I think I'm starting to really appreciate what the clankers can do for a guy like me. I'll be the first to admit I barely ever know what I'm doing. I stumble through with guides and advice and picking up what knowledge I can from listening to others or just from the brute-force of experience.
But in the last month, I've managed to:
・ create a very simple Daggerfall Unity mod to rename in-game items (SkoomaRenamer, turned Potions of Orc Strength into Skooma)
・ successfully reinstall and backup-restore a SeaweedFS server, as well as security harden it with CORS rules as well other things
・ extract .onion Hidden Service keys from a defunct tor Docker container and transplant them into a new one on my p2pool/monero node server to keep it running
In every case, normally I would have hit the wall of "I don't know what I'm doing, and I don't even know how to figure out what I need to know to be able to continue" and given up out of frustration. Sure I could post in a forum or a repo issue tracker, but what are the odds anybody will even give me an answer, let alone have the patience for all my beginner-ass questions?
But now I can just copy-paste error logs along with explanations into Claude (via search engine wrapper) and it'll give me easy to understand, step-by-step, beginner friendly instructions on how to get it done, along with troubleshooting as errors pop up. In an hour I can get from "I have no idea how the fuck any of this works" to a functioning solution with minimal friction. It'll never get tired of my shit, or call me an idiot, it just answers all my questions, and in the process I learn a little bit more about how shit works.
I'm actually thinking of trying to make a PeerTube plugin via the same process, just to see how far I can take this. Stuff that normally felt like it would have been forever out of reach now feels possible, and I kind of like it.