I'd been struggling to find good use cases for agentic things like Claude for this reason. My project is not a good fit for it as there's enough novelty to throw off the ML pattern systems. I was benefitting greatly from autocomplete, but not really leaning too much on code-writing tools.

But I actually found a use case where the agentic approach adds incredible value: internal tooling and visualization.

I was debugging some feature in the core, and had some code to jump a JSON diagnostic structure with a lot of info. Looking at this directly was getting to be a pain, so I wanted to write a UI for it.

Claude handled this task almost perfectly for <$5. I wrote up a description of the JSON schema, and a description of how that should map to a view, added some styling directions, and let er rip. In one afternoon, I go the UI built for me when I was doing dishes.

So I built the tool and went back to debugging and made a ton of progress using it. It's ok if I don't have a full internalization of the visualization architecture. It's basically a complex software "jig" that the AI built for me. I can build new ones as necessary.

A very interesting revelation.