Sean C Davis
@seancdavis.com
Helping developers build better websites • Sandwich Lover • Netlify • former Stackbit • CFE.dev host
I pointed Claude Code at a genuinely messy auth flow in one of my real projects and asked for a diagram. It took about 15 minutes and ~$4 in tokens to get a color-coded Excalidraw scene that would have taken at least an hour to do manually.
Auto-generate architecture diagrams with the Excalidraw MCP server
The Excalidraw MCP server has been a game changer for me. Point Claude Code at your codebase, ask for a diagram, and it draws out the thing — auth flows, sys...
youtube.com
For years it was cheaper to buy than build. I stopped building as much. But it feels different again. This is a short talk of me walking through what I think changed the game. I'm going to throw more of these types of videos together in the coming weeks!
An audience of one: build software for yourself again
For years it was cheaper to buy than to build, so I stopped making my own software. AI flipped that math — and now an audience of one is all the justificatio...
youtube.com
My 8-year-old daughter and I are building a video game this summer. She's artist and Customer Zero. I'm architect/developer. Aiming for this to be an ongoing series of updates so folks can follow along.
Building a video game with my 8-year-old
School's out, so my eight-year-old daughter and I are teaming up to build a real video game this summer, and I want to document the whole thing. Instead of j...
youtube.com
My kids always want the oddly specific coloring pages ("dragons AND a castle AND a spaceship"). A coloring page generator is an elementary sort of app, but it's led to insights when digging into the details. It's a bit surprising how hard it's been to get it right.
I built an AI coloring page generator on Netlify (Crayonable)
My kids are always asking me to print coloring pages, and we never find the oddly specific thing they want ("dragons AND a castle AND a spaceship"). So I bui...
youtube.com
I still have some tweaks to make, but I really like being able to control the information in the Claude Code CLI status line (footer).
Customize the Claude Code status line (repo, branch, cost, and model)
You can fully customize the footer (status line) in the Claude Code CLI, and it's been a game-changer for me. It helps me know which version of Claude is doi...
youtube.com
AI coding lowered the barrier to entry, but it also raised the bar for possibility. At first, I thought it meant the gap in developing software was closing. I'm starting to feel like it might actually be widening, but the implementation has changed.
Heyo! We have an official Discord community now!! Come say hi!
Netlify Community
Join the Netlify community. Let’s build the future of the web, together.
netlify.com
Challenge: Take a static mockup from Claude and turn it into a real, full-stack app (on @netlify.com) without ever pulling the code down locally. Spoiler alert: it totally worked! Auth, database, image uploads, the works!
Challenge: Convert a Claude design to a full-stack application
A quick experiment to see if I could take a static mockup in Claude design to a real, dynamic web application, without ever pulling the code locally.Spoiler ...
youtube.com
I find the "one-shot" thing so gimmicky. Trying to reframe it positively. It takes: - an hour (or less) to experience the magic - a day to understand your mvp's scope - a month to make it something you will continue to use - a year to ... (I'm not there yet)
This turned out to be a welcomed little struggle. Finding how quickly I could polish a conf talk from a rough voice note has already changed a lot.
How I built a polished conference talk in 48 hours
I found out what my conference talk was about 48 hours before the event. Here's the workflow that took me from a blank page to a tight, practiced, genuinely ...
youtube.com
100% agree with this. In fact, one of my favorite uses of AI lately has been in helping get better at things I've wanted to learn but didn't have the time. TBD how long it will be until I have to call a contractor to get me out of a massive pickle.
Sarah Drasner@sarahedo.bsky.social · last mo.I think in the next few years, human communities and the value of the handmade in certain areas will become more important, not less We’ve actually seen this trend in art history play out a few times already -> highly mechanical gives way to the return of the “prestige of the handmade”
Astro 7 is here! A new Rust compiler, a new Rust Markdown/MDX processor, Vite 8 and more. Get ready for 60%+ faster builds. astro.build/blog/astro-7/
Astro 7.0 | Astro
Astro 7.0 brings faster builds with Vite 8, a new Rust compiler, Advanced Routing, background dev server support, and structured logging.
astro.build
/color and /rename are great for seeing everything active at once. But as soon as I want to look at code or run a manual command, this gets clunky. Is there an app that lets me do this??? - see activity - switch fast (shortcuts) - get notified - run commands w/o session exit - explore repo files
In 2019 we launched Netlify Functions. In 2023, Functions 2.0 rebuilt the whole experience around Developer Experience. Today we're taking it to the next frontier: Agent Experience. Here's what shipped. 🧵
I've been using AXIS heavily for the last couple of weeks on Netlify's public skills. It's a tricky (and expensive) thing to nail testing non-deterministic systems, but we have to find ways to do it, as it's not manually scalable. This has been super useful already, and it's just beginning!
AXIS — Agent Experience Index Score
AXIS is open source tooling and a scoring framework to measure how well services work for AI agents. Run real scenarios, get a 0–100 score, and fix what's slowing agents down.
axis.run
Finally got Claude to do a naming exercise with me without giving me a bunch of tech bro shit. These are some high-quality names.
New build challenge idea: local, custom meeting recorder/transcriber. Probably a few weeks out, but curious to at least learn how these things work.
Aside from privacy, one of the motivating factors with a personal audio recording tool is that I can plug it into other custom workflows. Assuming I can get it working, of course.
Every day with AI is like Game of Thrones: So much promise to start. By lunch, 10 open sessions, half not worth screentime. Something dies that shouldn't. I fixate on one thread and burn it all down. Call it a successful day (it's a lie). Tomorrow, spin off the ashes as though I know nothing.
It still takes a lot of time, effort, and expertise to build and scale a polished web experience.
I'm curious to get into the research for a little meeting transcription app, largely to see where the latency comes from and if I can avoid it. That's always been my biggest hangup with these things.
At first, it felt like AI meant opportunities to educate were drying up. But now I'm starting to think that the developer education gap might be wider than ever before.
The first 15 minutes with AI can be real magic. And that absolutely matters. But it's also just the first 15 minutes. What really matters is where that time leads.
The people making the most out of AI treat it as a tool, not a cheat code.
I'm really happy yet another way to enjoy The Index is available for people: 1. RSS piccalil.li/the-index/fe... 2. Web piccalil.li/the-index/ 3. Email 4. Standard.site via @standard-reader.app Build your newsletter web-first and anything is possible.
There’s a difference between building something useful and building something to avoid the harder question of whether it should be built at all. If you're in a position where you can just build anything, you're not free. You're just surrounded by distractions with a higher ceiling.