u/zediman

Same livery, same EuroBonus, same A320neo cabin – but a different AOC and a different pay scale. I wrote up the history of SAS Connect for Flygbladet (my site, Swedish-language aviation news): from the 2017 announcement that openly cited the 40–50% Scandinavian crew cost gap, through the 2022 pilot strike that cost SAS over 1.5bn SEK, to the Heathrow cabin crew who struck over Christmas last year after Unite said members were using food banks.

Connect is now past 30 EI-registered A320neos, up from nine in 2021. The peace obligation from 2022 expires in early 2028, and Air France-KLM takes majority control later this year – so someone in Paris has to decide fairly soon whether three parallel AOCs are worth keeping.

https://flygbladet.se/bolaget-sas-byggde-for-att-slippa-svenska-avtal/

Happy to answer questions on the sourcing.

I've been building Flygbladet.se, a Swedish aviation site (news + forum + job listings + flight school directory), almost entirely through Claude Code. It's a custom WordPress theme: no npm, no Composer, no build framework, no page builder, no SEO or ACF plugins. Vanilla PHP, CSS and JS.

The core of it is a CLAUDE.md with a handful of non-negotiable rules:

That wasn't nostalgia. It was a deliberate bet that the fewer moving parts, the fewer places an agent can silently break something it can't see.

- Only edit sources, never the .min files — a Python script regenerates those on deploy

- Procedural PHP only. No classes, no namespaces, no autoloading. Every function prefixed, every file guarded with if ( ! defined( 'ABSPATH' ) ) exit;

- Deploy ships files, never content. Posts and settings live in the server DB and are created by admin buttons — never by editing PHP

- Escape every output

What surprised me is how much the "no classes" rule mattered. The theme is now 32 modules in inc/. Because everything is a flat prefixed function, Claude can grep for a name and get the definition and every call site in one pass. No inheritance chain to trace, no DI container, no magic. When I ask "does anything else use this?", the answer is complete.

The related rule that saved me repeatedly: the three entity-page modules (airlines / airports / charter operators) are self-contained mirrors of each other. Each carries its own render helpers even where that means near-duplicate code. Reason: deploys go over SFTP, and a partial upload that lands one file but not another must not be able to produce an undefined-function fatal. Deduplicating those into a shared module would be "cleaner" and strictly worse.

Happy to share the CLAUDE.md structure if useful.

Curious whether others have found that removing tooling made agentic coding better rather than worse?