prints a simple "hello world!". $0.08 later it performed this simple task flawlessly.

Excel Telescope Angular Resolution

Create an Excel file that can calculate the angular resolution of a reflector telescope as a function of A) the diameter of the primary mirror and B) the altitude of the telescope. It went off and thought for a bit, and spent another $0.17 of my money. It output a file with a ".xlsx" extension, but the file can't be opened. Looking at the output of Claude, I suspect that this may be a file formatting issue because Claude is designed to handle text file output rather than binary.

Text to Speech

Seeing that Claude struggled with creating binary output, next I asked it to create a Jupyter notebook (Jupyter notebooks have the extension .ipynb but they're actually text files) that uses Python and any required packages and can take a block of text and use text to speech to output the text to a sound file. This succeeded ($0.12), and in particular used gTTS (Google Text To Speech) to do the heavy lifting.

Rust Parallel Pi Calculator

Write a program in Rust that uses Monte Carlo techniques to calculate pi. Use multithreading. The input to the program should be the desired number of digits of pi, and the output is pi to that many digits. $0.11 later, I got a Rust program that crashes with a "attempt to multiply with overflow" error. Not great! I could interact with Claude and ask it to try to fix the error, but I haven't.

Baseball Scoresheet Web App

Create a web app for keeping score of a baseball game. Make the page resemble a baseball scoresheet. Use a SQLite database file to store the data. Make the page responsive such that each scoring action is saved immediately to the database. At a cost of $0.93, it output almost 2,000 lines of code. The resulting npm web app doesn't work. Upon initial page load it asks the user to enter player names, numbers, and positions, but no matter what you do, you cannot get past that. Bummer!

Random Number Generator

It looks like the more complicated the ask gets, the worse Claude gets. Here's one more thing I'll try that I have no idea how to do myself. We'll see how well Claude does at it. Create a Mac OS program that generates a truly random floating point number. It should not use a pseudo-random number generator. It should capture random input from the user as the source of randomness. It should give the user the option of typing random keyboard keys, or mouse movements, or making noises captured by the microphone. Please use the swift programming language. Create a Xcode compatible development stack. Create a stylish GUI that looks like a first-class Mac OS program. $0.81 later, and asking it to fix one bug, led to a second try that was also broken with 10 bugs. Clearly, I've pushed Claude past its breaking point.

I'm guessing that all of the broken code can be fixed, maybe by Claude itself, but it ultimately might require human intervention in some cases. I'm optimistic that it could fix the Rust/pi bug, but I'm not optimistic that it can fix the baseball nor random number generator stuff. AI code generation might be coming for us eventually, but not today.

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