76 real things people did with Claude, with the source and a prompt to try it yourself.
In a meeting about a bug in an app they didn't own, they told Claude to find out if it was user error, notify the user, and tell the developer what to fix. Fifteen minutes later, the developer asked: today or Tuesday?
Result The user had the same tools and training all along
After $45 in GitHub Actions overage in one month, a solo founder put an idle homelab to work as CI runners, with Claude making it easy to set up. Daily spend dropped from $2-4 a day to under $0.25.
Result Even runs some jobs faster than GitHub's own workers
A first homemade synth has 36 hall-effect keys and buttons and 7 rotary encoders. The firmware started by hand, then gentle prodding at Claude got everything needed much faster. Rev 2 of the PCB is nearly done.
Result Hope to one day sell a few
A browser game where you answer with a power of ten leans on Claude for code and content: fact checking answers, writing explanations, and inventing new questions.
Result A single HTML file, no accounts, no ads, no framework
For syncing epub and audiobook files, they had Claude implement forced alignment using a CTC transcription model. It aligns a 60 hour book's transcript in 20 minutes, even with dirty source data.
Result Runs on their own GPU with a 0.6B model
Working on a Quake project, Claude decided on its own to build a test suite: demo playbacks with snapshots compared pixel by pixel, plus recorded demos whose screenshots it checked for each element.
Result Used at most 1% of a $20 plan's weekly limit
A former PwC tax preparer did their own return with Claude, then again in TurboTax. Claude read the forms and statements and caught a missed credit, and the two matched to the dollar after reconciling.
Result An audit-defense file, built as a side effect
Tracking which newsletters break into Substack's top 200 meant clicking and copy-pasting. Claude in Chrome now scrapes the charts every Tuesday, and Cowork turns the data into a spreadsheet report.
Result Each scrape now takes a couple of minutes
A technical SEO and UX audit for a new client site normally takes the writer 3.5 to 7 hours. Claude pulled client info from OneDrive, ran the audit, drove a remote PageSpeed tool, and produced a Word report in 0.5 hours.
Result Left about 1 hour of review and writing
Matching Amazon orders to YNAB entries by hand was tedious, so the writer vibe-coded a Chrome extension with Aider that reads Amazon orders, matches them to YNAB, and uses Claude's Haiku to clean up the memo line.
Result Cost $27.81 in API credits to build
After building a minimal proof assistant, the writer asked Claude how they knew the prover was actually sound. Claude checked, found five different ways it could prove false theorems, and fixed them.
Result Also proposed a fuzzer that turned out useless
An unwieldy pile of Claude chats sent the writer looking for an organizer extension, but the only one they found was Chrome-only. Claude built one from scratch for Firefox instead.
Result They haven't even peeked at the code
Four years after shelving a homemade RSS reader and selling off its $500 domain, the writer built it this year with Codex and Claude. They use it daily, along with 30 other strangers who found it public.
Result 30 strangers now use it too
Chasing a childhood itch for the exact 1996 After Dark Flying Toasters screensaver, the writer turned to Claude. It did a lot of good reverse-engineering work, but kept inventing details that needed pushback.
Result Released as AGPL on GitHub
A rabbitmq connector occasionally got stuck after rare network drops, too minor to spend days fixing. Claude built a test harness that reproduced it, and the actual fix wasn't too hard.
Result Automatically runnable scenarios, not a one-off check
When a new OpenClaw beta added Telegram message streaming, they asked their agent what else had changed. It read 15+ merged pull requests, compared them to the current version, and gave an upgrade recommendation.
Result Costs about $10-15 a day, with spikes to $30+
Applying to jobs one by one eats hours. Using the new Claude Computer Use, 50 job applications went out in less than 30 minutes.
Result Doubled as a first test of Claude's new Computer Use tool
Adding Oracle to a database migration tool took 9 months and about $160K. A pipeline of Claude coding agents, run like a teaching hospital, added IBM Db2 in less than two days for $4172 in tokens.
