Making Magic Mandala

Today, I decided on two things.

First, I decided to try out Matt Pocock’s Wayfinder skill. I watched a video clip about it and it seemed to be a super useful skill to try, especially the prototype part which the LLM will generate a prototype to test feedback with the user!

The wayfinder skill, combined with Trello, led to Claude brainstorming and grilling me lightly on what i wanted, and my intentions for various projects.

I decided to brainstorm various project ideas, including ideas from CIID.

One idea i revisited was the Magic Mandala.

This was a project I had worked with Amit for the Introduction to Programming course we did; our original project was built locally on our laptop using Processing, with a very-hacky hack to get a sound for each keypress.

The project was also memorable for the lesson I learned, about the value of scrappy roleplaying and body storming to test ideas in low fidelity, (vs writing a paper!): that testing led us to this idea after discarding two others.

The three ideas: (from left to right) Cards for Humanity, Magic Mandala, Twister

I vividly remember that Amit and I spent a couple of days on the Processing code; there was one evening after we had called it a night, and as I cycled home, I suddenly had an insight “hey! Maybe i can solve our problem in this way!”. When I reached home, I whipped out the laptop and continued coding for another hour or so. That was my first introduction to being in the coding zone, and it was addictive.

Today, it literally took Claude Opus 5.5 two minutes to make a working prototype on the Claude app.

And it took about the same time to build the entire app from scratch.

We live in pretty amazing times! and I am super excited to work on the rest of the ideas in my Trello. 😊