Former Google engineering leader Hugh Williams is back with another fascinating Claude Code experiment.
After previously showing how Anthropic's coding assistant helped him build an AWS-based system in 48 hours, Williams has been using Claude Code recently to create a working search engine called Zettair that indexes 1.5 million Wikipedia articles.
The project includes features you'd expect from a modern search engine: autosuggest, query-biased snippets, related searches, trending topics, and AI-generated summaries.
Williams says he wrote zero lines of code himself, relying entirely on Claude Code. That's technically true, with an important caveat: the underlying search engine is based on an information-retrieval system he helped build in the early 2000s.
His biggest takeaway wasn't that AI can replace engineers. Instead, Williams argues Claude Code works best when paired with deep technical expertise.
Building with AI, he says, feels less like programming and more like coaching — and experienced engineers still make the best coaches.
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Alistair Barr is the author of Business Insider's Tech Memo newsletter. Sign up here. Before that, he was BI's Global Tech Editor and the Big Tech team leader at Bloomberg, following a reporting career at The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Reuters, and MarketWatch. Alistair won a Gerald Loeb Award in 2007 for coverage of short selling and was a finalist in 2013 for scoops on the Facebook IPO. More recently, he won a 2024 San Francisco Press Club award for commentary. Got a tip? Reach out using the secure messaging app Signal (+1 415-341-4927) or via email on [email protected].ExpertiseAlistair oversees all things Big Tech, along with startups and venture capital. He writes analysis and columns about topics including generative AI, large language models, cloud computing, semiconductors, online search, e-commerce, EVs, robotics, and autonomous vehicles.Popular StoriesArtificial Intelligence:It's getting harder to make big leaps at the frontier of AIOpenAI's AI-adjusted earnings numbers have echoes of Groupon and WeWorkDeath by LLM: Stack Overflow's decline, and its plan to survive, shows the future of free online data in an AI worldCloud computing:Amazon dominated the first cloud era. The AI boom has kicked off Cloud 2.0, and the company doesn't have a head start this time.In cloud, there's AI (which is hot) and everything else (which is not)Chips:Why Intel is still so important: Real countries have fabsApple's made-in-the-USA chips signal a turnaround for the US's big semiconductor betEVs and Tesla:Tesla's AI supercomputer has a Silicon Valley town rushing to meet surging electricity demandTesla's Cybertruck is outselling almost every other EV in the USOnline Search:Google is losing its status as a verbA simple way to fix search: Bright pink ads
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