A New Kind of App

I've recently been interested in robotics companies. On overall hardware I guess but robotics in particular. I would like to work at one some day. I'll say that I want to move to hardware at some point of my career, or I should say I want to start a hardware company, mostly because I think manufacturing is one of the main equalizers into bringing equality and can help develop Mexico.

In order to do research, I stumbled into this workflow: instead of searching and gathering notes in a Notion, Google Doc, or visual board, I started by asking Claude to do the search for me, but instead of returning text, to generate an html file. This has been useful and it's a great product feature from Claude, but it gets buried in the chat, so I've been downloading the htmls and keeping them as archive. I started by asking Claude web to search and generate results as html first, I added basic capabilities like sorting and filtering.

Then I had an interesting idea: I asked Claude Code to add an update button. Claude generated a Python script that works as middleman (between the web file and the terminal), and it will trigger the web search again, and then it'll update the file. This is what I've been calling a new kind of app.

This kind of app is, at the end of the day, a web app. It's light, html, css and js. It's portable, you can send it to friends, coworkers, send it over email, chat.

This new kind of app is:

• local
• editable
• just html, css, and js
• doesn't have (nor needs) a database
• it interacts both with my computer and with the web
• it solves a specific purpose
• it solves my own problem
• it's used in the same working paradigm that I already work all day: browsers
• it can compute but it doesn't need a server per se (and when it needs computation, my computer is the server/backend), claude is the backend.

I have a folder, called /artifacts, where I save the artifacts that Claude has been generating for me.

I wonder what else I can do with this process. Just simple interactive documents or mini-apps that live in my computer, but also, can talk to the internet when I need to. A folder with tiny web apps: a timer, a to-do list, data visualizers, mini-video games.