Then on Sunday I woke up and had claude bang out a series of half a dozen projects each using this GUI library. First, a script that simply offers to loop a video when the end is reached. Updated several of my old scripts that just print text without any graphical formatting. Then more adventurous, a playlist visualizer with support for drag to reorder. Another that gives a nice little control overlay for TTS reading normal media subtitles. Another that let's people select clips from whatever they're watching, reorder them and write out an edit decision list, maybe I'll turn this one into a complete NLE today when I get home from work.
Reading every line of code? Why? The shit works, if I notice a bug I go back to claude and demand a "thoughtful and well reasoned" fix, without even caring what the fix will be so long as it works.
The concepts and building blocks used for all of this is shit I've learned myself the hard way, but to do it all myself would take weeks and I would certainly take many shortcuts, like certainly skipping animations and only implementing the bare minimum. The reason I could make that stuff work fast is because I already broadly knew the problem space, I've probably read the mpv manpage a thousand times before, so when the agent says its going to bind to shift+wheel for horizonal scrolling, I can tell it no, mpv has WHEEL_LEFT and RIGHT, use those. I can tell it to pump its brakes and stop planning to load a PNG overlay, because mpv will only load raw pixel data that way. I can tell it that dragging UI elements without simultaneously dragging the whole window certainly must be possible, because the first party OSC supports it so it should go read that mess of code and figure it out, which it dutifully does. If you know the problem space, you can get a whole lot done very fast, in a way that demonstrably works. Does it have bugs? I'd eat a hat if it doesn't. They'll get fixed if/when I find them. I'm not worried about it. Reading every line of code is for people writing airliner autopilots, not cheeky little desktop programs.