We were tasked with duplicating some website functionality by a client of ours. They are a franchised businesss and have multiple territories and had a postcode lookup thing on their old website. It was clunky and used the Wordpress database for accessing the territory information. We were moving the website to a static site using HTML, CSS and Javascript, so needed to change how this lookup worked.
The AI tool by Anthropic, Claude was chosen to help out. A few requests later and Claude had created a simple client side Javascript tool to do exactly this.
It was not a case of request the tool, copy and paste the code, job done. Many tweaks were needed and tests carried out on every interation, but ultimately the final product was useful and worked well. 43 versions were created, many of them just had some debug information that was used by Claude to get to the bottom of some of the behaviour. This process also lasted over 2 months of back and forth, so quite time consuming. We also asked Claude to turn this into a Wordpress plugin to possibly be used in future, which it did with aplomb!
The conclusion we came to is that AI coding tools can be incredibly helpful and useful, but you still need a human to be on hand to firstly write good requests and then test and iterate to get a successful outcome.
See the live postcode lookup tool in action here.
