Strade Viola
Published 2026-02-19
Strade viola means “purple roads” in Italian. This name is an homage to the famous Strade Bianche race and roads.
It’s also the name of my new mini-project website, which pings the Strava API to draw a graph of the distance and elevation I have ridden my bike since 2012.
I built this website in a few hours with the help of Claude Code. I’ve been using various AI tools for my work and freelance projects for the past few months; this was the first soup-to-nuts project I attempted with AI tools.
I have Opinions about AI coding of course. They deserve a much longer blog post, but the five minute version is:
- Using Claude is like pairing with a cleverish junior developer
- It is not an outright replacement for developers but largely renders coders redundant
- the people who should fear replacement the most are off-shore development shops whose sole value proposition is “cheaper than onshore developers”
- the long-term social danger to AI tools is that we are choking off the pipeline of junior talent, in all white-collar industries
- Related thought: the value of a white-collar product (market report, project plan, product design, etc.) is not in the product per se but in the experience/thought/effort that was necessary to produce it