Claude Code Changed How I Build Everything

I've been using Claude Code — Anthropic's terminal-based AI coding agent — to run almost every part of my digital life. Not just coding. Writing articles, managing my YouTube channel, building web applications, organizing my file system, tracking my kids' chores, managing recipes, visualizing monthly bills, and deploying to production. All from the terminal.

At last count I have about 20 projects I manage with Claude Code — from The Marketing Show to a gospel study library to a tech support marketplace to a monthly bill visualizer. This isn't a review. This is what it actually looks like when Claude Code becomes your operating system.

What Claude Code Actually Is

Claude Code runs in your terminal. You talk to it in plain English, and it reads your files, writes code, edits content, runs commands, and interacts with APIs. It's not a chatbot you paste code into — it lives inside your project and sees everything.

The difference between Claude Code and the regular Claude chat is like the difference between texting a contractor and having them in your house with the tools. Claude Code doesn't need you to copy and paste files into a prompt. It reads them directly. It edits them in place. It runs your build commands and tells you if something broke.

It's Not Just for Developers

People hear "terminal" and "coding agent" and assume this is a developer tool. It's not. Andrew Ansley put it best when I interviewed him: "Get out of these things and get into the terminal." He said the barrier is fear — it took him about two hours to get over the intimidation — and after that he was deploying "an army of agents." Andrew's not a developer. He's a marketer. And he's building more with Claude Code than most dev teams.

Here's a sample of what I'm building with Claude Code right now:

The Marketing Show — The site you're reading. Articles, propagation, deployment
MyTechSupport.com — A tech support marketplace connecting clients with specialists
iamhelpful — A chore tracking app for my kids
Meadow Reader — A recipe management app
Monthly Bill Visualizer — Visualize where the money goes
Life Score — Personal tracking and scoring
AI Gospel Library — Scripture study tools
Entrepreneur Quotes — A curated quote collection
All Things Handy — A handyman services site. Ripped down from WordPress, rebuilt on Cloudflare Pages with a conversion-focused mobile-first design
YouTube tools — Clip seekers, transcript grabbers, upload automation

Some of these started in Lovable, some in Cursor. But I'm all in on Claude Code now for future development and ongoing edits. Every one of these is a real project with real files, managed from the same terminal. I don't open ten different apps. I open Claude Code, tell it which project I'm working on, and go.

How I Use It for Content

Writing Articles From Video Transcripts

I have a five-phase pipeline for turning YouTube videos into articles. Claude Code runs almost all of it.

Phase 1: I give it a YouTube URL. It downloads the transcript, cleans up the auto-caption garbage (YouTube captions have massive duplication), downloads the thumbnail, identifies short-form clip candidates, searches my entire existing content library for related articles, and saves a handoff document with the full article plan. That handoff includes the outline, key quotes with timestamps, monetization opportunities, and propagation targets.

Phase 3: I tell it to write the article. It reads the handoff — not the full transcript, because the context window is limited — and writes a complete article with frontmatter, wiki-links to related content, a call-to-action callout, and a See Also section. I review it, give feedback, and it revises in place.

The merge fields guide on this site went from a 41-minute training video to a published, propagated article in a single session.

Content Propagation

This is where Claude Code earns its keep. My site philosophy is that new content makes old content smarter. When I publish a new article, every existing article that mentions the same topic should link to it.

Claude Code extracts 15-20 keywords from the new article, searches the entire codebase for each one, reads every matching file, decides whether a link makes sense in context, and makes the edits. Then it opens every changed page in my browser with the changes highlighted so I can review them visually.

The merge fields article triggered updates to 10 existing pages — call scripts, custom fields, SMS templates, workflow automation, Google Business Profiles, and more. Each one got a natural inline wiki-link woven into the existing prose. That would have taken me an hour by hand. Claude Code did it in minutes.

YouTube Channel Management

Claude Code talks to the YouTube API through OAuth. It updates titles, descriptions, and tags. It generates chapter timestamps from transcripts. It drafts pinned comments and copies them to my clipboard. It opens YouTube Studio pages one at a time so I can handle the manual steps (monetization, end screens) without getting tabs confused.

It also runs an unlisted video sweep — every time it interacts with YouTube programmatically, it checks my last 20 uploads for any that are still unlisted. My upload script defaults to unlisted, so videos can get forgotten. Claude Code catches them.

SOPs That Build Themselves

This is the part that surprised me. Every time something goes wrong — I push tags without reviewing them, a CTA has the link in the wrong place, a callout button breaks because of a keyword conflict — Claude Code and I fix the issue, and then I tell it to update the SOP so it doesn't happen again.

The SOPs live in markdown files in my repos. Claude Code reads them at the start of every session and follows them. So when I say "the pinned comment must end with the link as the last thing," that rule is permanent. It's not something I have to remember or re-explain. The system gets smarter every session.

Build and Deploy

When an article is ready, Claude Code increments the build number, runs the production build, catches any TypeScript errors, commits with a descriptive message, pushes to GitHub, waits for deployment, and opens the production page so I can verify it's live. One command.

The Meld

Here's the thing nobody talks about with AI tools: it's not about what the AI can do alone. It's about the combination.

I focus on the creative decisions — does this title land, does this CTA feel right, does this section actually help someone. Claude Code handles everything the computer can do — opening pages, searching files, running APIs, refreshing browsers, formatting content.

I'm not trying to replace myself. I'm not trying to be lazy. I'm trying to let each of us do what we're best at. I make judgment calls. Claude Code does mechanical work at machine speed. Together we ship more in an afternoon than I used to ship in a week.

What It's Not

It's not magic. You still need to know what you want. You still need to review the output. You still need SOPs, or Claude Code will make the same mistakes any new hire would make — it just makes them faster.

And the context window is real. Long transcripts eat it up. That's why my pipeline has clear phases with handoff documents between them — so we can start fresh without losing work.

Getting Started

If you're thinking about trying Claude Code, here are the things that actually matter:

Run it in VS Code's terminal, not the Mac terminal. VS Code lets you paste images directly into Claude Code — screenshots, mockups, error messages. The native terminal doesn't support this.
Give it a CLAUDE.md file. This is a markdown file in your project root that tells Claude Code how your project works — conventions, file locations, SOPs, preferences. It reads this every session. The better your CLAUDE.md, the less you have to repeat yourself.
Build SOPs as you go. Don't try to write every rule upfront. Use Claude Code, notice when something goes wrong, fix the SOP, move on. The system improves organically.
Break big tasks into phases. Context windows are limited. Build in clear handoff points where you can say "save your work" and start a fresh session without losing progress.
Voice input changes everything. I use Wispr Flow to talk to Claude Code instead of typing. At 120 words per minute, I can give detailed instructions faster than most people can type a sentence.

Case in Point

This entire article exists because a friend named Becky commented on one of my Facebook posts asking what I meant by "supercharging Claude from the terminal." I told Claude Code to write a blog post about how I use it, include a backlink to her handyman business in Spanish Fork, Utah with local SEO anchor text, and push it live. The article you're reading right now was written, committed, and deployed while that Facebook conversation was still happening. That's the speed we're talking about.