This week was an interesting one in the world of AI - we had all of Google’s announcements at Google I/O↗ , some announcements from Microsoft at their Build↗ conference, and the most exciting of all - the launch of Claude 4↗ from Anthropic; and to top it off, there is a new Doom↗ game out!!!

Gaming or coding

While I am not much of a gamer, game releases like Doom prick up my ears - as most of you will know I am a macOS user, so Doom isn’t out for that. This is one of the reasons why I subscribe to Nvidia’s GeForce Now↗ service, so I started playing Doom: The Dark Ages, but, I do like puzzles, so when Anthropic announced Claude 4 I decided to park Doom and give it a go.

RussTools

A few weeks ago I used Cursor↗ to create a single-page app to help with my day job. The first of the two tools was a network design tool↗ , the second was an Azure Resource Naming tool↗ . I decided to make use of one of the nearly fifty domains I’ve accumulated since 2001 and stuck them on russ.tools↗ . To create these tools I have used a combination of Claude 3.5 Sonnet and Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro, and while the two tools were functional, they were very obviously created by two different models - there wasn’t much consistency, both style-wise and with the code itself.

Finishing off some existing code

After the announcement of Claude 4 and after seeing a few posts about its code improvements, I decided to use it to finish off the third tool, which was a Cron Job Expression Builder/Validator↗ . While the code I already had in place was mostly non-functional and full of placeholders, this was enough for Claude 4 Sonnet to pick up where Gemini left off and finish the tool off with a single prompt; not only that, it rebuilt the interface to be more user-friendly and added a few extra features without me asking it to do anything!

More tools

Colour me impressed - so with a long weekend I decided to add some more tools: first an SSL Certificate Checker↗ , then a DNS Lookup Tool↗ , and then a WHOIS Lookup Tool↗ .

What is missing

At this point, I had quite a good little collection of tools. I fed Claude the README↗ file and asked it what other tools would complement the existing ones, and we came up with …

Bringing it all together

While everything was pretty consistent, there were a few design issues. Not a problem, though - I asked Claude to review screenshots of each of the tools and write then implement a style guide↗ giving them a consistent look and feel across the site.

Why?

While the new Doom game is fun, I actually find puzzles more interesting. Not being a developer by trade, the whole vibe coding trend is quite a lot of fun, and I find it a lot more relaxing than Doom - errors are interesting to debug, and finding the right prompt is very satisfying when you get it right first time.

Summary

While the new Doom game offers its own kind of thrill, I found myself drawn to the intellectual puzzles of “vibe coding” with these cutting-edge AI tools. I’ve been building out my ‘RussTools’ collection, a series of single-page apps for my day job, using a mix of AI models. It’s been an interesting journey, especially seeing the inconsistencies when different models were involved. However, Claude 4 truly impressed me, not only finishing off a tricky bit of code with a single prompt but also intuitively improving the UI and adding features I hadn’t even asked for!

This success spurred me on to create even more tools, like an SSL Certificate Checker and DNS/WHOIS lookup tools. The final touch was having Claude help implement a consistent style guide across the entire site, bringing everything together beautifully. Ultimately, for me, this ‘vibe coding’ isn’t just about building; it’s about the satisfying challenge of debugging errors and crafting the perfect prompt – a far more relaxing and engaging pursuit than the chaos of Doom!