When I watched Anthropic’s release announcement a few days ago, I immediately saw the possibility.

A story for another time, but I have been building a personal-use bot over the past six weeks. As of last week, it was nearly complete, several times it was at a place were I thought this is awesome. But the app was 99% done, yet still that last 1% remained.

And then I got sick.

I am better now, thanks for asking, but during that week’s pause, Claude Code was born.

As I watched the Anthropic’s team chat Claude Code in their Youtube intro video, I was in awe. With a few simple prompts, Claude was adjusting the code and pushing the updates live via github.

I was enamored.

Over the past month, I have spent 50+ hours going back and forth with Claude to build my bot. And based on what I saw from their demo, Claude code could have handled nearly all of it.

That is insane. My 50+ hours could have been spent on another project.

I am excited.

Claude has once again removed a ton of friction in the app building process.

So naturally, I wanted to try Claude Code.

Unfortunately, by the time I went to sign up, the preview was already over capacity and waitlisted.

Damn.

Oh, well. I signed up. I knew I would get access eventually.

And then less than a day later, I get an email from Anthropic.

I was in!

It was an easy install — a few commands in terminal.

And here we go!

I logged in.

Yes!

As my first time in, I made it a point to read through all of the prompts. I didn’t want to miss anything.

I took note at the direction “Provide clear context…” and the line that made gave me a moment of reflection “be as specific as you would with another engineer.”

Truthfully, I read that as Claude was calling me an engineer. Technically, I am doing things a computer or software engineer might do (with the help of AI of course.) And that blew my mind.

I decided to start with my personal bot project. After a week off, I had yet to have the energy to grind out those last few hours debugging.

Wanting to test Claude Code’s capabilities, I asked Claude to tell me about my project.

Claude then proceeded to think about this prompt. It gave itself a task to accomplish and then identified the path to do so.

And here is what it came back with:

“This is a Next.js personal AI website project that functions as an interactive chatbot for Chase…”

Fantastic!

Let’s see if it can get me that last 1% and get this project over the line.

Can you help debug and get the app functioning.

A few days earlier, after syncing my Claude bot Project with github, I gave the updated Sonnet 3.7 some liberties and let it modify the app code.

One challenge I have realized with coding is that parameters change and become outdated. If the LLM you are using to help code doesn’t have access to the latest updates, this could put your app performance at less than optimal.

It came back to me with 7 file rewrites and a few additions. And I went with it.

In theory, the updates were really positive.

But they created a lot of bugs.

So, I was curious to see if it could help see me through to realize some of the changes we had made.

It started reading all of the files in the app.

And Claude made updates to some of the files.

Though I grabbed a screenshot, I completely missed this update’s impact. Claude was updating the welcome message of my AI bot, without my direction.

I would later catch this and revert back to the old welcome message.

I don’t recall the exact amount of time this all took, but it didn’t take long, maybe 2+ minutes.

And then it asked if I wanted to push the updates to github.

Success!

WOW!

I had one thing that wasn’t working still, but after a little back and forth, Claude Code and I got it to work!

My bot lives! Tell you about it later.

——

As I was shutting down, I came across a step by step debugging guide that Claude had created for me the night before. It was massive.

I laughed. And was grateful Claude Code did all of that for me!

Claude Code got it easy today. My bot was 99% there. It helped me with that last 5% of bugs.

I am excited to try building something from the ground up next time.