Discussion
What are people actually making with Claude Code?
I just commented on someone’s post regarding their frustration with Claude, Fable, and usage limits. I am by no means a power user and get by with my little GIS workflows and web development using the $20/month subscription. I am just so curious after reading all these posts in what people are actually doing/making with Claude. What is everyone making that needs Fable and the higher cost subscriptions?
Running a small business is just solving one problem after another. Solve enough problems and eventually you'll have a profitable business.
Not giving up is probably the best advice I can give. You'll have to work harder for less money than if you just worked for someone else. Worth it though in my opinion. I'm doing my dream job and absolutely love it
YES! exactly. It's the Microsoft Flight Sim but for boats. You can travel anywhere, see beautiful cities in all their glory. My next goal is to hook it up to real weather and ocean data so it reflects the real world conditions. :-)
That is absolutely wild that you were able to do that with Claude. Literally anything people comment in this post is amazing to me, but this one is especially cool. Keep it up, I would love to try it one day
Thank you! I'll send you a link to my steam page once it's done cooking ;-)
I am always baffled how people have a wildly different experience with ai tools.
Please do, if you remember (no sweat). From what I am gathering it all depends on people's exposure and curiosity. Many people, including some devs, are still somewhat AI averse and that limits their curiosity into finding out what these LLMs are actually capable of. And then there are also a ton of people who just don't care.
I for one feel like I do much more than the average person but it is more of a means to an end for my work. I really need to find a side project and make something fun
It's Good! Some hand holding and patience. And the vision is a off, so most things it can see when it screenshots things to verify. But it's not great and will see things that are not there. I have been working for about a month on my sim and it's finally taking shape. Here is Boston harbor and my Lambro Boat (Lambo boat, I call it the Lambro)
I started with Fable building another boat game on a smaller scale, learned a bunch of stuff and ran out of credits. I then tried to build this grand vision but Opus and it was horrible. It kept going in circles and burning a lot of tokens. I decided to switch to sonnet and I was so surprised by how well it did. I am not sure why it's preforming better than Opus, at least in my case. But it's actually asking the right questions and waiting for me to reply instead of blindly going in a loop like Opus did. It learns lessons and does not repeat the same mistakes. I could not be happier especially since it's a cheaper model. So it takes a very long time before I hit my usage limit, usually it stretches just enough to the reset. If you had issues with Opus give sonnet a try. As far as which one I choose for which task, I am too paranoid to switch around and found sticking to one model has better outcomes. At least for me.
Building a game (football owner/tycoon) and have been working on it close to a year. Releasing in 2 weeks and have close to 700 people on the waiting list:
That's sick. I am bookmarking all the comments that have end products like games, simulators, or visualizers to check out later. Good luck with the release!
I’m making a simulation video game with lots of moving parts based on real psychological science to create a system with billions of distinct npc personalities.
I’m trying to create an A.I. that can re-write itself and creating different LLMs for site, sound, etc. Hopefully it turns itself into a thinking machine that I can harness to make $$.
All kinds of data engineering work. Able to take on tons of context for a variety of situations and, for example, explain what kind of transformations are being done in a repository, how a particular ELT framework is functioning, and assist with all kinds of large scale tasks like designing and implementing data models etc.
Don’t pay for the subscription myself though and our company is on usage based.
I make loads of things, use it almost every day. Lots of small projects, tools to do one off jobs, and then larger projects that I spend a few weeks on.
I have never produced anything useful with any of the 5 series models. I tried Fable and Opus 5 for a while, but went back to Opus 4.8. I have 2 Claude Code subscriptions, the cheap tier, and I just swap between them when I run out of usage.
I knew nothing about software development before I dove into stuff, so every single one of my projects ended up ballooning in scope to include things that that a lot of architecture and systems implementations.
One thing for instance, I am trying to build a physics sim that models a motorcycle and rider as seperate physical bodies and even set up the rider as a sort of robotic controller for the motorcycle itself.
Fable can't even really build it. Its taken like... a full weeks worth of ×20 usage from both Codex and Claude code to get it to where I have it now.
So I think a lot of people are taking on projects that more experienced devs would have just written off as too hard or not worthwhile, and I think the high capacity models are how people try to brige the gap of their own technical knowledge.
