Just want to clarify, this is not my Substack, I’m just sharing this because I found it insightful.
The author describes himself as a “fractional CTO”(no clue what that means, don’t ask me) and advisor. His clients asked him how they could leverage AI. He decided to experience it for himself. From the author(emphasis mine):
I forced myself to use Claude Code exclusively to build a product. Three months. Not a single line of code written by me. I wanted to experience what my clients were considering—100% AI adoption. I needed to know firsthand why that 95% failure rate exists.
I got the product launched. It worked. I was proud of what I’d created. Then came the moment that validated every concern in that MIT study: I needed to make a small change and realized I wasn’t confident I could do it. My own product, built under my direction, and I’d lost confidence in my ability to modify it.
Now when clients ask me about AI adoption, I can tell them exactly what 100% looks like: it looks like failure. Not immediate failure—that’s the trap. Initial metrics look great. You ship faster. You feel productive. Then three months later, you realize nobody actually understands what you’ve built.
These are the principles I follow:
https://indieweb.org/make_what_you_need
https://indieweb.org/use_what_you_make
I don’t have time to argue with FOSS creators to get my stuff in their projects, nor do I have the energy to maintain a personal fork of someone else’s work.
It’s much faster for me to start up Claude and code a very bespoke system just for my needs.
I don’t like web UIs nor do I want to run stuff in a Docker container. I just want a scriptable CLI application.
Like I just did a subtitle translation tool in 2-3 nights that produces much better quality than any of the ready made solutions I found on GitHub. One of which was an *arr stack web monstrosity and the other was a GUI application.
Neither did what I needed in the level of quality I want, so I made my own. One I can automate like I want and have running on my own server.