Among large language models (LLMs), ChatGPT has always taken the crown, but one could argue that this has changed with the release of Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 3.5. This short blog post shows how a creator used Claude to prototype a simple idea.
Writing down your idea is the most basic principle in product development. If we go further, we will have a basic design of how it can look and function. But beyond this, what would happen if you had a basic prototype?
It seems like a dream scenario where you can interact with your prototype, but in reality, going from document to design and possibly even prototype is too big an investment for most small businesses and startups.
But what if this process were affordable? Get into Sonnet of Claudius 3.5:
In the above tweet (or x-post as they say nowadays), user Balaji shows a short video of how he was able to generate a rapid prototype for a to-do list web application in less than a minute. Claude’s “Artifacts” allow you to preview and interact with the generated code, which is truly an amazing leap in how far AI has come.
Although the video above uses a very simple idea, you’ll likely have to do some serious engineering work to get closer to a more feature-rich prototype. And a lot more work on logic and bug fixing if you really need to implement it.
However, this is just the beginning and future versions of this model will be better. You can try this model yourself for free at Claude’s sitebut due to the limitations, you’ll most likely have to purchase the pro plan to do anything remotely serious.
I’ve seen many regular ChatGPT users comment on how Sonnet 3.5 blows GPT-4o out of the water in the technical and programming domains. If you’re not convinced, just do a quick search on Sonnet 3.5 on X (formerly Twitter) and you’ll see tons of great examples of people showing off their skills.
I’ll leave you one below and end it with this: The barrier between idea and reality has become much thinner.
I needed a box shadow the other day, so I asked Claude to build me a unique custom interface to play with the box shadow properties.
It’s pretty amazing how we can create little custom tools like this in about the same amount of time it would take to search and select a tool that already exists! pic.twitter.com/2rGbzSsLZ9
—Simon Willison (@simonw) July 8, 2024
