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AI Hack #683: Learn The Tools

Thanks to AI, ideas that have been on the back burner for years can now see the light of day.

By Henry Clifford

Three projects that sat on my to-do list for two years are now running while I sleep. Here’s what changed:

In early February, two things happened in quick succession that I think every integrator needs to understand. First, OpenClaw launched. Essentially an AI agent that runs 24/7 on a Mac Mini or virtual server, it is capable of doing anything a person typing at a keyboard can do. It shipped with serious security flaws, so I wouldn’t touch it outside of an air-gapped lab environment. But the concept was the signal.

Also by Henry Clifford: AI Hack #723: Tell Them It’s Going To Die

A few weeks later, Anthropic launched Claude Cowork, a mode that lets you remotely supervise AI working on your computer while you’re out and about. Think “crockpot.” You set it, you check on it, you come back to something finished. Combined with Claude Code, it meant you could build real, working software tools without being a developer, without a big budget, and without sitting at your desk all day.

Here’s what that unlocked for me at Livewire:

The Livewire Intel Engine

The Livewire Intel Engine

For years, I’ve wanted an agent that reads industry news daily, scores articles based on fit with our client profiles across residential and commercial, and queues outreach automatically using the same format I’ve been doing manually for years. Every time I priced it out with a developer, it died on the spreadsheet. I stood it up with Claude Code in a few hours. It’s been running and sending every morning since.

Livewire Permit Miner

Permit Miner

Construction permit data is gold for a company like ours. It tells you exactly who’s building what and where, all before they’ve hired anyone. The data exists at every locality, but scraping it used to mean expensive subscriptions or a developer willing to build custom integrations for each jurisdiction. Claude Code doesn’t mind that drudgery. A couple of hours later I had a system monitoring our surrounding localities for luxury builds, pools, remodels, and new construction, automatically pushing matches to a direct mail service called Lob and generating postcards with personalized URLs.

Outdoor Lighting Visualizer

Outdoor Lighting Visualizer

Upload a daytime photo of your home and see what it looks like with outdoor lighting applied. The goal is to hand prospects a value-add before they’ve ever met our sales team, then feed that same list into a direct mail pipeline.

Three projects. Multiple years on the to-do list. A few weekends to ship them all. I first heard the term “vibe code” about a year ago. I played around with platforms like Replit, but most of my efforts got stuck at 80%. One of my buddies introduced me to a software developer overseas. We worked on some projects together, but got stuck anytime nuance became important. Claude Code compressed my timelines. Instead of calling someone, explaining my vision, validating alignment, and then scheduling a review (usually a week later) to check on progress, Claude does it all in a matter of minutes, enabling a near instant feedback loop.

I feel the same way about agentic AI as the first time I took a Waymo driverless car in San Francisco. At first, I couldn’t imagine riding in a vehicle without a human at the wheel. After a few rides, I couldn’t imagine taking a ride where I didn’t have my music dialed in without needing to make small talk (I know that sounds horrible!). I got a dopamine hit from getting Claude Code to create something instantaneously and became almost resentful of the now seemingly Luddite process of explaining a production task to a junior employee. Sue me for saying the quiet part out loud, but it’s not to be ignored.

Also by Henry Clifford: AI Hack #673: Negotiating With ChatGPT Riding Shotgun

CI businesses are well insulated from employment disintermediation across installation, service, project management, and sales, but this instant work loop is the equivalent of pay at the pump or Amazon Prime. We’re now ratcheting up our expectations around how quickly we can bring ideas to life and can’t unsee what’s happening around us.

Is Claude Code perfect? Hell no. Is it a panacea? Also, hell no. Drudgery is fair game right now. Creative and knowledge work still very much need humans in the loop and the misapplication of AI in those spaces is creating slop at scale.

The honest truth: The barrier was never budget. It was always time and willingness. Claude Code collapsed the technical gap. The willingness part is still on you.

Here’s Exactly Where to Start, In Order:

What project has been sitting on your list for two years that you could actually build this weekend?

Stay frosty, and see you in the field.

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