In Claude We Trust

We rescheduled this episode four times, and when we finally recorded it, it sat unedited for two months. Same reason both times. We’ve been obsessively using Claude to transform our business. Over the past two and a half months we’ve built a dozen custom apps that all run off one shared internal database to manage Chill Country’s day-to-day operations. What we’ve pulled off since April would quite literally have been impossible before Claude.

This is a PSA: the AI revolution has arrived. Buckle up. Things are going to get weird.

I didn’t believe the hype

Back in April, my good friend Mike (whose opinions I hold in high regard) was buzzing about the latest advancement in AI. He claimed he was building real, complex software by himself without writing a single line of code. Mike is a CMO-level marketing guy slash tech hobbyist, with no engineering background. I have a background in web development, mostly front-end UX, and his claims sounded like an exaggeration. Sure, maybe you could spin up a prototype that looked impressive. But good luck actually using and maintaining your “vibe-coded” software in practice.

After finally diving in, it turns out Mike was right, and I was so, so wrong.

Claude Code is a magic portal for digital creation

AI chat is impressive, and it’s genuinely helpful for a huge range of tasks. I’ve used ChatGPT for years to move faster and take on projects otherwise beyond my skillset. But AI chat is also frustrating. It makes mistakes constantly and delivers wrong answers with total confidence.

None of what Mike described matched my experience with ChatGPT, so I kept brushing him off. Eventually he gave up explaining and said, “just download Claude, then let’s talk.”

So I downloaded Claude.

Claude immediately felt smarter and more capable than ChatGPT, but I was still just typing into a chat window. A few days later our digital ad agency asked for some new landing pages, so I figured I’d try Claude Code. A project like that used to take a couple hours with ChatGPT (already a huge upgrade over my old pre-ChatGPT process). With Claude Code I built perfect landing pages in 15 minutes.

“Maybe Mike was right,” I thought to myself.

Two months later I’m still tumbling down this rabbit hole, and I still can’t see the bottom. I’m Claude Coding all day, every day (I’m running a prompt right now as I write this blog post). My projects keep getting more ambitious, our business keeps getting easier to run, and I have never had more fun or felt more creative behind a computer. Anything I can dream up in the digital realm, I can build. It feels like a superpower. The only question left is, “What should I create next?”

Check out some of the things we built

We’ve spent most of our time Claude’ing apps behind-the-scenes to improve the foundation of the business, but a few projects are customer-facing and live right now:

• Chill Country Bird Hunt. A nostalgic, Chill Country themed video game where you win discount codes for shooting birds. Play now. (Pro tip: shoot the golden bird for the biggest discount.)
• Chill Country Rewards. We rebuilt it as a pure 10% cashback program. You earn $1 in credit for every $10 you spend at chillcountry.com. It’s easy to apply your credit at checkout and it never expires. If you’ve ever bought our gummies online, you already have credit waiting under your email address. Sign in here and check your balance.

Listen to episode 6 of the Chill Country Report

We recorded this conversation on 5/7/2026, about ten days after I first dove into Claude and started pointing it at our business. Some of the information and explanations are already outdated. We only used Claude Cowork briefly and now use 100% Claude Code. My workflow has also changed about 5 times. Things are moving fast… Give it a listen:

• Category: AI, BTS, Podcast