The Importance of Tools and the Hedonic Treadmill of “Feels like Magic”

Claude Code felt like magic when I used it for the first time (14 months ago?). And then it felt like magic again when the models got good at code at the end of the year. But then I wanted to be able to vibe code entirely from my phone, one handed on vacation, while sipping a fruity drink and playing beach soccer with the kiddos, which brought me to exe.dev and Shelley. Shelley is great because its batteries included, all the tools you need out of the box to do web development. Of course after that it started to feel clunky. The UI is a power tool of options, compaction is disruptive at a time when most agents are smoothing that experience out, exe.dev is still primarily focusing on it’s magic SSH setup experience, but I’m on my phone, and the phone based ssh/terminal clients feel like the increasingly baroque products of an evolutionary dead end. So now I’m using “Claude Code for Web for iOS” (I think that really is the product name), and it’s simple and elegant, that nice soothing…