What have I wrought?

I have used LLMs in various formats for writing code for a while.

A common question is “If LLMs make you so much more productive, what have you built?” I have a full time job, two young kids, and a full-time-working wife. Time is short - so efficiency matters.

Well, here’s my (growing) answer to the question of “Where’s the shovelware?”

1. My entire nvim config is now managed by claude - it can debug and implement features using a combo of existing plugins and custom code. This has been game changing.
2. I’ve made a few hundered lines of bash scripts that make my laptop more ergonomic. Starting byobu instances, cleaning up folders, firing up a set of tools. All that is trivial and I use it several times a day to save a few minutes.
3. I can restyle this blog on a single request. I’ve gone through Starcraft, NBA Jam, Cyberpunk themes, and more. The existing style is entirely Claude.
4. I wrapped my entire personal finances stack in some easy to use cli tools.
5. I built a frontend for a queens board solver so I could cheat at the LinkedIn puzzle and beat my friend who is extremely good at it. I did write the ILP myself because I felt that was a good learning exercise, but Claude one-shot it when I let it do that part for fun.
6. gh-commemorate, a CLI command to generate a commemorative plaque for a github repository. From git cli to laser cut plan all in one. For this project, we even had to make a custom font b/c the material we used could only support certain bridge widths.
7. I finally built several automated trading bots, did extensive backtesting, and two of the most proftiable ones are live and trading with good initial results.
8. At work, whenever I fix a bug, add a feature, or do a deep dive, Claude can follow along and build a script or exec to reproduce the work. Because of this, I’ve accidentally built an entire reporting pipeline that I use a few times a week to check up on the prod codebase. This was previously an hours-long process for even a few features.
9. Similarly, using skills I have significaltly reduced friction in pre-pr checks, including bug triage and integration level testing. It takes a tiny amount of my time to check these results.
10. I’ve generated dozens of throwaway executables or libraries using different patterns, languages, styles, or other design choices. This helps me understand things more deeply and make conscious design decisions.

All of the above came about in the last two months (from about 2011-12 to 2026-02-15), while I was making significant progress on day job tasks as well.

I recently visited a few labs and job shops in Southern MN, and noticed that one engineer would jump between several different CNC machines, doing touchpoint inspections or loading designs. The CNC analogy is apt. That’s how coding feels most of the time.