Mechanical Bird, 13 Years Later

Thirteen years ago I built Mechanical Bird as my final project at a full stack development bootcamp. It took weeks. This past spring I rebuilt it in two days with Claude AI.

That alone stopped me cold.

The rebuild felt like being a coder again — but a different kind of coder. The parts of my brain that had always struggled with certain aspects of coding had a mentor now. One that never got annoyed, always had time, and had a particular gift for teasing out the things I'd always wanted to add but never had the knowledge or bandwidth to do. What surprised me more, though, was how much I had changed.

Thirteen years is a long time. Most of them I spent as a product manager, sitting between the CEO's vision and the engineering team's reality, translating one into the other. I didn't realize until I was working with Claude how much that experience had accumulated into something useful. I understood what Claude was coding and why. I knew what questions to ask. I was always thinking about the final product — how it would be used, what it was for, what it was doing to the person on the other end. And that combination — coding knowledge plus product instinct — meant that Claude and I were seriously grooving. Like Olympic ice dancers.

But then I tried to actually use it.

Twilio, which was a scrappy little startup when I first built Mechanical Bird, was one of my favorite things about the original project. I used to be able to pick up the phone and call their developers directly. They loved the idea. They were eager to help. Now you create a ticket and wait. That's not a complaint — that's just what it looks like when a startup grows up. But it was a reminder that the intimacy of early tech doesn't last.

The bigger shift, though, was the phone call itself. Mechanical Bird works by calling you. You enter a number, and the site calls that number and sends you a Denver Butson poem. When I built it in 2013, that was novel. Exciting. A little magical. Someone calls you out of nowhere and a poem arrives.

Now it's almost impossible to get through. Spam filters. Call-screening. The simple fact that nobody picks up an unknown number anymore. And if you want to call someone — even a friend — you text first. Hey, do you have time to talk? Calling someone out of nowhere is, at this point, borderline rude. The world that Mechanical Bird was built for had quietly disappeared while I wasn't looking.

It was still gratifying to rebuild it. People sent poems. A few landed. But I could see clearly that the idea needed to evolve — not because it was wrong, but because the context around it had changed completely.

Denver and I are working on what it becomes next.