Did I Just Experience a >40X Productivity Gain? If Yes, What Does This Mean?
My daughter was in the back seat eating pizza, our dog settled beside her. I was driving our favorite route around the city lakes, the parkway lit up with city lights and Christmas decorations reflecting on the dark lake ice. Noise-cancelling AirPods in, listening to [Lenny's podcast about AI agents](https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/we-replaced-our-sales-team-with-20-ai-agents) for the second time.
About a week earlier during my first listen to this episode I could sense that the content was triggering some thoughts but I wasn't able to translate these thoughts into action. The second time through, I knew the conversation well enough that my mind could wander. I could let the things they were talking about generate connections. It was quiet, peaceful, the kind of drive where I could just think.
I'd been asking my wife to help me figure out how to reposition [Refrigerator Games](https://refrigeratorgames.mosaicmeshai.com/).[^1] What's running in production today is exactly what existed six years ago when I turned off the servers. Frozen in time. Unfortunately, my wife has been too busy to help so this project has just been sitting there waiting.
But driving around those lakes, I realized: I didn't need to wait. I'd been reading about [Simon Willison's experiments with Claude Code for the Web](https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/20/claude-code-for-web/) and I suddenly knew what to try.
How I Learned to Leverage Claude Code - Part 1: Resurrecting an 8-Year-Old Codebase
October 2025. I'd been staring at an 8-year-old Django codebase for years, wanting to resurrect it but never having the time. StartUpWebApp—my "general purpose" e-commerce platform forked from RefrigeratorGames—had been gathering dust since I shut it down to save hosting fees. I always felt like I'd left value on the table.
Then I discovered Claude Code CLI. After experimenting with AI coding tools (GitHub Copilot felt limited), Claude Code was my "ah-ha moment." I had new business ideas—RefrigeratorGames and CarbonMenu—and I needed infrastructure I could fork and iterate on rapidly. I didn't want to depend on someone else's platform. I wanted control.
So I tried: "Evaluate this repository and build a plan to modernize it and deploy to AWS."
Claude surprised me. It understood Django. It broke the work into phases. It thought like I would think. During that first session, I got excited. I could see how this might actually work.
I thought it would take 2-3 weeks. I had no idea.