Paediatric Anaesthesia Calculator: Where I attempt to use Code

Over at Your Daily Meds, I want to start adding to what will hopefully become a repository of useful medical resources. In that effort, after an exam-specific opener, I thought I should add a practical tool.

So I went and made one:

Paediatric Anaesthesia Calculator

I have no computer science background and do not know how to navigate code. But, with sufficient persistence and fixed interests, along with using some legitimately miraculous Large Language Models (LLMs), a non-technical individual can just…make stuff.

So, as an experiment, I tried to make a calculator that would give me estimated drug doses and equipment sizes in children based on their age (or date of birth) or weight or height.

I used Bolt to generate a code base from plain text prompts of what I wanted:

Which I then uploaded into a GitHub repository:

Which then automatically deploys to Netlify so the ‘app’ can be rendered as a webpage:

Realistically, the bulk of the ‘making’ took about an hour. Then I pottered for a few more hours to get it looking right and deploying to a web page properly. Which basically looked like me asking my new AI overlord what the next step should be. Repeatedly.

And so as I write this, that calculator you can find by clicking the link is not quite finished and I aim to keep updating the medications and formulas to improve what is essentially just a tool that I thought would be useful for myself.

Next steps could include formally making the calculator into an ’App Store-approved’ app, or I might just leave it as a webpage that I keep saved to my home screen as a reference tool for when I need to give drugs to a small human.

Dunno.

The point, dear reader, is that there are a staggering array of tools becoming available to us non-technical luddites that can allow you to just make stuff that you find interesting.

I recommend having a play.

Remember, however, to say ‘please’ and a ‘thank you’ when chatting with your chosen LLM so that you may be spared when the machines become sentient…

Have fun,

Luke.