Yes yes AI is coming from my job! And I love it.
I have been using Claude Code for almost a year now. I started with the basic plan and now pay $100 a month for unlimited use. What I love most is that I can finally work on programming ideas I have had for years. With Claude Code, I can finish projects in just minutes.
Here is a good example. I have a website called Haiku With Teeth. It has been offline for about 17 years, ever since my son was born. The site was built using old technology called PHP 4 and a MySQL database. It had no protection against hackers.
I downloaded the old files from my cloud storage and asked Claude Code to look at them. Right away, it told me everything that was wrong. The code was outdated and full of security holes. No one had touched it in 17 years.
I asked Claude Code to update everything to modern standards and make it more secure. It gave me a long list of problems to fix. I told it to go ahead and do the work.
In about five minutes, Claude Code had completely rebuilt the site. It fixed all the security issues, cleaned up the messy code, and made everything easier to read. It even changed all my variable names to follow a consistent style. Best of all, I asked it to give the site a fresh, modern look using a tool called Bootstrap 5.
What it delivered was better than anything I could have done myself in such a short time. This was a site I had to take offline years ago because hackers broke into it. Now I am thinking about putting it back up. It used to be one of my most popular sites.
There is a lot of buzz around how I have used Claude Code to restart projects I had given up on. Podcast.gs is another good example.
This site does something simple. It goes to a web page, grabs all the text, and turns it into an MP3 file. I built it because I would find great articles at work but never had time to read them. However, I had a really long drive when I worked in the office.
So I would download articles, convert them to audio files, and upload them to my Amazon S3 cloud storage. The site would then create an RSS feed. My podcast app would check that feed and download any new “episodes” I had created that day.
I had been using the site in its current form for about three years. Every month I would get a bill from Amazon Web Services. I noticed that Amazon Polly, their text to speech service, was costing me a lot. It was not as expensive as Route 53, which handles all my domain names, but it was still an obvious place to cut costs.
Even though this is just a personal project, I did not want to pay 50 to 100 dollars a month just for text to speech.
I asked Claude to look at my code again. I wanted it to review all the services the site uses and suggest cheaper alternatives to Amazon Polly.
Claude came back right away with three options. Two of them were free. One suggestion was 11 Labs, but that would have gotten expensive fast because some of my articles are very long.
I did go with a Linux or open source system called Piper. Piper runs out of a docker container and while not as fast and not as polished sounding as the voices on AWS poly it does do a good job and there’s no charge.
Example of a text to speech mp3 using Piper
Next I asked Claude Code to replace all the Polly code with Piper, a free text to speech tool. Claude finished the job in about 10 minutes. I only had to give it a few extra instructions along the way.
The hardest part was getting my Apache web server to communicate with a Docker container on the same system. I am not going to make this available to the public. There are too many moving parts. Any money I would save by dropping Amazon Polly would be lost paying for Kubernetes or another container service.
Finally, I had Claude Code build another big project. It created a system that logs into my local driving school website and checks for open class spots for my son.
Ohio recently changed its laws. Now everyone under 21 has to take a driver’s education course. Schools do not offer these classes like they did back in the 1970s and 1980s. Instead, you have to sign up through private driving schools.
These places only have a limited number of classes. Spots fill up on a first come, first served basis. You have to register online, and every night at 11 p.m. the next week’s classes become available.
I explained the issue to Claude that I wanted it to go out to the website check to see if there’s any green dots, green dots meaning open lessons, then send an email to myself my wife and my son. This was version one.
The problem? By the time we got these emails in the morning all the spots have been taken. So version 2 I need Claude code to write a script that will reserve any class available on a Saturday or Sunday or afternoons after 3:00 p.m.
Claude built a Node.js script that ran perfectly. The problem was that Claude registered my son for six classes in just two days. The driving school’s website allowed this, but then they canceled all the classes. We were not supposed to sign up for that many at once. Claude had found a bug in their system. That was version two.
For version three, I gave Claude new rules. It could only register for one class per day. The class had to be after 3 p.m. on weekdays or anytime on weekends. I put this version into production.
On the first day, it signed my son up for two classes. The second day, it got him one more. After that, it registered him for one class per day until we reached six total.
If I had tried to build this myself, it would have taken forever. It probably would not have worked as well either. I do not even know how to write Node.js.
At work, I use Claude Code more and more every day. I clean up old code, write quick scripts, and build reports. I have it handle server tasks, set up databases, and connect Slack to other apps. I do not have to pay for services like Zapier anymore. It saves me both time and money.
So yes, AI agents are probably coming for my job. But I am loving it.