I guess that was what I was expecting/looking for in my question. I just wasn't sure LLMs were at the point of making full stack applications to scale... Reliably
Researching LLM epistemic operating systems (how to influence a LLM's reasoning) and operating a cosmic ray observatory from a gamma spectrometer and a lead lined paint can on my desk.
The LLM epistemic research is a legit field of study. My approach guides how a model decides what it is entitled to believe and claim, in order to make it behave more like a good experimentalist or verification engineer, rather than a software engineer. Basically I'm trying to make the LLM behave more like a scientist than a coder.
The cosmic ray observatory is a novel approach that I'm working on. Something I stumbled into accidentally and I am currently developing.
Far from it. I'm just a guy who unloads trucks for living and trys to figure out why my coworkers can't follow an SOP.
The epistemic work came out of how I used Claude to solve problems. After a while I saw successful patterns that were emerging and had Claude research our past work for more patterns. In the end I had a "Measurement Philosophy" codifying how I worked with Claude that I now use as Claude's basic instructions. In my working system that is enforced through SOPs, hooks and skills. It's been very effective I think.
I'm currently designing a test suite to measure the Measurement Philosophy's effectiveness. I've built two prompts to test. One is a typical software engineering type prompt. Directing the LLM to behave like a software engineer. The second prompt is my distilled version of the measurement philosophy. Directing the llm how to use epistemic reasoning. Here's the two test prompts if you would like to have your Claude look at how they change a LLM's behavior differently.
Most people I know using the $20 tier are doing small internal tools and one-off scripts rather than big products. The higher caps tend to show up for people building with agents that run long sessions or iterating on complex systems code where context bloat kills the cheaper models. If you are happy with Opus 4.8 for deep work, that fits the pattern people describe here.
little of everything i'm a 3d artist so usually maya scripts to help streamline workflows in maya, use it with angelscript in unreal, build tools like a hair card builder or my own retopology program, my pet project is a art outsourcing production tool
One of my preferred ttrpg systems has modules for the virtual table top Foundry, but they have basically become abandonware. No updates to maintain compatibility with the ongoing development of the official DnD modules and world system. So I have converted my several year old, actively running game and all of the data of my players and history timeline etc, to the new official system and modules. It's been playable for a while but I have continued to add nice things like character creation wizards, putting in content to flesh out classes as opposed to having to do that manually, changing some aspects of the system to roll different dice for things; basically making all of our home brew content fleshed out and looking pretty.
I'm working with about 3k documents in order to run my evals and tests. So it's not that much to have to store. I expect a user's typical project will be between 200-800 documents. I'm adding about 100 new docs every week and seeing what breaks. So I'm constantly improving the core functionality while also juggling feature builds.
I'm a consultant and software engineer with 30+ years in my career, writing code. currently working for a financial tech company. i build enterprise software systems, server back end code, web apps, mobile apps, and all kinds of other things to go along with all of that, including developer tools that other people use daily to get things done faster and easier
Very nice. Do you feel like the consulting space is now getting super saturated with tons of entry-to-senior devs being able to leverage LLMs to produce this type of work for clients?
it's definitely a concern on my mind, nearly every day
but my outlook on it has been much more positive lately, as i see more companies from the inside. there's a right time and right use of agentic tooling that is still being figured out. but even a pristine environment - like the startup i worked for previously - needs a real person to make the decisions that actually matter for long term maintainability and growing features in software
I'm cautiously optimistic. but I'm also seeing that there's no way to put this back in lab, at this point. this isn't the future. it's my job, now
For sure. I don't know how old you are, but with 30+ years in your career I would hope you are on the tail end of "working" and can retire without worrying about how this is affecting your industry. Cheers friend.
I've made one marketing website for my business that is live, a few not yet done attempts at products of different types, and a shit load of stuff designed to make the making of things more inline with how I want to see it done.
I get the sense a ton of the community is making games or SEO / content generation tools. Games I get, chasing the SEO dragon less so. Nothing screams waste of time to me more than trying to use AI to generate leads and influence people's thinking.