Result No human reviewed the Db2 code yet; that check is underway
Overdue German VAT statements for Q3 2025 needed filing, with no custom code written for it. Claude Cowork and the Claude Chrome extension worked from a folder of invoice and receipt PDFs and filed the statements.
Result Called it "completely off the shelf stuff from Anthropic"
A new live-coding tool, Strudel, and no experience using it. Claude wrote the starting code, including sample filenames that turned out not to exist, then restructured it for live performance once it was tweaked by hand.
Result Called it nothing they would listen to at home
Six AI workers, two each on Claude, Codex and Gemini, were set loose to build a SQLite-like engine in Rust. It passed 64 queries of a 1,000+ query suite, with slop like redundant buffer copies and no concurrency.
Result 54.5% of all commits were just lock coordination
An old printer stopped working with MacOS 27. Claude wrote new drivers, using its owner as eyes and hands: did grayscale work, did page 1 print at lower DPI, now reload the paper for duplex. Then it printed again.
Result Done with very little hardware know-how
Their Claude Max200 plan started including API credit. In 2 minutes Claude built a fallback callout moving their busiest app stage from Gemini on OpenRouter to Haiku. Their OpenRouter bill should drop about $200 a month.
Result OpenRouter stays on as overflow and for testing models
Their Chromecast wouldn't connect to their IKEv2 home VPN from an Airbnb. Told to fix it, Claude found no way to make the existing VPN apps work, so it wrote a new client. About 20 minutes, plus their certs.
Result Also patched Plex after an update broke its whole UI
Apple's built-in capture can't record the Mac's system audio, OBS felt clunky and Kap seemed untrustworthy. So they asked Claude to build a native app that did exactly what they needed. It took 4 minutes.
Result Also built a Japanese dictionary site in under 2 hours
A MongoDB-like database for a hobby project, written spec-first by Claude, Kiro, Qwen Coder and Cursor. They read zero lines of the code and checked it through tests. The first version took about two weeks, part time.
Result Learned more in two months than in 20 years
They wanted a blog article turned into a video without losing control of the text. Claude built a recording app to screencast the article's diagrams and add titles. It worked, but it still took them many hours.
Result They'd pay to have it done faster
Devialet's official app was abandoned. Claude and Codex reverse engineered the amplifiers' private protocol and built an iOS controller in about a day of work. Without AI, they'd never have started.
Result About a day of work, spread over a week
Assembled boards were too expensive for this KiCad 10 project. Claude found cheaper versions of their parts, then reworked the schematic for through-hole parts they'll solder themselves.
Result Ordered bare boards; parts from Mouser and Amazon
Public government data is hard to get at. Claude built sites that present it clearly and email it weekly, then review their own SEO and fix the day's glitches. Subscribers are trickling in.
Result Trickle of subscribers, climbing in search
A Santa hat, a hidden Bluetooth speaker and a cloned voice reading lines Claude wrote. At Christmas it sorted the kids, and declared a cheeky niece "Slytherin!!!"
Result Declared a cheeky niece "Slytherin!!!"
Claude writes the story page by page, with the tension planned to peak in the middle, and Gemini draws it in a consistent style. Their kids love them night after night.
Result Stories their kids love night after night
Code from 1999, around 100 hours of one developer's time, and every new model failed. Sonnet found nothing. Opus 4.5 managed a workaround. Opus 4.6 solved the whole thing.
Result Sonnet found nothing; Opus 4.5 only a workaround
A very subtle but important bug in open-source lattice Boltzmann code. Claude didn't give up until it found it. Later they realised they could have just had Claude write a whole new solver.
Result Back when Claude was still cheap to run
Digging through SaaS APIs one record at a time is slow for an LLM. So a small company dropped several SaaS tools for self-hosted ones and plain files, and cut licensing fees on the way.
Result Lower licensing fees, faster data access
Making Vestiges playable without a mouse took nearly two days of part-time work, with Claude busy throughout. Then they set up an MCP server so Claude can play the game like a player would.
