Otto's Tools
Note: This is not a tutorial. These are just the tools I use. If you tell Claude or ChatGPT your idea, it will tell you exactly how to create it. This is the exact strategy I used. I am a philosophy major with no coding background. A good place to get started might be another blog post I wrote, Assignment 0. This is a living document—I'll update this page whenever I discover new tools worth sharing.
The Tools
Claude Code is like having a master programmer sitting next to you 24/7. You describe what you want to build in plain English, and Claude Code writes the actual code for you. It can create entire applications, fix bugs, and explain what every line of code does.
Claude Code lives in your terminal—that's where you interact with it and watch it work its magic. WARP makes that experience significantly better. WARP makes it easy to run multiple Claude Code sessions simultaneously—you can have one tab building your frontend, another handling backend tasks, and a third running tests, all at the same time.
Instead of typing everything out, Superwhisper lets you speak your ideas and instantly converts them to text with remarkable accuracy. Best of all, it's completely free and runs locally on your computer—no internet connection required, so your voice never leaves your machine.
GitHub is like Google Drive, but specifically designed for code. It keeps track of every change you make to your projects, lets you share code with others, and allows multiple people to work on the same project without stepping on each other's toes. Even if you're working alone, it's your safety net—if something breaks, you can always go back to a version that worked.
Once you've built something cool, Vercel is where you put it on the internet for the world to see. It's like renting a plot of land on the internet where your website lives. The magical part? You just connect it to your GitHub, and every time you update your code, Vercel automatically updates your live website.
Figma is where you draw what your app or website should look like before you build it. It's like Photoshop meets PowerPoint, but specifically made for designing digital interfaces. You can create buttons, layouts, and entire app designs by dragging and dropping elements around.
This is the bridge between your designs and your code. Instead of manually describing your Figma designs to Claude Code, Figma MCP lets Claude Code "see" your designs directly and turn them into working code. It's like showing a blueprint to a construction crew instead of trying to describe it with words.