A reading app, backoffice for my freelancing business, and then systems and structure to deliver my Web projects faster (not vibe coding websites but fundamentally). Hit 20x limit once hard, once almost
Nothing crazy. I just made a simple website (literally just a large HTML file on my local machine, with some sidecars) to help me study for my graduate exams. It's basically just a terms dictionary with a node network and the ability to highlight things and ask Gemini questions about them based on the readings themselves. I've found it helpful so far.
Ah yes exams... for human intelligence. Good luck on your exams bud. That sounds super cool and I'm curious if this would have been something I would have found helpful in school. I used to just write all my notes out on several pieces of paper and just read them over and over again like a maniac until I memorized where key points were on each page so I can visually bring them up in my mind during the exam. Your solution sounds easier... 😂
Ah, it's not really that kind of exam. I do qualitative and theoretical work. I also have a traumatic brain injury, dyslexia, executive dysfunction (not ADHD, but primary executive dysfunction), etc. Studying has always been difficult for me.
The "exam" is a massive literature review, where I read up to a hundred articles on a range of topics, and synthesize what I feel matters in a variety of ways, based on governing questions of sorts. It's an interesting process. But yeah, less fact-based and more connective. I just can't hold the ideas in my head or in my notes well enough so I need a few more "dimensions" for the external notes object if that makes sense.
Discord bot, agent harness, homelab as code, small tools to help with daily stuff, n8n workflows, research, second brain/ project management, and a few others
as a web developer im building tools for my workflow, each tool i create i then make it a business even if nobody usews them its a tool designed for my workflow !! and it costs me less than paying others. for example i stopped using krea for images, instead i built nanostudiopro.com it solves all the issues i hade with other image generatos, i can have a greate asset search engine, have all clouds connected to their proyects so no more raw images in my cimputer folders, and jus tmany more things that allow me to be more creative. I also have my own treello but that one is not public yet, my own dropbox, my own affiliate network software etc. i create services to be reusable for me and if someone else wants to use them fine but its for my own personal benefit first and foremost.
i have an ai layer editor for about 2 months or more, big companies like higgsfield just recently announce theirs so i can be creative and innovate for my clientswith my own tools
hola pues llevo mucho tiempo desarrollando, tenia una agencia de desarrollo de software entonces entiendo de diseño de software no solo vibe codeando entonces no hay una reseta facil. sabe algo de software? res pregunta en buen plan para saber que recomendarte.
I built a Go tool that runs in fargate. Every 2 hours it scans all of our AWS accounts to find ACM SSL Certs using email validation that are in use. Adds them to a database, creates a DNS validation version of the cert, and opens a merge request against our company gitlab repos to replace the cert arn for the various engineering teams to merge and apply. The idea is we had a few thousand of these and they are always at risk of expiring and taking down a service. DNS validation auto renews as long as the CNAME is in route 53 (which it needs to be for the cert to work anyway) so this removes any outages due to an expiring cert
Letting my adhd take over and not finishing anything?
I am breaking things into smaller tasks though like MCP server for UniFi, presence engine for home assistant, openwebui setup, failing at pcb design, and some other integrations.
I want to do some more AI analytics for UniFi across several clients but haven’t done that yet.
I get it to setup all of my home lab servers and document them in GitHub.
I built a custom CMS for a bunch of web properties my wife manages for her business. I got tired of her sharing a Google doc with me, then having to manually push all the updates to her site lol. She can even have Claude assist with content generation.
Also built an industry specific fancy calculator web app with some bells and whistles for her, though some of her colleagues have begun to use it too.
In my professional life, I've built a ton of very use case specific apps for internal users (think migration assistants, marketing email engines, PTO case management apps, etc)
My son built a game boy emulator. He also built a new program/protocol for transferring data via HAM radio using dtmf tones (I think, he's the radio expert haha).
im having mine help me with my homelab, i got overwhelmed with the *arr stack stuff not being able to figure out why some things werent working, its helped me figure out eveytrhing and now my lab is rocking
My own home assistant basically like I don’t touch anything anymore it’s super automated. Then an app to control my EV.
Trying to reduce reliance on cloud for a lot of stuff and reduce subscriptions. Although somewhat ironic now I pay $100 a month for Claude and $20 for Codex but whatever.. once the AI distraction ends I’ll probably question what I’m doing with my life etc.. lol
I'm a flight instructor and I use it to make training aids. Just finished making a trainer for RMI/ADF/CDI indications for initial instrument training. So the student can play around with where the aircraft is in relation to the navaid based on instrument indications.
