When I was fifteen, I got interested in computers — and especially in Visual Basic 6, which was my first programming language. Computers really clicked for me only when I could see how easy it was to build a new program. I was very fascinated by interactive computing, and by the systems that make interactivity possible: debuggers, interpreters, computer graphics, UI and UX.
At fifteen, I built my own Visual Basic interpreter — in Visual Basic itself. And I remember going from teacher to teacher and library to library, hunting for details, trying to understand how it all worked under the hood, and begging a teacher to show me how to write DLLs. I had no internet access back then.
Today, in just a few hours and with minimal prompting, Claude Fable 5 built me a very functioning Visual Basic clone in JavaScript — with a full debugger, autocomplete, and syntax coloring — and even wrote a BASIC interpreter in BASIC, running inside it. The exact thing I once went door to door trying to understand, handed to me in an afternoon, with the complete source code.
Check it out → ajinkya.ai/basicworks-2000. You can even deploy an app you build as its own URL — the whole program encodes right into the link, no server needed:
See a deployed app → tinyurl.com/basicworks-demo
My fifteen-year-old self would have loved to have Claude Fable 5 as a teacher. I wonder what I would have done!