I listen to the RideHome podcast every weekday, and some weekends when there are bonus episodes that pique my interest. Around November 24, 2018 I think I started hearing Brian, the host, say things like “I’m sure I’ve talked about this before” and thought to myself that this should be a pretty easy problem to solve. Well, if it’s easy it wasn’t easy for me. But that rarely stops me from trying…

I hacked together some really terrible python to grab the RSS feed, parse it, extract the links, and spit out Markdown. Why Markdown when you already had HTML? I was going to use GitHub Pages and Markdown was the easiest path to that, that I knew of at the time. What I didn’t know was that Markdown was going to become the format of choice for LLMs. Anyways, once I got my hack-a-thon scripts working, I basically just ran them once in a while to update my Markdown files and push everything to GitHub for hosting. It mostly worked most of the time, except when the human making the show notes would change how they did the markup. Silly humans, always ruining everything with their capriciousness.

Now, fast forward to December 8, 2025 and I drop a big “Claude Rework” into the repository. Yes, as regular readers know, I’ve been using Claude Code for my little one-off personal projects. What really helped though was Nick Tune’s claude-skillz. I used the TDD persona and refactored my crappy scripts all the way to the point where I could start asking Claude Code to make new features. What kind of new features? Well, I had always wanted to do some data analysis, but I was always too busy and then…this made it so easy. I made a Wrapped feature for 2025 and then ran it against all the previous data I had gathered.

At work I have a reputation as an “AI Hater”, which if you only want to characterize “AI” as “will replace all humans and reduce human labor dollars to zero”, then yes…that’s accurate. I use Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini almost every day for something. Sometimes I’m just testing the same question across models. Sometimes I’m having them all independently evaluate something I’ve written, always with the prompt that the model is my intended audience and to ask me questions about what I’ve written to help me find the gaps I’ve left or where I was unclear. Seriously, they’re really good at this…if you can ignore the sycophancy.

So what? Now I have some python that’s less sucky than when I started…big deal. Well, sure…but for me it’s more about finding where the actual value can be derived. Is it worth it to back the systems that are actively trying to replace me and the ridiculous race to turn the planet into either energy plants or data centers to consume that energy? Ask again later, hopefully we and the planet are around long enough for that. Right now, for me…my little project is in a much better state and I can do things that I probably wouldn’t have done on my own. Maybe that’s enough.