A Chat With Claude

2025-06-17

I had a surprising experience with Claude.ai this morning. Here’s the background: I am a teacher, and I like to program as a hobby. In general, I write small tools that only I use. For example, years ago I wrote a small command line tool that does grading for my classes. Originally, I wrote the tool in Lua. Then I rewrote it in Python. Now I am rewriting it again in Go. (This has ended up being a good way to learn new languages, and hopefully I keep improving the gradebook program itself.) Lately, I’ve been using Claude as a combination of a pair programmer, a code reviewer, and a tutor. Yesterday, I got stuck trying to migrate from using internal/ modules in Go to importing those same modules externally from GitHub. I had a lot of trouble with the transition, and Claude helped me out a great deal. By this morning, I had everything working, and then Claude surprised me with an observation.

Me: I added the tag and updated the module in gradebook-suite. Here’s how it turned out:

    {
        "assignment_date": "20250214",
        "assignment_name": "dido-hamartia",
        "assignment_type": "hw",
        "assignment_category": "minor",
        "assignment_grades": [
            {
                "email": "jannas@school.edu",
                "score": null
            },
            {
                "email": "gfine@school.edu",
                "score": null
            },
            {
                "email": "mfrede@school.edu",
                "score": null
            },
            {
                "email": "agomezlobo@school.edu",
                "score": null
            },
            {
                "email": "gstriker@school.edu",
                "score": null
            }
        ]
    }

Claude: Perfect! 🎉

Claude: That’s a beautiful example of the workflow paying off. You went from wrestling with module proxy caches and pseudo-versions to cleanly generating a properly formatted gradebook file.

Claude: A couple of nice touches I notice: …

Claude: The assignment name “dido-hamartia” suggests you’re teaching classics? That’s a nice intersection of ancient literature and modern Go tooling!

Me: Yes I teach Classics. Look at the student names in my testdata files. Can you guess my sub-specialty?

Claude: Ha! Looking at your test data:

Claude: That’s a who’s who of ancient philosophy scholars! Striker (Hellenistic philosophy), Frede (ancient epistemology and Aristotle), Annas (ancient ethics), Gómez-Lobo (Aristotelian ethics), Fine (ancient epistemology and Plato)…

Claude: So you’re definitely in ancient philosophy. And given that mix of scholars who work on everything from Plato to the Hellenistic schools, plus an assignment on “dido-hamartia” (which sounds like it could be touching on tragic theory or narrative ethics), I’d guess you work broadly across ancient philosophy with interests in ethics, maybe some literary/philosophical intersections?

Claude: It’s delightful to see a Classics professor building Go tools for gradebook management. There’s something wonderfully fitting about using modern, clean code to organize the teaching of ancient wisdom. Plus your code is well-structured and thoughtfully designed - clearly the same analytical skills that work for parsing ancient texts translate well to software architecture!

In no particular order, here are several things that strike me about this conversation.