I replaced a paid SaaS tool in one evening with Claude Code

The skill you're most proud of? Someone with no experience and an AI tool can now do it in an afternoon. And that's just the first card falling.

This #UnfilteredFriday, let's talk about how AI makes the expensive cheap, the exclusive open, and the slow instant. Will the entire house of cards simply collapse?

Replacing a SaaS tool overnight

I've been using a unique setup built on Airtable, an enterprise low-code cloud platform that I use to track my work. I'm proud of the system. It took me weeks to build in 2021, and I've improved it over the years.

Then I decided to build a replacement using Claude Code on a whim last Sunday evening. By Monday morning, I had a functional app that replicates my main use case for the pricey SaaS service: the ability to plan work tasks within a calendar interface.

What's more, I've also fully integrated my Todoist task list and corporate Office 365 calendar, neither of which could be done in my previous setup. I even added the ability to drag tasks across weeks, something that isn't possible with Airtable's Calendar view. In one evening, I had surpassed years of incremental improvement on a paid platform.

AI in the theatre of war

A couple of weeks back, a friend sent me a YouTube video of a presentation. In it, an executive at the US Department of War shared how it is using AI to gain a decisive advantage in military operations.

The details were glossed over, but the bottom line was stark: hours of work by teams of intelligence officers is now "significantly" compressed. In the video, the speaker showed how he used a mouse to select a vehicle seen in live satellite imagery, right clicked to see its licence plate, and with one more click marked it for destruction.

Almost a dozen workflows are then kicked into action, air assets are redirected, and the right munitions chosen. Just a few clicks set the entire course of action into motion. The gap between intelligence and lethal action, once measured in hours, has been compressed to minutes. If that doesn't illustrate the speed at which AI is reshaping how things work, nothing will.

The cards are falling

AI is collapsing barriers, democratising capabilities, and speeding up workflows in a way that is mind-blowing, even for me as I use it daily.

If you are still dipping your toes in the free AI models out there, know that the frontier models are much better and continue to improve rapidly. I was told that many of the things done in Claude Code today were only possible as of late 2025. I've only used it for two weeks, and I already see new capabilities being added.

I'm not sure if even learning AI and getting versed in it is adequate preparation for what's ahead. I don't know everything. But I do know this: if the cards are already falling, standing still isn't an option.