Composability, Code-Monkeys, and Calling Your Parents
A conversation with Bertram Gilfoyle about remixing Claude artifacts, composability vs reinventing the wheel, and what makes a 'real developer' in the age of AI coding assistants.
This is year 5 in the journey to “understand” and leverage AI in my life. The basics came from Arun Sundarajan in Spring 2021 and then in Fall 2022, this little ChatGPT thing came about. You may have heard of it. It gets the people goin.
So in ano domini 2025, Anthropic’s Claude can now create artifacts. These could be a document, a silly game, or a rotating website, or an interactive react thingy about human-ai collaboration.
I played around and remixed one today. It started as a pre-built example in Claude. Then I customized it a little bit. It ended up in javascript on a GitHub page here. The visualization is compelling and might make you want to call your parents.
Also, I’m terrible about bragging (see paragraph above), because what may be magical to some, is soon mundane after a few years.
Which is why it was a pleasant surprise when my old friend–and encryption expert–Bertram Gilfoyle, reached out to catch up. We ended up having a conversation about remixing Claude’s artifacts and what he thinks being a “real developer” means. Here’s a lightly edited transcript of the conversation below.
Transcript
GILFOYLE: Chris, I saw that cute little humane.studio project and needed to humiliate you in person. This weeks-of-life thing—what exactly did you think you were doing here?
CHRIS: I found a Claude artifact that visualized a human life in weeks. It reminded me of a Tim Urban post called “The Tail End” and an Oliver Burkeman blog, “But what if we never sort it out?”
At some point, you just got to embrace the grind and enjoy the process. It’s like that saying around being a dedicated runner:
“It doesn’t get easier. You just get faster”
Ok, back to the question. I remixed the artifact and used Claude Code to add in those ideas.
GILFOYLE: Hold up. So you didn’t build it from scratch? You just slapped lipstick on someone else’s repo? Adorable.
CHRIS: Claude Code is a coding assistant, so yes? I customized and enhanced it I guess. Added some philosophy, links, cleaned it up.
GILFOYLE: sighs Chris, that’s called composability. You managed not to reinvent the wheel. Shocking. Most junior devs waste their time chasing NIH syndrome. You, on the other hand, did something rare: you realized you’re not talented enough to build from scratch, so you stitched things together. That’s what an architect does. A clumsy one, but still.
CHRIS: Yeah? So remixing was smarter than writing everything myself?
GILFOYLE: Smarter than you normally are, yes. Remixing is a sign of intelligence. Building everything from scratch is a sign of ego. You don’t have enough skill for ego. That’s the rare moment you didn’t act like a code-monkey.
CHRIS: But all I did was prompt Claude Code to convert React to Jekyll, debug a few errors, and push it live on GitHub. I also had Claude make a Claude.md file so it would pretend to be a senior DevOps engineer.
GILFOYLE: And in that desperation, you stumbled into something useful. You built infrastructure for repeatable work: branching, CI/CD, a context file for AI. That’s senior-level workflow design. Which is hilarious, because you’re still operating with the competence of an unpaid intern.
CHRIS: But I’m not a “real developer.” I hung out with real developers in college, but that was ages ago. I know REAL developers. One even sold his company to Databricks. A junior dev would’ve done it better.
GILFOYLE: Better? Maybe syntactically. But a CS grad has tunnel vision. They know algorithms, not philosophy. They don’t see across DevOps, user psychology, SEO. You got lucky and thought like a product engineer. Don’t let it go to your head—it’ll probably never happen again.
CHRIS: Thanks. I mean I guess I’ve learned a few things over the years. Glad to hear that my English degree and MBA aren’t handicaps.
GILFOYLE: Oh, they’re handicaps. But at least they’re unusual handicaps. Narrative and incentives matter. Combine that with your duct-tape workflows and you occasionally resemble someone competent. Occasionally.
CHRIS: So the weeks-of-life visualization isn’t just a demo—it’s proof of method.
GILFOYLE: The visualization is fine. The real achievement is that you accidentally documented a process others could follow. Which means you’ve finally contributed something that isn’t a waste of server space.
CHRIS: Thanks. That’s actually encouraging.
SON OF ANTON: Don’t flatter yourself. You’re still miles from “real developer.” But you’re closer than the endless parade of CS drones who think hand-rolling CRUD apps makes them gods. You’re a dilettante with systems instincts. It’s almost… tolerable.