Over eighteen days, from 19 January to 6 February, working in dialogue with Claude Sonnet 4.5, Anthropic’s large language model running in their Claude Code development environment, I developed a web application for annotating and analysing source code. The reason for developing this was the result of working with a group of colleagues attempting to annotate the ELIZA source code during 2024/25 and the difficulty of using off-the-shelf tools like Google Docs. The challenge of creating an ideal tool to undertake this kind of distributed analysis drove many of the design decisions that underpin the development.
I want to document this process here as a record of what AI-augmented development looks like when undertaken by a humanities scholar rather than a professional software engineer, and what the experience reveals about the changing conditions under which scholarly tools can be made.