Big Story I Just Had a Conversation — and Three Apps Appeared Here's how it actually worked: I sat down with Claude — Anthropic's AI — and I just talked to it. I told it what I wanted. I described the tool. What it should do. Who it's for. How it should feel. And Claude built it. Now, my background is programming, and I used to write requirements for an e-commerce website, like an airline booking engine :-). But I didn't have to write the code. Claude did. Not a rough mockup. Not a wireframe. An actual, working application. Now — I didn't just hit "publish" and walk away. I reviewed everything. I tested it. I made sure the logic was right, that it did what I said it would do, and that it was ready for my users. That part is on you as the human in the room. But the heavy lifting? The coding, the structure, the logic? Done. Three apps. One week. Resources that would have cost me a fortune and months of back-and-forth with a developer — gone. Why I'm Telling You This Because I know some of you are still skeptical about AI. And I get it — I really do. There's a legitimate conversation happening in this industry about content scraping, about travel sites seeing their traffic drained by AI-generated answers, about who owns what on the Internet. But I want to offer you a different frame for a moment. Think about the encyclopedia you had growing up. The library you went to for a school project. You'd walk in, pull books off the shelf, read what experts and institutions had written, and use that information to build something — a report, an argument, an idea. You'd cite your sources if appropriate. That was just research. The internet has always worked the same way. Trusted websites publish information. People find it, learn from it, and build on it. AI tools are trained on that same publicly available knowledge — and when you use them to create something, you're still on the hook for the output. You review it. You verify it. You put your name on it. That's how knowledge has always typically worked. What This Means for the Travel Industry The barrier between "I have an idea" and "this exists and people can use it" just collapsed. That's huge for travel. Think about tourism boards that want a custom itinerary builder but don't have the dev budget. Travel advisors who want a trip planning tool for clients. Content Creators who have ideas for interactive experiences but no technical background. You don't need a developer anymore to test an idea. You need to be able to describe it clearly — and be willing to review what comes back. Now you may actually need a developer as the AI can't code everything and you may not have time anyways :-). That's the skill now. Not coding. Communicating. The practical takeaway: If you've had an idea sitting in a notebook or an idea black book like I have :-) — a tool, a resource, a calculator, a quiz, a booking flow — spend 30 minutes describing it to Claude. Just talk to it like you'd explain it to a smart colleague. See what comes back. It's work though :-). You might surprise yourself. |
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