Trust me, this title sounds better with a French accent.
The end of freelance web development
I've been freelancing for 17 years, but I think I'm about to shut down my web development business.
Freelance web development has become a thing of the past in just a couple of months. There's no point in selling web development services anymore when a customer can get better results with just a couple of tokens at a fraction of the price.
As long as tokens remain this cheap, my business is no longer sustainable.
The job now is managing coding agents. But anyone who has ever been in a management position knows that this is actually micromanagement rather than management. You need to read absolutely everything LLMs produce to avoid mistakes.
The day managing coding agents stops being micromanagement and actually becomes management will be the day coding is solved.
Until then, knowing how to program is still an advantage when it comes to validating that what gets produced isn't bullshit.
This means that the development process nowadays sometimes feels like one endless code review.
So now, I need to pivot my carreer. That's a bit frightening.
But there are also crazy and exciting things I've been able to do with LLMs! A developer who was once limited to a specific set of tasks is now a one-man army.
Learning Japanese
I'm using LLMs to summarize, correct, polish, and enhance my writing.
But they're also incredibly useful for breaking down Japanese sentences and explaining grammatical nuances.
I use them almost daily for this purpose, and I feel like this speeds up my learning process.
And did I mention that they're excellent at translating?
Building a Japanese-French dictionary
I've used an LLM to build a Japanese-French dictionary for the macOS Dictionary app.
It takes the free Jibiki dictionary data and converts it into a native macOS .dictionary bundle.
I didn't have to look at the structure of the Jibiki XML source files or Apple's rather specific dictionary infrastructure even once.
I gave Claude Code an example of a built-in macOS dictionary along with the source files, and let it figure out the rest.
I then iterated on bug fixes and edge cases, asking it to add unit tests along the way.
It took me a couple of days. But this would have taken me weeks of work without an LLM.
Bringing Le Petit Robert back to macOS
I've used an LLM to bring the 2011 edition of the French dictionary Le Petit Robert back to my Mac.
Its original application no longer works on modern versions of macOS, and there's no standalone version available anymore.
The original data was stored in binary formats. I used Claude Code to reverse-engineer the .DAT files from the original PowerPC/i386 application:
- binary disassembly
- conversion into a native macOS
.dictionarybundle - styling modeled after Apple's built-in French dictionary
- fixes based on screenshots (spacing, duplicates, missing entries, etc.)
I also managed to get it to recover the audio pronunciations and link derived words to their parent entries.
It took a couple of days to turn an obsolete application into a fully functional native macOS dictionary. Once again, without ever having to look at the structure of the source files.
Generating and translating Japanese subtitles
I've used WhisperX and Demucs to generate Japanese subtitles from a video.
Demucs reads the audio straight from the video and separates the voices from background music and sound effects.
WhisperX then uses the whisper-large-v3 model and silero to transcribe the voices track and generate a properly timed .srt file.
I then used Opus 5.5 to translate the subtitles into French. WhisperX misheard some words, but Opus was able to correct some of those transcription errors.
It also identified and removed lines that Whisper had hallucinated over background music, and marked unintelligible dialogue rather than making up translations.
Some manual corrections were still necessary, but the result was more than good enough.
It took me a couple of hours to put together a fairly complex audio-processing and translation workflow.
An uncertain future
So, I don't really know what my professional future looks like anymore.
But I've rarely had so much fun experimenting with technology and building things.
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