tmsi nag-retweet
I've often been building single-use apps with Claude Artifacts when I'm helping my children learn. For example here's one on visualizing fractions claude.site/artifacts/e967…
Here are some things I've learned.
Speed of creation
My kids are young, so any single activity might last only say 15 minutes. The fact that I can create an app in a minute or two, use it for one session, and then forget about it is a big deal. If it took even 5 minutes to create an app it would be much less useful.
It would take me much longer, maybe an hour or two, to make one of these apps on my own. So I would never have done this pre-AI.
Shittiness of app stores
What's more surprising is that it is far easier to create an app on-demand than searching for an app in the app store that will do what I'm looking for. Searching for kids' learning apps is typically a nails-on-chalkboard painful experience because 95% of them are addictive garbage. And even if I find something usable, it can't match the fact that I can tell Claude what I want.
Sometimes we don't notice how awful certain technologies are from a user perspective until we get to experience the alternative!
Overall I think the "single use app" or "throwaway app" paradigm is really powerful. It's like shell scripts but for non-programmers. I'm curious if others have been building these.
Why use apps?
Of course you don't need an app to learn fractions (or anything else), but the ability to use them has made a material difference. Some of the main benefits:
– being able to visualize concepts (far better and faster than I can by drawing)
– slight gamification to make it more fun
– repetition to teach skills (for instance, to teach how to tell time I made a random clock face generator and my kid and I played with it).
Limitations
Claude's lack of Internet access (both when building the app and for the app itself when it is executing) is seriously annoying and really limits what kinds of apps you can build. I'm sure there are startups who offer less restricted versions of the same functionality but I haven't looked into them. If you have recommendations please leave a comment.
English
