I spent two weeks in Taiwan recently. One afternoon I was sitting with my friend Vic. Vic is a C++ programmer. He’s also the guy who teaches a community of people how to extract maximum value from credit card points. Two skill sets that don’t usually share a table.
He had an idea. The product is in stealth so I’m not going to say what it does. But the shape of it was real, and he could see it clearly, and he could not see how the modern stack would actually build it.
So we built it. In 45 minutes.
#Ten minutes on paper
Vic sketched the idea on a hotel notepad. I asked questions. We argued about edge cases. By the end of those ten minutes, we had three boxes connected by two arrows and a list of about seven things the system needed to do.
Most of the work was in the ten minutes. The next part was just typing.
#Thirty-five minutes in Claude Code
I opened Claude Code. I narrated what we wanted. The stack was the usual:
- Cloudflare Workers for the request handlers
- Cloudflare Queues for the async processing
- Cloudflare R2 for object storage
- Cloudflare Secret Store for the credentials Vic needed
- Cloudflare Pages for the front end
I’d done this stack before, so I had instincts about which prompts would land cleanly. Claude Code did the rest. Vic watched the file tree fill up. He asked questions about each piece, the kind of questions a senior engineer asks: “what happens if the queue backs up?” “what happens if the secret rotates?” “how does the front end know when the worker is done?”
I had answers because the stack has answers. He didn’t have to take my word for it. He could see the code.
#The hostname
Around minute 33 we ran wrangler pages deploy. Around minute 35 the prototype was live on a real hostname. Vic could click it on his phone.
That’s when the look happened. The same look I get from Hudson when something he described shows up on screen. A grown C++ programmer doing the same face as my 10-year-old. I’ll take it.
#What Vic actually learned
Vic could already build software. He’s been doing it for twenty years. What he didn’t have was a mental model of which seams the modern stack snaps together at. After 45 minutes he had that. He could see where the queue lives, where the secret lives, where the deploy goes. He saw the shape.
The shape is the unlock. Once you’ve seen Cloudflare Workers and Queues and R2 and Pages click together once, you don’t need to learn it again. You just notice the seams everywhere you look. Then you stop being intimidated by green-field projects.
Vic’s now building his idea into a real thing for his credit-card-points community. He doesn’t need me anymore. That was the point.
Let’s go!