Curiosity and a mentor

A friend’s wife sells ethnic wear on Instagram. Tens of thousands of followers. Orders via DMs and WhatsApp. No website, no proper store.

He asked if I could help get something set up.

I spent a few hours on it. Not in the way you might expect.

What actually happened

I did not open Shopify and click through menus. I did not manually upload images, configure sections, or create pages by hand.

I described what I wanted. Claude Code — with Playwright running alongside it — built the store. Slideshow with three slides. A four-column footer. An About page. A Contact page. Four policy pages. Navigation menus linking everything together. An announcement bar. When it was done, I opened the live store on my phone.

Everything worked. I had barely touched the keyboard.

The distinction worth sitting with

This is not magic. It is browser automation in service of a well-specified goal. Claude Code used Playwright — a tool that controls a browser programmatically — to perform the same actions a human would. Click here. Fill this. Select that. Save. Navigate to the next screen. Repeat.

The difference is that I did not need to know how to do any of this. I needed to know what I wanted.

Knowing what you want and knowing how to execute it used to be bundled together. You had to understand the tool to produce the outcome. Now they are separable. The what is yours. The how belongs to the agent.

Who gets to do this work now

This kind of work used to require a team. A developer to build it. A designer to set it up. A project manager to coordinate the handoffs. Weeks of back-and-forth and revision rounds before anything was live.

That’s not the constraint anymore.

What’s required now is the ability to describe what you want, access to the right tools, and someone who’s done it once to show you how. Curiosity and a mentor. That’s the new entry requirement for work that used to sit behind years of technical training.

The agency work is not disappearing. It is looking for new owners.