Claude Code helped me bring my dead passion project back to life
TL;DR: Claude Code took a half-finished HeroMachine conversion and helped me complete it over a long weekend.
I'm the creator of HeroMachine, a free Flash-based character creator that's been around since 1998. Over 25 years I and a handful of other artists hand-drew nearly 10,000 items (heads, bodies, weapons, capes, the works) so people could assemble their own superhero illustrations. It found a real audience in tabletop gamers, writers, teachers, kids who just wanted to see their character come to life, and middle-aged dudes like me who once dreamed of a career in comics. At its peak HeroMachine 3 had tens of thousands of active users.
Then Flash died in 2020, and HeroMachine died with it.
I tried to rebuild. I really did. I hired a developer, spent thousands of dollars, and got back an unfinished product. I tried redoing it myself, but the sheer scope was paralyzing and I just didn't have the energy any more after working my day job every day.
HeroMachine 3 has thousands of hand-drawn items across 30+ equipment slots, each with three-channel coloring, transforms, layering, masking, and more. Rebuilding all of that from scratch while also converting every item from Flash's internal format to SVG? I burned out. Real life got in the way. After a while it just felt like I'd failed, and I stopped trying.
Fast forward to earlier this year. In my day job as a web developer, I started using Claude Code to automate tedious migration work like taking old WordPress sites and converting their content into our modern custom-built blocks. The kind of work where you know exactly what needs to happen, it's just painfully repetitive.
One Friday night I had the thought: "If it can convert old WordPress content, maybe it can help convert those old HeroMachine items, too."
Five days later I had a working app.
I want to be real about what that means, because I have the same genuine concerns about AI I know a lot of you do.
What AI did NOT do:
- Draw a single item. Every piece of art is still hand-drawn by me and a small group of human artists over the past 25 years. Every creative decision, from what to draw, how to draw it, and what looks right, is still mine.
- Design the application. HeroMachine's logic — the architecture, feature set, how items and colors and transforms work together — was designed and written by me in ActionScript over 10+ years. Claude Code helped me translate that existing design into a modern stack, but every decision about what the app should do came from me.
What AI did do:
- Help me translate my existing ActionScript code into modern JavaScript and Svelte. I'd point it at the decompiled ActionScript code, explain how something worked, and it would produced the refactored result.
- Automate the conversion of thousands of Flash-format items into clean SVGs.
- Help me debug when I got stuck and build new features quickly when I had ideas.
- Eliminate the parts that were actually stopping me: the tedium, the unfamiliar syntax, the sheer volume of conversion work that made the whole project feel impossible.
I got more done in five days than in the previous five years. Not because the AI is smarter than me, but because it removed the wall between "I know exactly what this should be" and "I can actually ship it."
I'll be honest, I find AI companies' business practices troubling. I have real concerns about what AI will do to my own industry and my actual job, not to mention the huge data center being built less than an hour from where I live that could have a massive impact on our environment. I hate that it's positioned to take over the fun, creative parts of work while leaving us with the grunt work. Am I sharpening the axe that will ultimately be used on people like me? Maybe.
I've sat with that, and I don't have a clean answer.
What I can tell you is that I sunk 25 years into HeroMachine and it was dead. Now it lives again, and I have a hard time convincing myself that's an altogether bad thing.
HeroMachine 3 "Phoenix Edition" (it rose from the ashes!) is free and live now if you want to check it out. I'm happy to answer questions about the process, the tech, or the ethics of it. I don't think this is a simple story, but at least it's an honest one.