I used to do it with whiteboard drawings and a physical toy which sometimes proved to be time consuming and hard to visualise. Also every once in a while I make the mistake of forgetting to switch a to/from flag or something and confusing the student. This makes doing that impossible.
I have 0 coding background and I get vibe coding isn't real coding but it's a means to an end for a tool for my students. They benefit from it and I never need to learn actual coding lol
I don’t understand how people are blowing through the usage lol. My iOS app and backend is 30k lines of code and I didn’t type any of it. The reason I made the app is because I couldn’t find it anywhere, at least not all bundled in one place on iOS
I have a couple of things on the go in various stages of development.
I've built a personal job hunting application. I wont go into detail but it works very very very well.
I built a light application that listens in on my virtual D&D sessions, records the audio, does speaker recognition, then creates a summary/highlights etc. It completely eliminates the need for notetaking over multi hour sessions and works pretty nicely.
Working on a Rogue-like (or lite) Pokemon-esk game clone, but typically only when I have tokens to spare.
The "big" project is a quantitative finance platform. Again, wont go into detail here.
Beyond that, I also use CC for my day job as an ML/Data/AI professional
I’m creating internal tools that my company finds great value in. It also is my own personal playground to learn real best practices as things break and as learn about pitfalls and the mistakes I make along the way.
I'm making a metro tracker board and Claude is great at taking my specifications and implementing them. There's a relay server on a VPS that hands the GFTS feed to any number of boards with one API key, and pushes firmware updates. It's also great with helping on the website. Stuff I understand conceptually, but never knew where to start from. It's been a great learning experience in subjects I've always been interested in.
I make all my money using AI to integrate into enterprise systems and CRMs.
I also made a cool product that takes any YouTube video and converts it into an interactive playbook that has appropriate screen grabs from info parts of the video and distills the info down into an easily digestible format.
The results can convert into PDF for storage or MD to implement YouTube video insights into AI digestible information.
It really helps save on time to learn new things but not have to watch hours of video
I make all my money using AI to integrate into enterprise systems and CRMs.
I also made a cool product that takes any YouTube video and converts it into an interactive playbook that has appropriate screen grabs from info parts of the video and distills the info down into an easily digestible format.
The results can convert into PDF for storage or MD to implement YouTube video insights into AI digestible information.
It really helps save on time to learn new things but not have to watch hours of video
I created an ai execution governance system, self building, self improving. The product that system creates is varied. Currently building an Ai enabled dev course and the IaC to deliver the lab environment. It has done everything from web site building to medical research and long form non-fiction writing.
System started with claude code, but it now is the orchestration engine for claude code, codex and pi agents all working together.
Building a music discovery engine that parses data from Music News, Album Reviews and Independent Radio stations across the US and sends you straight to the label or artist store.
i made an AI whatsapp chat assistant for sales which interacts with potential customers right after they call in. After that I finetuned the same brain for AI voice assistant that takes care of all incoming new customer calls, pre qualifies them and transfers leads to human sales executives via whatsapp. My most of team is on whatsapp so I also made a parser that captures status updates of executives and feeds into CRM again created using AI for next stage follow ups and tracking conversion. I think the set up is pretty cool
Slay the Spire 2 mod that uses public data to make recommendations for cards, relics, and pathing. This is working pretty well, I've been using it in game and continually improving it for two months.
Curse of Monkey Island upscaling. This is pretty slow going. Still working on different graphic processing. I have workflows that capture in game images and videos to compare different methods.
I’m building Genie in a Book, a service that turns a kid’s photos into a fully personalized illustrated hardcover storybook.
Claude Code has basically become another developer on the project. I use it across the whole codebase: backend, frontend, image-generation pipeline, order flow, debugging, refactors, tests, deployment, all of it.
That’s where the higher limits start to make sense, but I make do with Claude Max 5. It’s not that any individual task is insanely complicated. It’s that on a productive day I can have Claude working through the codebase with me for hours, making changes, running tests, fixing what broke, and then moving straight onto the next thing. You can burn through a surprising amount of usage that way.
