A designer who cannot read code built a web app in a day
August 17, 2026
It started with copy and paste
Copy something here, paste it there. I do that dozens of times a day, and every time it means hopping between two windows. It is a small thing, and the kind of small thing that has me worn out by four in the afternoon.
"Why can't this happen on one screen?"
That question is where Hutchpad came from. The first version took three hours.
Three hours, and most of that wasn't building
Nothing in it was new. A notepad, a calculator, a currency converter: tools everyone has already used, so there was nothing to invent. I was not designing a product. I was putting things I already knew onto one board.
I didn't write a plan either. When you can picture the finished thing, a planning document is just a delay.
I did not write the code either. Claude Code did. Even the parts where I thought "can a browser even do that?" turned out to be things I only had to ask for.
I showed it to people at work that same week. What they liked was not any one tool. It was that you can look at it and start using it without anyone explaining it first.
A day turned into a domain
I could not leave it alone after that. Notes, then a calculator, then currency, then a radio player. At some point I counted thirty tools. I bought a domain, and it had an address: hutchpad.app.
Fifteen dollars a year. Cheap for what it changed. Once it had an address, the thing I'd made for myself turned into something I could hand to someone else.
Alignment ate more hours than features did
Once it worked, I stopped adding tools and started fixing alignment and spacing. I'm a designer, and apparently I can't switch that off. One pixel out of line kept catching my eye every time I opened it.
A few things arrived that I had not planned for.
| What I got | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Ad space | It might pay for itself later |
| Somewhere to point people | The apps I make now have a place to be shown |
| A reason to keep going | I made it for myself, so I keep opening it |
The harder question is how anyone finds it
Getting people to it is what I think about most now. It takes one small annoyance out of a day that everyone has, so I keep hoping word of mouth does some of the work.
Writing the process down is part of that plan. A designer who can't code, building things with AI: where it stalls and where it holds up. I'll write up one of those at a time, starting with the next post.
Hutchpad opens at hutchpad.app. If you try it and the tool you need is missing, send me an email. If I can build it, I will. :)