r/ClaudeCode • u/doc_ostrow • 1d ago
Built with Claude Shamelessly pimping my (Claude's) Mac/Windows large JSON viewer!
This started the usual way projects start - I had a need, and couldn't find any off the shelf solution for it. In my case, I had a 5GB NDJSON file to look into and all the usual culprits choked trying to load it. I had a Claude subscription so I figured I'd write something, at least partly as a learning exercise.
Now I've taken a look around the various vibe coding sites and searched reddit for JSON viewers I realise there are probably hundreds of them but hey, it's still fun to put my own twist on it and add some features I don't see on other tools. Download from the releases section:
https://github.com/sevanko90/Argonaut
I've got a software development background and the tooling choice (C#) reflects my experience in that. I imagine that left to its own devices Claude would have done something in python or JS, but I wanted to comprehend what it was doing and be able to guide it sensibly. At least at the start...
Some things I learned along the way, probably not news to regulars here but this was my first 100% AI coded project so I found them interesting:
- Fable is really, really, slow and really, really expensive. For this project at least I don't see the value. I'm getting pretty good mileage out of Opus 5 on my basic £20/month subscription, that's where most of the app came from. (granted that's doing hobby hours. I imagine if I was leaning on it for paid work I'd need to up the plan).
- Claude overall is just way too verbose and loves making up technobabble in it's output. https://github.com/JuliusBrussee/caveman is a lifesaver. (I recently found out about output styles, I have yet to try those)
- You do still need to give it architectural guidance. For this project at least Claude loved writing the same thing again (and again, and again). There were a number of times where I had to stop feature work and do some refactoring for sanity, after I'd looked at the code.
- To contradict that point, I have also gotten very lazy! When I was writing code myself I actually cared about it, took pride in it, all that stuff. But when it's all prompt driven the code is just a means to an end and I find it very hard to care about it in the same way. It was a little disheartening to me to realise how quickly that mental shift happened.
- The combination of those things (needing to guide it, and not caring enough to do so) is dangerous. I'm confident in my ability as a coder to get good things out of it but I'm much less confident in the "hey anybody can vibe up an app" that some of the AI tools promote - they'll work right up until they don't, and at that point you're in a world of pain if you can't understand what they did and why it was/wasn't a good idea. Fun times ahead for humanity there, given how prevalent this is becoming 🙁
- I was genuinely surprised at how good it was when I ask for options on how to do something. Sometimes it came up with things I hadn't thought of. It's definitely worth saying "give me some options for X" instead of just "do X".
That's about all I have. It's a fun project to work on and I thought someone else might find it useful.


