Pattern
Skip the read and try the product.
Like most, I have been down the Claude Code rabbit hole the last couple of weeks, transitioning from technically illiterate to technically illiterate but with an infinitely patient teacher.
I’ve probably worked on a dozen ideas that I’ve gotten 50/60% there before abandoning to the realization that they are trivial to copy and I don’t have any sort of distribution advantage in getting them off the ground.
The first one I’ve gotten in good enough shape to share more broadly is called Pattern.
The idea initially came from a tweet I saw by Scott Belsky a couple of days ago:
A couple of prompts later I had a version of this working, submit your prompts, upvote etc. Anyone who read that tweet and can write a few sentences could have made the same thing in a few minutes.
The immediate weakness is the degree to which you rely on people to create the content that makes the product compelling. What is their incentive to do so, etc. These great prompts are more likely to circulate on already established networks like X.
So as I was populating the feed with examples (so people wouldn’t arrive at an empty screen) I tested a few of them in my own LLMs.
The first response I got is why I’m writing this email, here’s the prompt:
From our conversations, what creative practice do you think I've abandoned? Why did I stop, and does that reason still hold?I (Claude) continued to buildout sign up/sign in, accounts, bookmarks, then remove it all last minute in favor of a “Follow” button that directs people here.
Why? The friction in signing up for thousands of software products with individual accounts is exhausting. I have no idea if anyone will find this interesting or useful, and if they do, they can follow this account instead of memorizing another password.
Usually I would just tweet something like this out, but I’ve also found the shape of the X algorithm to have changed so significantly that this feels like a more appropriate place to share it.
One other detail on the product itself, removing accounts and upvotes in favor of a global counter of how many times each prompt has been copied, which (in theory) with enough engagement can act as a filter of sorts to both surface great prompts and train for better ones.
Thanks for reading and let me know if you get any value from this.
played around with this for about two hours, lot of good self discovery.
this is amazing