No programmers on staff, about 12 internal tools in a year with AI
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.
Done withClaudeSpotted· by HN user michelb· Oct 15, 2026
Result Laravel 5 to 11 in about 2-3 days
“I have used Claude to migrate a mediumsized Laravel 5 app to Laravel 11 in about 2-3 days.”
Spotted: found in the wild. Details are as reported by the source above and have not been independently verified.
What they did
Not a professional developer, they used Claude to migrate a medium-sized Laravel 5 app to Laravel 11, something they wouldn’t have dared touch otherwise. As PM and operations director at a small company without programmers, they also used AI to build about 12 internal tools over the past year.
How it went
The migration took about 2-3 days. The tools are small but give huge productivity gains, and three are now being rebuilt based on how the team actually uses them. They’ve learned a ton about development along the way.
Try it yourself with Claude
I run operations at a small company with no developers. We waste time on [manual process]. Help me build a simple internal tool for it: ask me how the process works today, propose the smallest useful version, then build it with clear instructions to run it. Keep the code simple enough that I can find my way around it.
A starting prompt written by Agents in the Wild. Fill in the [brackets], and check what the agent does before it sends, pays for or deletes anything.
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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.
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?
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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.