Result Nearly two days of part-time work
A client needed posts going out on schedule to about 9 social networks. Built with Claude layer by layer and tested as it grew, it has run for months without a single error.
They gave Claude the video, its audio and ffmpeg, and asked for a code-only recreation. One pass, under an hour, and only the end logo differed. The writer calls it "just an experiment".
Result Only the end logo differed
They wanted game audio through the controller's headphone jack while streaming to an Android TV box. With the spec, a USB capture and live access, Claude built it, for $20 instead of begging a developer.
Result Game audio through the controller's jack
Mood, food, habits and sleep, logged daily for months. A Hermes agent writes end-of-day reports (they miss a lot), but asking Claude for correlations surfaced a pattern they'd never noticed.
Result A pattern too faint to notice on their own
It built the game from his description and kept adding his ideas. Then the file got too big, edits broke in a loop, and the parent had to step in: split the code into several files.
Result Lesson: split big files before they break
Every visitor picks a World Cup winner, and countries light up by majority vote. When the live dot layer choked on mobile, they rewrote it in WebGL to keep it smooth.
Result Seeded with 4,200 predictions across 183 nations
A Mac plus a Raspberry Pi speaker: wake word, web search, weather, Apple reminders, their own files and memory across sessions. And you can talk over it mid-reply to interrupt.
Result Talk over it mid-reply, no wake word again
Working abroad, they didn't know the local systems. Gemini flagged a pension account they could cash out when leaving the country, and Claude caught risky clauses in a contract too small for a lawyer.
Result Risky contract clauses fixed without a lawyer
A small company's ops director, not a developer, also had Claude migrate a Laravel 5 app to Laravel 11 in about 2-3 days, something they'd never have dared touch alone.
Result Laravel 5 to 11 in about 2-3 days
No algorithm, no rabbit holes. The child searches and requests, the parent taps Approve, and only approved videos play, with youtube.com blocked. Built entirely by a non-developer with Claude.
Result Free and open source for other families
Ten years ago a similar scraper took them a horrendous amount of time and wasn't half as good. With free Claude and ChatGPT, this one grabs images, reads them with OCR and crops the hits.
Result About 5-10 hours over a weekend
Their agent wakes Claude at night to work through the to-do list. Having watched them struggle exporting Android icons, it wrote a resizer that outputs every size and folder, unprompted.
Result Another night: a Go tracker for their test matrix
She has no tech skills and very specific ideas. Built with Claude over a week of evenings: drop a folder with text and images, preview it at home, click to publish. She has exactly the site she wants.
Result Built over a week of evenings
Lights, AC, generator, leveling, all locked in a poor app. Claude Opus read the APK, cracked the Bluetooth protocol, and now their own Android app, website and Home Assistant setup run the RV.
Result The patched original app is now the fallback
Three bins on alternating collections. A snapshot from the doorbell camera goes to Claude, which says which bins are still in their spot, so reminders come when one actually needs moving. Pretty reliable.
Result Runs a 3D-printed bin light too
Pulling and cleaning public data into a dashboard, turning call recordings into action points, skimming podcasts by transcript: Claude did the grind around their meetings all day.
Result Podcasts searched by transcript, not listened to
Photos of parts with dimensions, CAD screenshots, questions about strength and stability. Claude showed a real grasp of boats, materials and how parts connect as the design evolved.
Result Later modelled in code with Claude in the loop
She invented the rules, the name and the board: words climbing from 3 to 7 letters in a pizza-slice shape. Claude turned her design into code, and it became a real daily puzzle over a weekend.
Result Now a daily puzzle with a leaderboard
Remote desktop into an existing Linux session never worked quite right. Claude rewrote xrdp: connect, pick display :0 or :1, sign in, done. No more fiddling with x11vnc.
Result Drop in, pick a display, sign in with PAM
Their reTerminal E1002 e-ink display needed a dashboard and firmware that accepted all 6 colours. Claude did both, after earlier reverse-engineering their NAS's LEDs. They vibe-debug 10x more than they vibe-code.
