Claude Code configured the DNS for this website

In the latest development on my "LLMs are magic" journey, Claude Code setup the DNS configurationDNS configuration is linking a URL to a website server's IP address for the website you're on right now.

I was muddling through the DNS setup myself, trying to connect my Porkbun domain to the Vercel React app that runs this blog. ("Muddling" is perhaps a generous term for what I was doing; I'd had to reset a botched first attempt and was quickly running out of patience).

Then I realized: Both ends of this problem, the Porkbun DNS provider and Vercel, have APIs. Surely I wouldn't be able to just hand Claude Code some API tokens and send it on its way? I threw together a quick prompt and wandered away to do some chores with no real expectations.

By the time I was back, it was just done. The browser window that had been previously serving an ERR_NAME_NOT_RESOLVED error had reloaded to show the live site. Other than purchasing the original doman and setting up the API keys I had done no manual interventions at all.

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What did it do?

I find sharing LLM chat sessions to be a bit like telling people about your dreams. Your dreams are interesting to you, but describe them to other people and you're going to be met with perfunctory politness. (Or perhaps I am a poor dream-teller)

So I'll limit my dream-telling to just Claude's summary of what it did to implement the DNS:

In particular, Claude figured out how to fix a nasty DNS resolution issue (steps 3-6) that I would've probably spent a couple hours debugging on my own! This was what I was getting frustrated with before handing the reins to Claude and is now stuck in my brain as a potential failure point for future DNS setups.

(You can find the full Claude Code transcript for the DNS setup here but the fun stuff starts on page nine (!) here)

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...but is this a good thing?

I originally wrote this piece to add my perspective to the "LLMs speed up software development at the cost of personal technical development" discorse. I think there's a point to be made that understanding what LLMs are capable of and how to leverage them is now part of our personal technical development.

But I learned more about DNS during this process than I did during any of the domain setup processes I went through in the pre-LLM era. And I learned more because I wrote about it. Because I sat down to understand what had happened and how the model had done it and how I could best explain that to other people. So the lesson seems to be LLM-independent: write about what you're doing!

I'll save my point that knowing how to use LLMs well is a skill unto itself for another post :)