Last Sunday afternoon I sat down to plan a fishing trip to Baja California. I opened Claude, described what I was looking for — roosterfish on the fly, maybe a few days in Mexico City on the way down — and asked for some help thinking through the itinerary.
Claude returned a mapped route with stops, transit options, accommodation suggestions, and day-by-day logistics.
I stared at it for a second and thought: this should be an app.
So I said that out loud. And Claude just… started building it.
Eight hours later I had a fully functional AI travel planner with a dark-mode map interface, photo carousels, a booking page with affiliate links, shareable itinerary URLs, terms of use, and a privacy policy. I named it Muévete AI — Spanish for “get moving” — and it’s deploying to muevete.ai this week.
I want to be honest about what happened here, because I think the story is more interesting than the headline.
I am not a developer.
Fifteen years ago I was a non-technical co-founder at a “big data” startup. We had a technical co-founder, a dev team, a roadmap, sprints, standups — the whole thing. It took months to build anything. The gap between what I could imagine and what I could ship felt like a canyon I was always trying to shout across.
That startup failed. But I learned a lot. I became an attorney. I stayed curious about technology, probably more so than the average lawyer, but I never closed that gap.
Until Sunday.
What actually happened
Claude didn’t just write code. It was a conversation. I’d describe what I wanted — can we add a way to request changes to the itinerary without regenerating from scratch? — and minutes later it existed. When something broke, I’d paste the error and ask what went wrong. When I had a product instinct — no one is going to share this to LinkedIn, swap it for Facebook — it just happened.
I was functioning as a product manager, not a developer. And it turns out that’s the job now.
The things I actually contributed:
- Knowing what I wanted (I’m my own target customer — I’ve always wanted this tool)
- Product instincts built up from that startup era, dusted off and surprisingly still useful
- Branding decisions — the name, the tone, the aesthetic direction
- Judgment calls about what to build vs. what to skip for MVP
The things Claude did:
- All of the code
- The architecture decisions
- Debugging
- The legal copy
- Knowing when I was about to make a mistake before I made it
The numbers are almost offensive
The entire thing cost under $100 to build and deploy. API calls to generate itineraries cost pennies. Hosting on Vercel is free. The custom domain was $80.
Compare that to what it would have cost me to hire a developer to build this fifteen years ago. Or last year, honestly.
What this actually means
I don’t think “anyone can build anything now” — that’s the hype version and it’s not quite right. You still need to understand enough to make good decisions. When Claude suggested I let users supply their own API key to reduce hosting costs, I pushed back — that’s friction that kills consumer products. When it wanted to add account creation early, I said no — test demand first, add accounts when users are asking for them. Those calls matter.
But the gap between idea and shipped product has collapsed in a way I genuinely did not see coming. The bottleneck used to be technical execution. Now it’s clarity of thought. Can you articulate what you want? Can you give useful feedback? Do you know what good looks like?
If yes — and especially if you’ve ever run a product before, even badly — you can build things now.
What’s next
I don’t know yet whether there’s a real business here. That’s the honest answer. The plan is to put it in front of real users, watch whether people actually use it and share it, and let the data decide.
If it gets traction there’s an interesting second layer — a marketplace connecting high-intent travelers with vetted regional specialists for the trips that are too complex or too important to plan with an AI alone. But that’s a future problem.
For now: the fishing trip still isn’t planned. I keep getting distracted building the app I was supposed to use to plan it.
Muévete AI is live at muevete.ai. Generate an itinerary, break it, tell me what you think.