The archive · Product Ideas · Product decision · 2024
Simon Willison produced 14 single-purpose apps in a week by prompting Claude Artifacts
A prolific LLM blogger turns Claude Artifacts into an on-demand app factory — 14 bespoke single-page tools in a week, most built in under five minutes.
Simon Willison
What it had to solve
Simon Willison had been using Claude Artifacts since the feature arrived in June 2024, then dug through his own Claude activity export and found he had spun up more interactive single-page apps in one week than he expected. Each one came from a concrete personal problem: copying a whole webpage into an LLM from Mobile Safari, decoding a QR code from a meeting slide, escaping HTML from his phone, or checking his arithmetic on Gemini's pricing.
How it works
Simon Willison's post of 21 October 2024 was a weekly review with a twist: he exported his Claude activity, converted it to SQLite with a tool he had written, and counted how many Claude Artifacts he had built in the past seven days. The answer was more than he expected — 14 interactive single-page applications, most of them finished.
What made the week interesting was the pattern. Each tool started from an immediate annoyance: he needed a whole webpage as Markdown to paste into an LLM on his phone, a way to decode a QR code from a meeting slide, or an HTML escaper for text on the go. Instead of searching for an existing app or writing from scratch, he prompted Claude to build one and iterated until it worked. Most took under five minutes; the OpenAI audio recorder, which Artifacts cannot wire to external APIs, was prototyped there and finished on his own hosting.
He published the finished tools on tools.simonwillison.net with code in the public simonw/tools repository and transcripts attached, then wrote up the week as evidence that spinning up a full interactive app — sometimes a prototype, sometimes a real fix — had become a daily utility. The post drew 637 points and 465 comments on Hacker News, where he told sceptics that being able to build something in minutes was worthwhile, and the tools site became a running collection of prompt-built single-page utilities.
Why it lands
- Every tool began with a task he personally needed done that day, so the work was real and the fit was guaranteed.
- Artifacts made iteration conversational: paste a problem, inspect the result, ask for changes, and copy out the code when it was right.
- Publishing each tool with its transcript turned ephemeral prompts into a reusable, inspectable library — the build process itself became the documentation.
- Keeping tools small and single-purpose matched the model's strength, so most were finished in minutes rather than abandoned halfway.
What it did
He documented 14 projects from a single week in a 21 October 2024 post that drew 637 points and 465 comments on Hacker News. In the thread he argued that building a small tool in minutes was worthwhile, and the site of single-page utilities kept growing into a collection whose colophon lists commit messages and transcripts for every tool.
What you can take
When a task is a five-minute utility, generate it instead of finding it: conversational iteration makes bespoke software cheaper than searching, and transcripts make every build reproducible.
Since then
The tools stayed live at tools.simonwillison.net, where a colophon now lists commit messages and transcripts for every tool and the code lives in the public simonw/tools repository. Willison kept cataloguing what Artifacts could and could not do — no external API calls, no form submissions, no outbound links — and wrote that he would probably build his own small Artifacts alternative from what he had learned. The site grew into a running collection of prompt-driven utilities, and his blog continued to document how he used LLMs in his long-running series on the subject.
Sources
- Everything I built with Claude Artifacts this week
- Everything I built with Claude Artifacts this week (Hacker News discussion)
spotted an error? The archive wants to know.
Your turn
You just read one. Describe the brief you are staring at, and see who has been given the same problem.
Free account · 3 free questions · no card