New weather feature released

I've closed three big Jira cards on Weather Now in the last three days, two of them new features. The bug fix was a pretty straightforward vibe coding, using Claude Sonata 4.6 iteratively to fix a bug. Basically, that means I had a conversation with it, watched it make changes to the code, then I tested the code and gave it feedback.

The new features (which are closely related) were more deliberate. Claude actually made the changes to the code, with just a little polishing afterward from me. But the conversation was about the specification, not the code itself. Instead of starting the session with "Here is a bug, let's fix it," I started with "Here is the beginning of a spec, let's write it in a way that you can use to write the code."

The new feature, by the way, allows you to compare two weather stations to each other for the past day. For example, here is the comparison between O'Hare and Lakeview/Pine Grove. The Lakeview station is only 580 meters from Lake Michigan, while O'Hare's weather station is 21.3 km from the nearest shoreline. So this comparison is particularly useful on days with strong lake cooling, like last Sunday. (I wrote about the front passage that afternoon.)

Note that you have to have a free user account to view station history. It keeps the bots away. Google and Microsoft accounts both work.

Unfortunately, there's a minor bug with the feature that I will now attempt to fix by writing a bug report Claude can use to fix it. This is the way of the future.