I’ll be honest: I was skeptical. Not in the “I hate AI” way, more in the “I’ve tried enough hype-driven tools to know most of them just shift the frustration around” way. But Claude Code kept showing up in conversations I trusted, so in January I made a deal with myself. Thirty days. Real project. No cherry-picking the easy wins.
This is what actually happened.
The Project
I was working on a mid-size Rails 8 app. A SaaS product with a fairly standard setup: PostgreSQL, Sidekiq for background jobs, some API integrations, a Hotwire frontend. Not a toy project. Real users, real data, things that could break in production.
The codebase had about 40k lines of Ruby. Some legacy corners I hadn’t touched in over a year. The kind of project where you sometimes open a file and just… stare.
