This summer I did something I had wanted to do for years: build software that does exactly what I need. With AI as part of my development process.
What started as far too many hours talking to Claude Code grew into a small digital environment around ITKaro.
A company cockpit
It shows me every week what is happening in my business. Leads, conversations in progress, what is still open. One overview, so I don't have to open five systems before my first coffee.
And yes, there is a fairly stern assistant in it that tells me what I should have done and didn't.
"Nice that you built all that software for yourself, but where is your second client?"
Fair point.
A learning portal
learning.itkaro.com runs an interactive AI course. Not just an explanation of how AI works, but AI actually inside the lessons. Set permissions wrong and you see straight away what happens.
With a working Claude Haiku model underneath.
An assessment tool
It scores organisations against NIST and ISO 27001, among others. It is running right now in a live assessment for a mid-sized manufacturer in England.
And the whole thing runs locally. Database, application, tooling. The information is a little too sensitive for anything else.
And of course an investment dashboard
Because I had had enough of my custom Excel. Live price data, analysis, and a runway calculator that works out which month you run out of money if you keep spending to your own budget.
Fairly confronting when you are still starting up in freelance mode.
What sits underneath
It all deploys itself. What goes into Git goes live through containers. Scheduled tasks pull information in and process it. The whole online environment costs me about €0.60 a week.
And that is perhaps the most important thing I learned about AI this summer. It does not replace my trade, it makes me faster at it. Ideas that used to sit around for months I can now actually build. And I have more time left for the part I am paid for: thinking, deciding, solving problems.
Which is why I would not sell a client an AI-built product as if I had fully mastered traditional development. Because I am not a real software developer. But AI letting me turn my own craft into working software much faster? That I find rather exciting.
Next week I am giving a week of free access to the AI course. I am mainly curious whether what I built also survives a few hundred curious people from LinkedIn.