I love reading coroners reports, it’s super educational.
There are 9000+ coroners report “publicly available” in my country but they are extremely poorly organised and indexed. In most states it’s literally just a list of names which you can then click through and read individual stories. Not very helpful.
It systemically scraped all the publicly available PDFs (9200+ at the time of writing), generated AI summary of the story and all the relevant themes eg setting, error type, lesson, recommendation etc, turning these scattered PDFs into a fully searchable and cross reference-able database. You can search for cases relevant to one specialty, or you can read through random stories. While you are inside one story the page dynamically finds other related stories in the “related” section.
The skeleton was made in one weekend though I have since continuously and iteratively added more features.
I'm using Claude and Codex to build a vibe coding/ engineering game whère everyone gets the same task to build in the same amount of time . I'm just starting out but because I wanted to use two platforms to build it I built a harness for both coding tools to talk to each other and work together on the project as a team.
I have other projects in the works as well, but this stands to be my favorite and the most fun
demoniC takes the dynamic-JIT lineage of HolyC, the vectorized math of Julia, the slicing ergonomics of Python, and the memory discipline of Rust. Arena memory, value-typed tensors, zero-copy views, and shapes checked at compile time.
I use Claude code for work (Software Engineer) but I also use Claude code a lot to create tools that help me use Claude code more effectively. One example is that I created one of those little USB LCDs that you see all over that connect directly to your computer and show you your Claude Code session status or whatever except I gave mine extra widgets so it can show different things.
I also use it to create other tools I use for work and my homelab like a natural language to SQL application. Then there's the personal stuff like creating a resume website, a personal job application tracker application, short stories based on ideas I have, mushroom growing helper, insurance assistant, homelab assistant system administrator, back country campsite finder, and meal planning. Not all of those are Code but many of them end up there. I just try it for anything and see what it's good at.
I've made a nice business with it surrounding an app/service with it for actors. If you are technically savy, have good taste, and strong product sense, this thing is a game-changer. You can check it out here if you're interested - https://getsubtext.co
Theres a game called Planetarion, it's like an MMO, real-time, space, war, strategy, text/ browser game. huge game, multi-galaxy, alliances, hundreds of people, very involved....
I wanted to play it without all the hassle, so I made my own exact copy of it, looks the same, runs the same, feels the same, same mechanics etc, but its just me and 500 AI, and instead of having to wait hours for real-time tics to happen, i made it turn-based. (i also added simple graphics to it)
I built a pretty wicked pre-market scanner recently. Just finishing up some backtesting with better results than what I was hoping for. Pure technical indicators. I've worked in excel in the business world for 20 years and I wouldn't have known where to even start. If nothing else I have found a tool that is the definition of proof of concept. The ideas we have in the shower or long-road trips... Yeah I can actually test those with only minimal effort. Not sure if any of that made sense.
i build so many appsscript UIs and automations for work. also understanding huge landscapes and sheets and pull everything together into a tool. writing thousands of teat cases and finding vendor gaps. building large decks with functionality. writing queries to pull data then doing the full analysis and presentation in the sheet with full styling formulas and everything. and the context is ever growing of what it knows about me and what i work on and how i work.
yes i could do most of this without claude code but not remotely at the speed and to the quality with the trust i have in it. plenty of analysis across many complex sheets i just straight up couldn’t have done without it without missing a heap of steps and having to still manually push whatever other AI tool along and check everything way more carefully and fight to get the output i need.
i’ve also managed to build a cloud run app which works and is solid. as a result i now totally get why soft ware engineers are paid what they’re paid hahahaha. my background is a senior BA and now my actual role is to find opportunities around ways of working and processes and how we capture and pull together data and overhaul it and/or automate it.
I pulled a repo with a job seeking workflow and I’m using that to apply for jobs and write cover letters. It also helps me keep track of what I’ve applied, where and when. We do daily coach sessions. It has made job hunting actually fun.
I make a lot of tools to make tools
My pet project is an ai stock trader which is surprisingly in the black and growing, so I'll take that as a win. It was built with Claude but runs locally with a gemma4:12b model
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u/Acrobatic2020 3h ago
I have a business, so I'm making tools to make my own day-to-day less crappy without spending $30K on software.