Using Claude Code To Improve Eagle

In general, I haven't been very outspoken about LLMs in this blog, or in general. For no specific reason other than not using them that much. I'm now revisiting the topic, as I've implemented a few features with the help of Claude Code in Eagle, the little program behind my website. Some context about how my website works: it's fully statically generated with Hugo, except for a few dynamic features powered by Eagle. Eagle is just a wrapper around the Hugo website. Most of the time it just serves static files. However, it does quite a few things on the side. Some time ago, I wrote about my experience using LLMs for code development. At the time, I tried both ChatGPT on their website, as well as GitHub Copilot through VS Code. It did some nice things, but I wasn't really blown away. So I went on using GitHub Copilot as a glorified autocomplete. In the meanwhile, and after constantly seeing stuff online about it and how great it is, I got a month subscription for Claude Code because I wanted to try it out. Mind you: I have used Claude before, but only through its web interface. This is specific about Claude Code. The tasks I gave Claude were things that have been on my ever growing TODO list for quite some time. They're not very complex tasks, but they're things that I don't really get that much pleasure from doing, and they're also not things that I really want. They're good to haves. So... perfect for Claude. Here's what I wanted: Refactor the session management in order to not use JWTs, and instead have a database-based sessions. A goal here was to be able to revoke sessions, and have a better overview of which sessions are active. Refactor the IndieAuth token management in a similar way to the sessions, by no longer using JWTs, storing the access tokens on the database, and be able to revoke them. In addition, also implement refresh token. Replace the usage of BoltDB with SQLite using Gorm. This has also been on my list for quite some time. The good thing here is that I did not need to migrate DB/preserve any data. So it was just replacing the implementation. As I said, the tasks are not very complex, just mildly boring. After asking Claude to do one by one, and reviewing the code it made, I still had to make a few adjustments, or ask Claude to do them for me, whatever I deemed to be faster. In the end, everything worked quite well, and I'm a bit impressed. Just like I said last time, I think it's a great tool, if used well. If you know exactly what you need it to do, and give a direction on how it should be done, it seems to do its thing. I have a few other things I want to add to Eagle, and they're a bit more complex than the tasks I asked Claude to do. So I'm very curious to see how Claude ends up performing. I'm a bit more positive than on my last article! In the meanwhile, Anthropic was offering 6 months of Claude Max for open source maintainers. After applying and waiting a few days, I got a link to activate the subscription. I haven't been able to activate it yet, because of my current subscription. I'm hoping the link doesn't expire in the next few days!