I've been mostly shitting on AI these days (also sick of the "built 15 apps in 15 minutes" crowd), but Claud just did something wild for me, a project that would otherwise take MONTHS.
Had it help me rip out our entire search engine (we're talking millions and millions of records) and migrate it from SQL "full-text search" to a small embedded, in-process Lucene port (Lucene is what powers Elasticsearch under the hood).
Our app has thousands of tenants with millions of tickets - the search went from 7-8 seconds down to fucking milliseconds.
The rewrite was the easy part though. The real work was all the one-off CLI tooling for index rebuilding, compaction, deduplication, gradual deploy... Literally dozens of tools. Also prep-work, tech-stack deciding, risk analysis, benchmarking, planning...
The reindexing job itself ran for 39 HOURS STRAIGHT, reporting nice progress graphs and auto-fixing errors as it went. It just finished and eberything checks out
not gonna turn into one of those AI evangelists, but claude saved me weeks of the most tedious infrastructure grind imaginable. And I've been trying to approach this project for literally YEARS.