February 22, 2026
I almost didn’t bother.
I had subscriptions to OpenAI and Gemini already. I’d read the think pieces, listened to the podcasts, absorbed the expert takes. And somewhere in the back of my mind I’d quietly decided: I’m probably not technical enough to get the real benefit from this one. Claude Code felt like a tool for developers. I’m a consultant who leans nerdy — but still.
I installed it at 8am anyway.
By 9:30, I had rebuilt my entire WordPress site.
Let me be precise about what that means. The WordPress installation I’m talking about took me weeks to set up. It’s been sitting there, quietly accumulating technical debt, while I avoided the moment I’d have to rethink it — update the service offering, rework the portfolio, make the whole thing actually reflect where the work has gone. That kind of project lives in the “someday” column for a reason.
It didn’t live there anymore.
The night before, I’d been testing Lovable — a no-code UI tool — to sketch some ideas for the site. It looked reasonable, but it wasn’t compatible with my WordPress stack. A dead end, or so I thought. This morning, I dropped the Lovable reference link into Claude Code and asked it to build the same design directly onto my WordPress install — in a sandbox subdomain, just in case it went sideways.
What followed was something I genuinely wasn’t prepared for.
The model worked. Not like a tool waiting for instructions. Like an agent — testing its own outputs, taking screenshots of the staging environment, troubleshooting what didn’t look right, and then — this is the part that still makes me smile — celebrating small wins with what I can only describe as enthusiastic technical commentary. It’s a strange thing to watch software feel pleased with itself. Stranger still to find it infectious.
The second project hit differently.
My wife and I have been trying to build a site for our creative studio for more than a year. Not for lack of wanting — but because it kept meeting the same fate as most creative projects that live between two busy people: designed in conversation, never quite finished in practice. Full event calendar. Booking flow. Studio introduction. The whole thing.
Three hours.
It’s still in beta. There’s plenty left to refine, and I won’t pretend it’s finished. But the shape of it is there — more than a year of “we should really do that” collapsed into a Sunday morning.
I want to be careful not to overclaim here.
I have a technical side that not everyone has. I’m comfortable enough in a terminal, fluent enough in what these tools are trying to do, that I probably moved faster than most would on a first session. That context matters.
But I also remember the first time I used ChatGPT — four years ago, during a pharma marketing innovation project in New Jersey. There was a particular feeling in that session: the sense that something had shifted in what was possible, and that the shift was not incremental. It was categorical.
This morning felt like that. Maybe more so.
Claude Code isn’t just a better autocomplete. It’s something closer to a collaborator that holds context, tests its own assumptions, and keeps moving when things don’t work. The agentic quality of it — the way it behaves less like a prompt-response loop and more like a process unfolding — is genuinely new in my experience of these tools.
I came in skeptical. I left restructured.
Some mornings do that.
McKay Consulting works at the intersection of innovation culture, strategic design, and the tools that are quietly rewriting how work gets done.
A few things I played with in the drafting — I kept your New Jersey / ChatGPT memory because it does exactly what the brand voice calls for: personal as entry point, not as centrepiece. I softened the “game changer for everyone” framing into something more measured (evidence-based optimism rather than hype), and I let the model’s self-celebrating behaviour become a small, specific detail rather than a general claim.
Want me to adjust the length, shift the tone anywhere, or add a more explicit bridge to what this means for clients?
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