On-The-Go
Who else remembers those really annoying “On-The-Go” playlists your iPod would seemingly create autonomously? Or maybe it was just pocket-dialling as your jeans decided you needed a playlist with the only song being “Monster by The Automatic”?!
Well, clearly I do. but my first [and only] iPod - [the gen 3 model pictured here though mine went through the wars so is in a few more pieces and only works if plugged into a powered dock] - was a much beloved gadget. It took me through university with the 20Gb [wow] hard drive whirring away with Radiohead, R.E.M., The Kooks and other very “mid” indie bands that were popular in the early 2000’s.
What wasn’t beloved so much though was this habit of creating random on-the-go playlists. And I'd not really thought about them until today when I was playing around with Claude Code on the mobile app. - See there was always going to be an AI angle somewhere.
Quick explainer: What is Claude Code? - it’s the coding agent that you chat to and it builds whatever you have told it to build, the complexity and functionality based entirely on the competence / clarity of the prompts you input and at the end of it you can have a working masterpiece or just a mess of bad code. Anyway. Claude Code has made its way into the Claude mobile app. Previously it was just Anthropic’s answer to ChatGPT - an AI chat interface for their latest models, but recently they added this new “Code” option.
The “Code” option takes you to a blank interface where you first have to connect it to your GitHub account, followed by specifying a repository [or repo] that you want to interact with. What has this got to do with On-The-Go playlists?? That will come, for now - GitHub account connected and repo chosen, you are able to interact with Claude just as you would through your computer - “Hey Claude, we are going to make some changes to this project, I need to add a new page that surfaces X data for the user to then filter by the available columns, please let me know if you need any clarification and as always please use the rules.txt doc to give you your best practices”. It will then take a clone of the repo, add code and update. The problem is if you wanted to view / deploy / test the changes as a user you would [likely] want to do so on a laptop rather than phone screen. Now there are plenty of use cases and people who would work in this way, but for me I prefer working and testing on a laptop where I have a fuller set of tools.
It was for this reason I hadn’t really delved into Claude Code on mobile, dismissing it as not really something that could enhance my time. Until today! Until “On-The-Go” playlists.
Now I am someone who has a lot of ideas. All the time. Not all of them good, but all of them get written down. OneNote has been my favourite product Microsoft has ever produced and I use it all the time for notes, ideas and reminders. it’s a good place to jot something down and then go explore when I have the time. More recently this has meant product ideas, where I will jot down a sort of brief and then come to it with Claude Code when I’m at my computer.
And that’s what hit me today. I was looking at Code mobile again and the whole “you have to have a repo to connect to in order to do anything” hurdle pretty much meant that I wouldn’t be spontaneously getting an idea down if I had to do a load of admin first.
Enter “On-The-Go” repos!
I have now created several empty repos on my GitHub which are labelled “On-The-Go-1”, etc. just like those annoying playlists from 20 years ago! But, unlike those useless things these repos are now “idea portals” [trademark pending] waiting to be filled. This morning I did the admin to get them setup but now they are there, it will be a case of open Claude mobile instead of OneNote, dictate the brief / scope and have Claude bash out a best guess / PoC for me to review at a later date.
I’m not sure if this translates the potential I feel this has as a power tool, but I’m pretty amped about the next pub session “ideation session”, perhaps with a glass or two of red…
