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.