For a long time, I was pretty anti-AI.
I thought it was mostly hype and a bit of a gimmick.
Useful for rewriting emails or essays maybe, but not something that would actually help me in a meaningful way.
None of it really interested me.
That’s changed completely over the last few months.
And it’s wild to say this, but I don’t think I’ve ever been this excited about a tool before.
Almost all of that excitement comes down to one thing – Claude Code.
To be fair, you could apply a lot of this to other AI tools too.
Claude just happens to be the one I’m using.
But the shift in how I work, what I build, and what I even think is possible has been huge.
I’m not a developer (and I don’t want to be)
Some context that’s important here.
I’m not a developer.
I don’t aim to be one.
I don’t even really enjoy coding.
I’ve done bits of coding over the years, but there’s no world where I’d call myself a programmer.
I’m very much a GUI (graphical user interface) person.
I like visual tools.
I like things I can see and move around.
That’s why I consider myself a designer.
Six months ago, opening the Terminal felt like hacking into the Matrix.
It was intimidating, and something I avoided unless I absolutely had to.
Now, weirdly, the Terminal has become one of my favourite tools for building things.
The moment AI started feeling different
I first tried Claude back in September.
At the time, I used it for fairly basic stuff, like building a photography website from a folder of images.
Useful, but nothing mind-blowing.
What changed over the last few months is that I stopped treating it like a helper and started treating it like an operator.
I began doing things that, realistically, I probably shouldn’t be doing as someone who doesn’t really know what they’re doing.
Things like SSH-ing into a VPS, handing control over to Claude, and just letting it work.
If it was something mission-critical, I wouldn’t do this.
But for test servers and experimental projects, it’s been some of the most fun I’ve had building anything.
The crazy part is that this kind of workflow isn’t even that unusual anymore.
A lot of developers are doing similar things.
The difference is that now people like me can too.
Building automation without knowing how automation works
One of the first bigger ideas I had was to build a Zapier-style automation tool.
Which, in hindsight, is a ridiculous thing to attempt.
But instead of shutting the idea down, Claude pointed me toward something I’d never heard of before: n8n.
n8n is essentially an automation workflow platform with superpowers.
You can automate almost anything, and the best part for me was that it has a self-hosted version.
That meant full control, and no ongoing software fees beyond hosting.
After a lot of research — and a lot of asking Claude what I should do — I ended up hosting it on a VPS.
Claude even helped me decide how to host it in the first place.
Letting Claude manage my VPS
After n8n was running, I started asking Claude what else I could self-host.
I’d been wanting a Google Analytics alternative for a while because Google Analytics just feels bloated.
Too much going on.
Too much noise.
That’s how I ended up installing Plausible Analytics.
What blew my mind wasn’t Plausible itself.
It was the fact that I didn’t even use a VPS dashboard to install it.
I logged in via Terminal, handed control to Claude, and a few minutes later it was running.
Six months earlier, I would’ve given up the second something didn’t work.
Now I had a VPS running multiple services that I’d installed myself, without really knowing how any of it worked.
That’s when it clicked for me, this wasn’t about learning server management anymore.
It was about learning how to ask better questions.
Realising I needed a proper system
At the start, I was winging everything.
Prompting directly into a VPS.
No backups, or version control, or structure.
It worked, but it was chaotic.
If I actually wanted to build real websites and apps, I needed a system.
But I didn’t want to slow everything down by doing things the “traditional” way.
That’s when I found an app called Conductor.
I think of Conductor as a juiced-up Terminal.
It lets you connect your LLM of choice, whether that’s Claude or something else, and wraps everything into one clean interface.
On one side you have your repositories, in the middle your chat and prompting, and on the other side your files, diffs, and Terminal.
For me, this was the missing piece.
It made the whole process feel organised without killing the speed.
Automating the entire workflow
Once I had Conductor in place, everything started clicking together.
I could build something locally with Claude, push it to GitHub, and then have it deployed automatically.
Suddenly, I wasn’t just building random experiments — I had a full pipeline.
Prompt.
Build.
Version.
Deploy.
That was the “holy sh*t” moment.
Not because it was fancy, but because it meant I could focus entirely on the idea and the quality of what I was making.
The infrastructure faded into the background.
Building something proper for the first time
After learning the ropes, I decided to try building something real.
That’s how Digital Creator Club came to life.
It’s a website with a paywall, user accounts, Discord integration, and a membership system.
A year ago, I wouldn’t have even attempted something like this.
It was too custom, and too specific.
I would’ve had to stitch together a bunch of tools and compromise on how it worked.
With Claude Code, I could build exactly what I wanted and extend it over time.
New features, new functionality, whatever I feel like adding.
What’s still hard to believe is that in the first week after launching, it made nearly $20,000.
That honestly blew my mind.
Why this changed everything for me
A year ago, I barely used AI at all.
Most of what I saw people doing with it felt uninteresting to me.
Rewriting emails, or summarising text.
That stuff never really clicked.
But using AI to build software, automate workflows, and create things that can actually make money..?
That changed everything.
Claude Code has massively expanded what I’m capable of building on my own.
And because of that, it’s completely changed how I think about making money online.
Now, my focus is simple.
I want to build things.
I want to ship things.
And I want those things to generate income.
That’s the whole point of my finance YouTube channel, Oliur Online, and this blog.
I’m figuring things out in real time and sharing the process along the way.
Start building
Claude Code isn’t just another tool for me.
It’s removed friction in places I never thought I’d get past.
I don’t need to be a developer.
I don’t need to master infrastructure.
I just need a clear idea and the willingness to try.
And right now, that feels incredibly powerful.
If you want to go deeper into this side of things, check out my videos on high-income skills for 2026, or how I made $50,000 selling iPhone wallpapers.
That still doesn’t feel real to me.
But this — this feels like the start of something much bigger.