Eight weeks with Claude Code

The problem I started with

The task I most wanted gone: getting YouTube videos and Zoom calls into my second brain.

Every video worth keeping meant being at my desk. Paste the link, type a title, pick a model, wait for the transcript, paste it into another page, choose which of my prompts fit the content, and run it. About 5 minutes of babysitting each time. The real cost was not the 5 minutes, though. Links I found on my phone piled up and I never went back to them.

What I built

• The task I hated, gone. I email a YouTube link to a dedicated inbox, from my phone or anywhere else, and forget about it. A watcher on my Mac pulls the audio, transcribes it with Whisper, picks the right prompt for the content, and saves a finished note in my second brain. 122 videos have landed that way since August 4, none pasted by hand. The bottleneck was never the transcription, it was me having to be at the desk, and that part is gone. Zoom calls take one step at my desk: I drag the recording in or paste its link, and the rest runs on its own.
• A second brain I can talk to. My music production notes, mentor sessions and tutorials in one private app I can search and chat with.
• A configured AI workstation. Claude Code with a CLAUDE.md in every project, a browser it can drive (Playwright), and my own reusable commands kept in one repo: set up security, review an app with fresh eyes, map what an app actually does, and prove an app works. Every repo has a check that refuses a commit holding a password or key.
• An assistant that texts me. GoBot, an open source Telegram agent I set up and extended on my own Mac. It stays on through restarts, remembers facts about me and finds them by meaning, sends a morning briefing at 9:00, and has a production advisor that reads my music notes before it answers.
• A live app I built. ServiceIsDue, my course project: a due list for yearly service calls at small home service shops. Each shop logs in and sees only its own customers. Live at serviceisdue.com.
• A system that survives an outage. If Claude is down, GoBot falls back to a cheaper model on OpenRouter, then to a model running on my own Mac. I broke Claude on purpose and the reply still came back, through OpenRouter. Real monthly cost: $100 flat for the Claude Max plan. The app, its database and GoBot's memory run on free plans, and the fallback costs cents, only when it is used.

GoBot describing itself on Telegram.

What I learned

The rules that held were the ones a test enforces; the rules that slipped were the ones that only lived in a comment.

What I can build for your business

Custom AI systems for a small business: a private knowledge base that turns videos, calls and notes into answers you can ask for, an assistant that remembers you and works by text, and web apps with logins that run on their own, tested before anyone has to trust them.