I wanted to actually learn how to build with AI instead of just reading about it. Not a tutorial. Not a throwaway example. Real projects, deployed publicly, with my name on them.
I built three tools in about a week, working with Claude the whole way through: planning, writing code, and just as importantly, debugging the parts that broke. Here's what actually happened, including the parts that didn't go smoothly.
The three tools
A document Q&A tool. Ask questions about your own documents, get answers grounded in them with citations. Local embeddings, a small vector search I could read top to bottom, and Claude generating the final answer.
A lead-triage API. Reads an inbound contact-form message and classifies it: category, urgency, a one-line summary, before it hits an inbox. Different core technique from the first tool: structured extraction instead of retrieval.
A content repurposing tool. Paste in a blog post or transcript, get back a summary, three distinct social posts, and an email blurb. The first one that generates new content instead of reading or classifying existing content.
Three tools, three different core AI techniques. That was deliberate: I didn't want a portfolio that was the same trick three times.
What actually separates a demo from something real
Claude answered questions correctly, classified messages sensibly, wrote reasonable social copy. That part is close to solved technology at this point.
What actually separates a working demo from something people can depend on is everything around the model: infrastructure that holds up under real constraints, catching problems before they get expensive, and knowing the difference between "my code is wrong" and "something else in the system is doing something unexpected," then proving which one it actually is instead of guessing.
That's the part that doesn't show up in a tutorial. It's also the part that actually matters once a client is depending on what you built.
Where this leaves me
Three tools, all live, all still running. A portfolio site with a real domain. And a solid answer to the question every potential client is going to ask eventually: have you actually shipped anything real?
If you're working on something similar, or just curious how any of this works, get in touch, that's what the form is for.