The creator of HeroMachine - a free, browser-based character creator that has been running since 1998 - used Claudee Code](/tools/claude-code/) to complete a stalled conversion project over a single long weekend. The announcement describes how a half-finished project finally crossed the finish line with AI assistance after sitting incomplete for years.
HeroMachine lets users build illustrated characters by layering nearly 10,000 hand-drawn components: heads, bodies, weapons, capes, costumes, and more. The tool found a dedicated audience among tabletop roleplayers, comic fans, and anyone who wanted custom character portraits without drawing skills. It ran on Adobe Flash, which Adobe officially retired in December 2020, effectively breaking every Flash-based tool on the web overnight.
The conversion - moving HeroMachine from Flash to a format modern browsers support natively - had been sitting half-done for years. Claude Code picked up the incomplete project and helped push through to a working version over a weekend. Claude Code is Anthropic's terminal-based coding assistant; it reads and writes files, runs commands, and can navigate large codebases without losing context. A 25-year-old project with nearly 10,000 assets is exactly the kind of sprawling, context-heavy task where that capability matters.
This is a good illustration of where AI coding tools are actually landing for real developers: rescuing projects that would otherwise stay permanently unfinished. A solo creator with a legacy codebase and limited free time completed something genuinely difficult in a weekend. That practical use case - one developer, one old project, one weekend - is more representative of AI coding tools' actual impact than most frontier benchmark comparisons suggest.