AI reduced my technical debt
Few years ago, I started making my own website. The initial goal was to “document the project I did”, so I can recall when I did what, as memory is effemeral. Projects are tech (programming, arduino) and non-tech (woodworking, leathercraft, ), so for the second category, a github account is insufficient.
After a while, I made 3 websites:
- One for non-tech projects
- One for tech / likely to be seen by peers
- One for family (hosted locally only)
The Time Bottleneck
Two years ago, I got a child. I didn’t imagine that it will consumme so much of my time.
- I was unable to make/complete projects
- For those that I did, I was unable to take time to make a wrap-up
I spent most of my time updating the family blog, as it is the most important for me, recalling the past moment.
I was unhappy with that. As I couldn’t spent personnal time on side projects, nor maintaining those website.
Coding Agent to the Rescue
In November 2025, I went to a Github, where they showed us Agent capabilities. while demo were not 100% successful or the target and achievement was unclear, I gave it a try.
It took me some time to figure out how to manipulate Github Agent, knowing what you can ask and how to ask, but now, most of my code is generated using AI. I still write some piece of code, when I know that writting the prompt would take more time than making the small fixes.
I was monitoring HackerNews, and I saw that Claude Code was highly popular, based on the votes and article count. My boss bought a few credits. We tested it, the user experience was much greater than Github Agent. The main different is the way the human is included in the loop. We runned quickly out of credit (30€ of tokens), so, he decided to buy a licence (the smallest package for now, as we are still experimenting).
Using Claude Code for Personnal Use
My boss was okay with the fact of using the “extra credit left” of my weekly usage for personnal projects.
With that, I did everything I could to improve all the things that took me time when managing my website:
Image Folder to Markdown Page
I build my website with jekyll. Basically, create a markdown page, and it compiles to html. For images, first, I needed to rescale them (otherwise, my pages with 100 photographs of 10MB would take a lot of time to load). I already had a script to do it. Nevertheless, I needed to:
- Rescale my image and create a new name
- Include all the images in a markdown page (I just had to copy/paste the output of the script, which was a list of
)
- Move the images to the /assets/images folder
- Adjust the path
With claude code, I automated the last parts of the process. Now, I put my image in a folder / subfolder, I run the pipeline, and then, for each folder, I get a page with markdown image link included, rescaled images stored in /assets/images, and page yaml written.
This is not rocket science, but building it, without making mistakes, when you have one hour left for you per day to do what you want (reading a book), working under pressure and in a tired state is not the best option.
Neocities CLI Upgrade
Few years ago, I build a CLI to update my websites. My websites are hosted thanks to neocity. Their GUI sucks (many bugs, one file at a time…), so I build a CLI. My coding skill was not the best at this time, so while everything was functionnal, it is difficult to read (even for me), as the structure is not conventionnal.
Expenses Tracker
I use the app MyExpense to monitor the familly budget.
Each month, I was doing a wrapup, to get a debrief month after month, who contributed more, what are the top expensises per category, maintaining by hand a consolidated .xls file. With Claude Code, I build an expense tracker, which do the aggregation month by month for me, remove the duplicate if my sheets overlap, make nice sharts …
HackerNews AI News Tracker
I am looking at hackernews frequently. Some articles are added to my favorite, so I can read them later.
However, it requires me to watch my app every day. I do not like to be tied to a tool. So I build a monitoring system, which automatically fetch the new articles, and filter those talking about AI.
This helped me to make a digest, get them save in a way which is more convenient for me than looking at algolia search engine. You can get a look at the digest here: Digest page
RAG for Images
For my personnal website, I wanted to make a image retrieval engine. Found a model on hugging face to do the job, ask Claude Code for all the functionnality I wanted. Now, it is done.
Keyboard Light Programming
I bought a new PC 6 months ago. I wanted to program the LEDs to customize effect. On linux, you do not have native support. I find my way thanks to OpenRGB, and built a python wrapper to customize colors and effects.
There are some others, but I just wanted you to have an overview of “week-end projects” solved in one hour thanks to AI.
Debrief
All these projects are small. These are not startup projects, however they matter for me. Of course, all of them can be improved. They solve my core problems, even if the UX might be a bit broken, they works as expected.
Thanks to that, I need less time to maintain my website, and I can focus on content, rather than repetitive tasks with no value. I could have done it with no AI. But I miss time.
Now, I can focus on ideas: thinking what to build and how to build. This makes me happier, I do not fear anymore the time I will spend for implementing the solution. I can focus on what matters the most, the functionnalities, the final goal.
It puts out of my heads of the ideas I have been thinking to, removing the cognitive burden.
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