Adventures with Collaborative AI
I used AI for all kinds of things at my last couple of day jobs: code, documentation, blog posts, social posts, image generation—you name it. If you’re working in the AI space, you should embrace it, right?
At first I was hesitant. Once I asked it about writing projects I’d done with my friend DeAnna, and it came back with “The Dandelion Knight”: a science fiction story we’d written about a knight who travels through different dimensions to save the universe. Except, of course, it had made that up. 🙂 AI had a long way to go.
It’s so much better now. Why read the manual for my washing machine when I can just ask an AI for instructions? I’ve even got my 81-year-old mom set up with a ChatGPT account which, since I’m her personal tech support, I am very happy about.
Now I’ve started building an app to help manage my publishing business. I’ve published over 20 anthologies and need to track lots of details for those publications—as well as for my own stories. I tried building an app on my own at least three separate times over the years, and each time I’d get bored, annoyed, or too busy with other things to continue. The last iteration got to where it saved me time on a couple of things, but I just didn’t have the time or energy to continue. After using Claude Code so much at my last job, I thought: why not see if Claude can create this app for me?
And he did!
There’s still plenty to do, but I now have a functional application that I’m using on a regular basis. It’s SO useful! This is an application I would have happily paid for, but it didn’t exist…until now!
The key goal I set for my application is that I will not only write zero code—I won’t even look at the code. I might someday, but I wanted to see what Claude could do. Turns out he can do a lot! With some guidance—and teamwork! 🙂
I’ve had up to eight Claude Code sessions running at a time, and have come up with a system for them to work collaboratively. I could have more than eight, but after a while I find it’s hard for me to remember what each one is doing. Plus they’re all working on the same codebase, so adding more Claudes would result in them bumping into each other.
I’ve learned a lot about how to work collaboratively with AI—and some of what I’ve learned has been really surprising!
Next post, I’ll share how I started by figuring out a way for Claude Code to “remember” important things across sessions.
