Take back of the Internet
Bluesky is where I prefer to do my social mediaing. Like most sites it has a particular perspective on things and the overwhelming attitude towards AI is something along the lines of: Industrial plagiarism machine. Most of this is due to how AI is encountered. It’s filling all of our social media feeds, google search results are garbage now, creepy folks are using with their personal surveilance glassed to be creeps in public. All these things are true. The refrain you hear from many folks is: AI is only good at programming, I’m not a programmer, and I want nothing to do with it.
You may not be a programmer, but you most certainly use software. Software is largely created by large corporations and most of us are consumers. We wait for companies to release it and then we use it. If it doesnt work or just works poorly, we may complain about it. However, most companies are too large and the software they produce is targets broad audience, so our suggestions/greiviences are not likely to gain any traction.
So what is a non-programmer to do?
You may not be a programmer but with Claude Code you can certainly create software. Not only can you create software, you can create software that does what you want. You can control almost every aspect of what you do. And in the process you can take back control over how you use computers and limit how much of your data these giant corporations can harvest.
I’ve been exploring these ideas with a series of projects. My intention is to take this space to expand on that a bit. Here is a list of what I’ve done and I will explain the details about these projects in the future:
- Creating this blog and Quarto site.
- Integrating health data from Apple and other sources to track my health and fitness goals.
- Creating a local archive of all of my email going back to the 90s and a gmail-like interface that allows me to search and actually find information.
- Creating my own youtube archiving and recommendation algorithm.
- Combining my data from streaming sites to allow me to actually find TV shows and movies I want to watch.
- Building my own PDF viewer/editor that works the way I think it should, with only the features it should, and essentially removing my need to buy Adobe Acrobat.
- Creating a custom DVR to manage my security cameras.
- Creating a service to manage all of this: Monitoring the health of these services and assigning service tickets (for bug fixes and new features). These tickets are resolved automatically by Claude Code.
If you’re interested in doing this yourself, this is how you can get started if you’re using a Mac. First install these tools:
- Xcode
- Docker Desktop
- An IDE like vscode or positron
- Brew brew.sh - This is aone liner you copy/paste into the terminal
- Claude Code of course - The pro subscruption costs $20/month or $200/year
You don’t have to have an IDE. It’s convenient if you want so see how the code changes as Claude works. Both vscode and positron have a terminal built in. If you don’t use an IDE you can use the macos terminal.