Oh wow. I didn’t think I could build this.

I leveled up.

Last week I told you that, after failing to find my ideal personal notepad app, I built my own. I talked to Lovable and it created it. In 15 minutes! And it was perfect!

I couldn’t shut up about it. (Just ask my wife. Or anyone I work with.)

I’ve run tech companies my whole adult life, but I’ve never built a single thing. “Real developers” always built it for me. My brother/partner, our hired tech department, outside dev shops.

It felt electrifying.

Then 2 days later, I had breakfast with these guys, and they broke my heart:

My buddy Nick Gray asked his friends to show what they were building with Claude Code. What they showed made my Lovable experience feel inadequate.

Some of what they built with Claude:

• One person built a database of the world’s museum donors by scraping obscure museum PDFs.

• Another built a hardware+iPhone product that stops phone addiction by disabling apps.

• A founder turned his meeting transcripts into stories that were catalogued in a database, so he had authentic business war stories for his presentations.

They used a more powerful tool and got better results.

Adam Brakhane, Gateway X’s CTO, tells me that’s the nature of building with AI. After you reach the top of one mountain, a bigger one pops up next to it.

But I climbed the next mountain!

My friend Pat Walls sat down with me to record this Claude Code how-to video for my new YouTube channel.

His company was dealt a massive blow recently. YouTube wanted to kick his enormously successful channel off the platform.

I watched him tweet about how much it sucked…

..but then…

…I watched him tweet about how he was using Claude Code to build a replacement video hosting platform. Within a weekend, he had a site up, and it looked gorgeous.

See for yourself:

So I asked him to record a how-to video so I could along with readers of this newsletter.

It became the world’s easiest “How to build with Claude Code” tutorial.

It’s the latest video on my YouTube. You should see it, here.

And because of that…

…drum roll please…

…I was able to REbuild my perfect notepad using Claude Code.

Yes, it’s pretty much the same as what I built before, but I had to use what I learned about Claude Code to build it.

It was so fun that I neglected my other work to get it done.

And it took longer than Lovable because I had to give Claude more instructions. But it taught me a more powerful tool.

Pat has an interesting story. He created a $2 million / year business by flying out to meet founders whose companies hit their first ~ $25k / month in revenue and seeing how they did it.

It’s on our usual podcast feed, but I think you should catch the video on YouTube because he showed how he built his video platform using Claude Code.

-andrew