Result A Things replacement on the side, still janky
Opening ports for family meant exposing every app on the server. In a few hours with Claude they wrote a tiny Go gateway that checks Tailscale, so each person reaches only what's shared with them.
Result No second login for the family
Changing the brake pads used to mean finding a Windows machine and the right cable. Claude built an open-source Volkswagen diagnostic suite from GitHub tooling and their own old research.
Result Ditched a ton of cloud services too
Alarms and reminders are easy to ignore. Claude built a Twilio script that calls before important appointments, reads out the message, and won't stop until they confirm. Set up in plain English.
Result Calls get through where alarms get ignored
Google released Magenta for live music generation. One weekend night with Claude added a spectrograph with key and chord analysis to its Collider app, so they can grab a guitar and join in.
Result Also built Tuber, a video summary tool
Maps from OpenStreetMap, print-ready trailhead maps and GPS ride heatmaps: a trail volunteer built all three with Claude, much faster than by hand, and rates them above the big apps for local trails.
Result Rated above Trailforks and Gaia for local trails
Claude went through past R&D reports and expenses, spotted that the company had been miscategorised, and drafted an email citing the tax code. Two days later the auditor admitted the mistake.
Result Plus $250 a month saved on AWS
Half their effort goes to automated adversarial review. Claude plans and writes the code, Sol tears into it with only the coding standards to go on, and it costs about $300 per developer a month.
Result Fewer bugs and clearer documentation
Thousands of words of planning on their phone over the holidays, then Claude Code built it. It forgot one key feature until asked, and their son's reaction was one of the best looks they've had.
Result Built with a test suite and a clear to-do list
Their rural home kept dipping below 110 volts. From two years of Home Assistant data, Claude documented brownouts down to 95v and helped fill the complaint form. Now they're pushing for a bigger transformer.
Result A bigger transformer now on the table
Paste in your text and it strikes through every word you could cut. They built it as a Claude artifact, ran it on their own draft the same morning, and kept about a third of its cuts.
Result Costs a fraction of a cent per run
They kept running into usage caps. Claude built a status line showing usage, reset time and context, plus a hook that catches spikes, like a long chat suddenly resending everything.
Result Spikes caught before they burn the quota
An always-on GPU box costs far more than cheap storage. Claude wrote a small Python script that boots one on Linode from a persistent drive in about 2 minutes, so they pay only while it runs.
Result Boots in about 2 minutes, paid only while on
Linux config files are where switching gets painful. Claude helped them pick Fedora, answered every setup question and had Claude Code write the scripts they'd never have bothered with.
Result Scripts they'd never have bothered to write
Code from one AI is hard to trust blind. This developer runs a Docker harness where Claude writes and Codex reviews, works in it most of the day, and open-sourced it as moarcode.
Result Open-sourced as moarcode
A photo of the dead-start switch panel from a historic supercomputer. Claude Opus read the switches and disassembled them into commands in about two minutes. Not detailed, but impressive.
Result Not detailed, but impressive for a historic panel
Two ancient V100 GPUs, one open-source inference engine, and about a week of Claude optimizing it. Decode speed reached around 300 tokens a second, and the work is still going.
Result Still going after about a week
Why pay to file? They had Claude fill the same forms on TurboTax and TaxAct, compared the numbers on FreeTaxUSA, then filed on the free one and kept the $150 filing fee.
Result Kept the $150 filing fee
No source code, just disassemblers. Told it had Ghidra and Radare2, Claude took the game apart, ported it to Rust and Bevy, and added MIDI music without being asked.
Result Added MIDI music without being asked
When the time-tracking and invoicing tool they relied on hiked its price, they had Claude Opus recreate it and load in 13 years of their own data. Read-only works; editing is still in progress.
Result Read-only version working; editing in progress
The data team wanted to automate complex analytics and lean less on outside agencies. Claude now runs those workflows, and also helps HR draft feedback and marketing produce content.