Today I got to live in the future for about 15 very ordinary minutes: sitting in the waiting room of a car wash. I had a truly mission-critical issue on my personal website: the Pac-Man Easter egg (where you play as "Marcman" and eat gummy bears) was bouncing the entire screen when you swiped to move. Peak severity. Clearly could not wait.
At the same time, I'd been listening to Boris Cherny's chat with Lenny Rachitsky on Lenny's Newsletter that something like a third of the code he writes now comes from the Claude iOS app. That's obviously crazy, how does that happen?! I couldn't quite picture how that actually worked in practice.
So I opened Claude on my phone, tapped Code, started a session, and wrote one very specific instruction:
"Prevent swipe gestures from moving the browser viewport when playing the Pac-Man game."
A couple minutes later:
- I reviewed the diff on the GitHub iOS app (about 8 lines, basically disabling touch scrolling inside the canvas)
- Approved my own PR
- Tested it directly in iOS Safari
Bug fixed. Deployed to production. All from my phone. While waiting for a car wash, with no terminal or IDE or fancy dev tool in sight.
What struck me wasn't just the novelty; it was how normal it felt. This wasn't a demo moment or a staged "AI magic" workflow. It was just… fixing something annoying while I had a few idle minutes. It felt like answering a few emails or approving a doc, except the output was code in prod.
We keep talking about AI changing how software gets built. But the bigger shift might be where and when it gets built. The barrier between "I have an idea" and "it's live" keeps collapsing. The future isn't always some dramatic leap; it might just be turning podcast-listening time into shipping time.
(PS: try playing the game on marcanthonyrosa.com from your phone — no-jiggle swiping courtesy of Anthropic.)