I did more in 30 days with Claude than I did in a year.
I've been on a long, slow struggle. What to do, where to look, how to calibrate myself, all while dealing with some personal issues and clearing up the wreckage of a few rough years.
Then I pulled the trigger on Claude AI and Claude Code, and ditched every other AI agent.
Context
When OpenAI took the world by storm, I wasn't one of the people who jumped straight in. I sat back and watched everyone else experiment, watched social media flood with templates, endless prompt lists, and breathless claims about what AI could do.
Venture capital poured billions into AI startups. I still wasn't fazed. I had too much to sort out in my own life. After a string of brutal up-and-downswings, I decided in 2026 to start experimenting again and find some purpose.
That took a while. My first real idea, back in late 2025, was a notes app for language learners. I was out of my depth, and it showed.
The effort wasn't wasted, though. Out of that attempt, I shipped a clean, minimal rich docs editor, which became the spark for what's now my venture, Ryoka.
Anyway, back to the point.
Claude AI is a saviour
The flagship product I ended up building didn't come out of thin air. I'm not a developer. I'd only dabbled in "prompt engineering" or "vibe coding" or whatever they're calling it this month, for a few months at most. But the result of building TWO Docs surprised me enough that something shifted.
It motivated me so much that I secluded myself and turned into a productivity machine, with an endless list of ideas I actually wanted to chase.
I got so fired up that looking back after a month of using Claude AI, I genuinely didn't realize how much I'd built:
Ryoka OS dashboard, custom-tailored to my workflow. (fully functional)
Sorano, a micro-SaaS for sharing a public roadmap, changelog, and community votes (fully functional)
TWO Docs, for creating beautiful documents — fully functional, in beta
Ryoka Group, my pillar and permanent capital company
Aegos Intel, company intelligence and data — currently in development
All of that, in 30 days of focus, from zero to one. I feel genuinely proud of it.
For someone who has no idea how to code, who's used to hiring endless lines of developers who barely understood what was going on themselves, Claude AI opened my eyes.
I gave it clear instructions from the start:
I can't use an IDE, so I rely on the GitHub web editor
I don't know how to use Vercel, Supabase, or Neon, so Claude had to hold that knowledge for me and walk me through it
I also trained Claude that if more than a few lines in a file need to be changed, I want a full replacement file, not a patch, so I don't make stupid mistakes copying things over
The deeper I went into each project, the more Claude understood my preferences for that specific project.
The biggest trick, for me, has been this: every time I ship or finish an important part, I ask for a detailed recap. What Claude got wrong, what actually got built, and what's still on the horizon. That recap habit is what's kept me oriented instead of lost in my own momentum.
Full capacity
I know there are dozens of posts every day about how to use this tool or that one, and people swap LLMs and AI agents like it's nothing. But I've learned that just sticking to a workflow and a stack that works for me means I don't go looking for something new when nothing's broken.
I'm aware I'm probably not using my Claude Pro plan at full capacity. My prompts and instructions could almost certainly be sharper, more contextual. I'm still early in figuring out how far this goes.
That said, what I built alone in 30 days with Claude AI, on the Pro subscription, should have taken me 6 to 12 months with developers and thousands of dollars a month. I did it for $20.
More than the output, though, is what it's done for me. I feel like myself again. Back in good shape, genuinely productive, heading into the rest of 2026 with a list of things I want to build instead of a list of things I'm avoiding.