Adding tools.brianshin.me

I created a projects page at tools.brianshin.me to share small projects I create. This is inspired by Simon Willison’s blog and his tools page. I’ve started creating a few tools using Claude’s artifacts tool, which is amazing. Going forward, I hope I can use this page to host interesting tools and ideas that aren’t limited to just a single-page HTML/JS page.

I’ve made a bunch of things now with Claude, but so far the ones I’m putting on the tools page are:

• Youtube Translate landing page A sample landing page I’m working on.
• Annual Return Calculator A quick page to help calculate an investor’s compound annual return, given starting, ending, and withdrawal/deposit amounts. I made this because I find myself wondering this more often than I’d like to admit and wanted a quick, no-frills place I could go to calculate it.

This new workflow of using Claude’s artifacts tool and the model behind it (Claude Sonnet 3.5 new today) feels like a game-changer. I’ve been using it heavily for my main work in coding now, and I can’t really go back. It’s one of those things where, once you know it exists, you can’t go back to a world where that knowledge doesn’t exist for you. Kind of like having experienced seeing color for the first time I guess. It’s also great that I can create new tools from my iPad or phone, and see the results. It’s like magic - I’ve been going through my running ideas doc and literally having Claude spin up my ideas for me in less than five minutes.

I want to try some of the more advanced tools where you can host React apps that Claude builds: claude-artifact-runner. Of course, I hope it isn’t long where I can ask AI to build full web apps with full-stack functionality and deploy them as trivially as I have with these html pages.

I analogize what’s happening today with these kinds of tools as similar to when the printing press was invented, or when computers and specifically word-processing/typing came out. It is like a step-change in enabling everyone to create or write, and consequently this has second-order effects on consuming the writings and increasing overall productivity.

Of course, I think real business value will always come from focusing, iterating and refining a solution to a problem, and solving real people’s needs. In that sense, the ability to quickly prototype is very valuable but not as valuable as building a product or products as a business over a long period of time. I guess it would be like the proliferation of printing and typing/word processing enabling the best writers, publications, important works to be distributed and enjoyed even more, and not necessarily killing any advantages they had simply because they could write well already.

This tools page was relatively painless to set up. Even though my main website is now on Gitlab Pages, I set up this tools subdomain on Github pages, and it was easy to set up the custom domain edits on Cloudflare DNS.