Back to Building: My Journey with Claude Code
After a summer of adventures and too much Minecraft, I discovered Claude Code and built five projects in weeks—a publishing agent, micro-SaaS, 3D game, SEO site, and migrated my decade-old app. We're on the cusp of the singularity.
I've been doing a lot of building over the last month or so, and it feels good.
After I got married last May, life got beautifully chaotic. Between the wedding and everything that followed, I didn't spend much time writing code, building projects, or being particularly creative. Honestly, this is pretty normal for me during Alaska summers. We don't spend a lot of time indoors unless we absolutely have to—there's too much to do out there. Hiking, fishing, four-wheeling… the list goes on.
And this past summer? I did plenty of all of it.
The week of our wedding, I chartered a boat with 13 people to go halibut fishing in Seward. My brother, my best friends, their kids—everyone was there. Standing on that boat with the people I love most, pulling fish out of Alaskan waters during one of the most important weeks of my life? That's a memory I'll carry forever.
But the adventures didn't stop there. I also traveled to Indonesia to meet my wife's family and experience where she's from. I absolutely loved it. We traveled around the country and saw incredible places, met amazing people, and experienced things I never could have imagined. I can't wait to go back.
From Minecraft to Making Things
When winter rolled around, I found myself deep in a Minecraft phase for a few weeks. I built a sprawling city of houses and mined deep into the earth. It was fun—genuinely fun—but after a while, I started feeling like a bit of a loser just playing games all day.
So I decided to try something new: Claude Code.
Before this, the only AI-augmented coding tool I'd used was GitHub Copilot. Beyond that, my workflow mostly involved a lot of copy-pasting code from various sources—which, to be fair, is still pretty fast compared to hand-coding everything. But Claude Code? It completely blew me away.
I was immediately impressed with its capabilities. It wasn't just about writing and editing code quickly (though it does that incredibly well). What really caught my attention was its agentic capabilities—the way it could be used for tasks far beyond traditional coding.
Building a Publishing Company Agent
I decided to put it to the test. In the past, I've written and published books on the Amazon Kindle Store using AI assistance. The process wasn't terrible, but with earlier, smaller context windows, the books often came out lacking cohesiveness and clarity.
So I asked Claude Code to help me write a book.
By the next day, I had built something I'm calling my "Claude Code Publishing Company Agent." It can take a simple idea, generate a proposal for my approval, and produce a complete book—all from my phone. There are still some manual publishing steps involved, but this workflow makes it theoretically possible to produce several complete books per day.
A Micro-SaaS in Days
Next, I asked Claude Code to build a website based on a prototype I'd been tinkering with. It's an AI "Toys" application featuring Pet Portrait Generators, Action Figure Generators, and similar fun tools.
Within a couple of days, I had a complete micro-SaaS application set up—Stripe billing and everything. All with Claude Code. You can check it out at voding.ai.
A Space Game in 24 Hours
Then I got ambitious. I decided to make a game.
Using Three.js and Claude Code as my development agent, I built a 3D space exploration game. Within 24 hours, I had what I'd genuinely consider an entertaining game—something you could play for hours if you wanted to. It's called Edge of Stars, and you can find it at EdgeOfStars.com.
Programmatic SEO with AI Diagnostics
My next project was autodetective.ai—an AI-powered diagnostic tool for automotive issues. You can chat with it like any chatbot, completely free, and it'll help diagnose your car problems.
But here's the clever part: the site is designed for programmatic SEO. Every free diagnosis generates a unique article about that specific problem. Over time, I'm hoping to build up tens of thousands of pages targeting long-tail keywords. I want to add localization features so it can recommend local mechanics when needed. If it works out, I think this could generate meaningful ad revenue.
Finally Modernizing Grizzly Peak Software
I also finally got around to updating my main site, grizzlypeaksoftware.com. The site is written in Express.js and has been completely server-side rendered, running on a DigitalOcean droplet for over ten years.
I'd always been nervous about migrating it to DigitalOcean's App Platform or any other modern hosting solution. The app was temperamental, the SSL configuration was finicky, and the server setup had accumulated years of quirks that I was afraid to disturb.
But with Claude Code, I was able to quickly get the app stood up on the App Platform and migrated over without incident. Then I asked Claude to analyze my analytics data and suggest improvements to the site. We implemented them in a few hours.
We're Closer Than You Think
All of these projects—plus others I haven't even mentioned—have been genuinely eye-opening.
I actually believe we're at or very near AGI at this point.
I've used Claude Code for general use cases far beyond coding. The only real limitation seems to be integrations, and those are being built at a staggering pace through MCP (Model Context Protocol). I've connected it to my Azure DevOps MCP server, the DigitalOcean MCP server, and others. I've turned it into an autonomous project manager with a virtual dev team. I've used it as a personal assistant. And yes, I've used it to write code too.
It's not just an LLM anymore. It's a true agentic system.
I genuinely cannot wait to see where this goes. I think almost every aspect of human life is about to change forever. We're right on the cusp of the singularity.
What do you think?
