Who I am

I'm Jay. I have a history degree and I work in HR. I've got a love for writing that goes back decades. When English became the coding language of choice — when you could describe what you wanted and an AI would build it — I was finally able to take my writing skills and the logic that comes with them and apply them to a place I'd always wanted to.

I'm not a developer. I never have been. Everything you see here — this site, the tools, the automations, the podcast — was built with Claude Code by someone who can't write a for-loop from memory. If I can do it, you can do it.

The origin

In 1985 or '86, I pulled a book off the shelf in my junior high library. It was Frederik Pohl's Beyond the Blue Event Horizon, the second book in the Heechee Saga. I've forgotten most of the plot, but one thing stayed with me for nearly forty years: a character had an Albert Einstein chatbot. Just a screen with Einstein's face, trained on everything he'd ever written or said. You could ask it questions and Albert would answer.

That was the most amazing thing I could imagine at the time. I carried that concept around for decades, always thinking: that's the future. I hope I'm alive when it arrives.

It arrived on the night of November 22, 2022. By December I was on ChatGPT 3, and by late winter 2023 I'd hired an iOS developer to build an app idea I had. We got it on the App Store. That fall, when custom GPTs came out, I replaced the app I'd paid a few thousand dollars for with a custom GPT that took me less than an hour to build. That was the moment I understood how fast this was moving.

From there it accelerated. I worked with my brother on a medical dictation device he still uses to this day. I wrote my first book with AI. I was building apps on Replit — until the costs got out of control, eating into every margin. So I moved to Claude Code, started in the terminal, got into VS Code, and never looked back. I used the Claude web app and desktop app to teach me how to use Claude Code. AI taught me how to use itself.

By December 2025, after building micro-SaaS tools, automations, websites, and bigger systems, I realized: I've got a lot of knowledge, and there must be people like me out there. People who aren't developers but want to build real things with AI — beyond the chat interface.

That's where Claude Code Pirates came from.

What this is

Claude Code Pirates is a space for people building with Claude Code without a developer background. You'll find build logs, experiments that work (and ones that don't), Claude Code workflows, and integrations with local LLMs, n8n, Electron, web apps, MCPs, Skills, and sub-agents.

This is not a course, a bootcamp, or a "make money with AI" program. It's a working space for curious, independent builders — especially non-coders — who want to build and evolve their own systems.

I prefer building tools over paying ongoing subscriptions for partial solutions I don't own. Most projects here use free, open, or freemium platforms stitched together pragmatically. If you're tired of paying for SaaS where you use 20% and own 0%, you're in the right place.

Two paths

You've got two choices here: DIY or DWI (done with instruction).

Either way, it's me and my first mate — Claude Code — showing you how to build things that actually work.