Today I wrote a small Express-based API.
When letting my mind flow freely, a lot of ideas bubbled up naturally, as opposed to forcing half-baked ones out through a plan mode session where I iterate with Claude.
I ended up not going the route of a managed API Gateway like Apigee, and rolling my own auth.
The hard part has been finding information. Websearch is terrible, I’m spending 5-10 seconds proving to Cloudflare that yes, I AM HUMAN.
Luckily Express is heavily documented and has tonnes of QA on Stackoverflow.
I did really miss looking at my kitted out neovim config, which I was kinda robbed from with Claude Code.
| Metrics | Score | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Satisfaction | 4 | turns writing boilerplate isn’t that fun |
| Mental fatigue / cognitive load | 8 | search sucks, I’ve also lost the taste of where each piece of code should go in a repo |
| Number of PRs merged | 1 | yay? |
| Time to complete desired features | 2 | took me an entire day to write a simple Express API with some auth middleware |
| Confidence in released features | 9 | I feel in control |