When Jackal met Claude
Jackaltx, the developer, at the end of 2024 was seeing the excitement over AI. And then on on Christmas day a young fellow showed me what he was doing with an AI running in a development environment. I was blown away he had accomplished knowing only what he wanted to achieve.
It all started in a chat windows for me. Asking questions and getting reasonable looking answers. And then I found Claude, which knows how to write code. Claude could write Ansible code like no tomorrow. It also seemed to like Python, which I wanted to know better.
Claude was teaching me Ansible better than google searching. But, free only gets you so far. Just $200/yr subcribed. First thing I got Claude to write was a was way to input/output files. I quickly got tire of that exchange and asked for him to create a file I could pull apart. Walla, I had a rudimentary document exchange format where he could build all this code.
It did not take long until I was building and testing. At the beginning the churn was great! It was like debugging with a race horse programmer on coffee++. To keep up with the wild changes as we "made code work" I had to up my source control habits. Sometimes the all I could do was hold while the code move. The recursive logic loops that happened was like "Please let me. please you". The sycophantic dribble coupled with a vast number techniques tried with little real analysis was an issue that needed to be tamed. I had to get in touch with the system engineer persona. Write what I want. Know what I want. Make sure I could test it. Along with the "anti-requirements", such as "don't be ambigous".
So I had him write the tests. I would have brainstorming sessions where the product was described, the process I wanted to follow, and hod I wanted it tested. Claude could not run the test, but I could feed it back into him for evaluation. Didn't even need to have pretty up the output. Claude can parse that nested json as good as any code I could write.
He loves python with regex (regular expressions). Regex is easier to read than write. As the dialects are many. Claude will coverge on a solution ... slowly. Lot'sa chatting. Debugging over chat would sometimes consume my daily resource allocation.
The lessons were many. I grew. Claude grew. I gained insights into how I express what I think. Much of my writing is based on a human reader, and the AI does not have that depth or breadth.
This is is the first article of many where I introduce my technical discoveries in stories.
See github for technical details on my Solti Project.
See my document stack at www.jackaltx.com