My Experience
I’ve been using AI heavily for about the last month. I had been listening to some podcasts centered around it and using Copilot for some work stuff and doing basic stuff. I was playing around with an idea for work and decided to give the free version of Claude Code a try. I was blown away is an understatement. I was, and still am, shocked at how I can feed it a few prompts and it just works. I’ve even given it prompts that in the back of my head I think “There is no way it comes back with what I want here” but then it does.
I started using it a lot. So much so I kept hitting my cap on free token often, limiting my ability to get stuff done so I bit the bullet and purchased their Pro level subscription (about $200 a year) and it was one of the best investments I’ve made in my learning since College. I thought I had to post something about my experience and encourage others to really jump in with both feet, especially if you do anything with computers.
Most of my focus has been around code and building applications and web apps. Surprising since I was so against Computer Science entering college. Everything from building a Work Journal app to making an egg tracker web app for tracking our chickens egg count to building a meal planning app for my wife that randomly selects recipes for her which integrates directly into Mealie, our recipe management system. I’ve been building so many projects all at the same time that I had to build a Git Repo Server to track control changes for myself so I know where I’m at in that apps development.
One of the things a few of the podcasts I’ve been listening to have been talking about is this idea of changing your mindset around problem solving. If you have something to do or a problem to solve, can you do it with AI first. I think I’ve finally started making that my first reaction. Next, I’m going to share a story from dinner last night and how I used AI to optimize my life.
How this connects to real world?
Around this time every year is the Inlander Restaurant Week (starts in a few days). My wife and I met around this time and one of our first dates was to a restaurant that was participating. It’s kind of a tradition to take part and eat some good food. Usually what we do is grab the big book they put out listing all the restaurants and menu’s for that year. We spend some time to go through every single one and mark the ones that we would be interested in trying. If we have restaurants that both of us marked, those go on a list of options during the 10 days. Tip for any couples wanting to start doing this like we do…narrow your restaurants down even more to menu’s where you can both order different items you want to try for all 3 courses and share the food so you get to try way more stuff.
Last night at dinner we were talking about it and the thought popped into my head “I wonder if I can make a web app to do this for us…”. I jump on my computer and with only a few prompts to Claude Code, it had a full website built for me before we finished dinner. There was one bug with grabbing the restaurants I had to come back and correct but for the most part it worked out the gate. As I was playing around with it and seeing how it worked (strongly suggest if you build stuff with AI, you at minimum go back and learn what it did so you understand what you are doing), I thought to myself “I bet others could use this like we do, I should host it and make it public”. So I did!
If you go to restaurant.cooperandgoodman.com, you will see what Claude built. There isn’t a login, all your selections are saved to the device you are using in the browser. Two notes with that - if you clear your browser data, it will reset your choices and you have to use the same device, can’t send your selections to anyone else. Also, it isn’t very mobile friendly so you will want to view it as a “Desktop Site” but hey what do you expect from a fully functional website built in 20 minutes haha.
Conclusion
I’m going to continue to use AI and fully submerse myself in its functionality. I encourage everyone to do the same. Even if you don’t think your job will be replaced by an AI system, it will at the very least be optimized by AI so you might as well get ahead of the curve.
Hope you like and use the restaurant app, I’ll leave it online for the entirety of this years event. Let me know on social media if you do, I’d love to hear where you ended up going.
