AI has helped with 0% of the image creation in HeroMachine. Every item is still the original art I drew by hand over the past 25 years. Every creative decision from what to draw, how to draw it, what looks right, is still mine.
What AI did do was help me finish the project.
HeroMachine 3 has been dead for years. When browsers killed Flash in 2020, the app went with it. I needed to rebuild it from scratch in modern web technology, and I tried. For a long time I tried. I spent thousands of dollars hiring a developer who ultimately delivered an unfinished product. I burned out. Real life got in the way. The sheer magnitude of converting hundreds of items from Flash to SVG when I couldn’t even use Flash anymore was paralyzing. After a while it just felt like I’d failed, and I stopped trying.
Over the last few months, in my regular job as a web developer, I started working with Claude Code on a variety of projects. The biggest use was automating tedious tasks like taking content from old WordPress sites and converting it into modern Gutenberg blocks. Normally you do that by hand and it is VERY painstaking.
One Friday night I had the thought: “If it can do that, maybe it can help with converting those old HeroMachine items.” Five days later I had a working app.
I want to be honest about what that means, because I have real concerns about AI and I know many of you do too.
I find AI companies to be largely unethical in their business practices. More personally, I have grave concerns about the impact AI will have on my own industry and my actual job. I hate that it’s positioned to take over all 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 what actually happened.
All of HeroMachine’s logic had already been designed and hand-written by me over the course of ten-plus years in ActionScript. The architecture, the feature set, the way items and colors and transforms all work together, I built all of that. What Claude Code did was help me translate that existing work into modern JavaScript and Svelte. I could point it at the compiled Flash file, explain how something worked, and it would produce equivalent code. When I got stuck on a bug, it helped me find it. When I had an idea for a new feature, it helped me build it quickly.
I got more done in five days than in the previous five years. Not because the AI is smarter than me, but because it eliminated the parts that were stopping me: the tedium, the unfamiliar syntax, the sheer volume of conversion work that made the whole project feel impossible.
I sunk over 25 years into HeroMachine and it was dead. Now it lives again. I have a hard time convincing myself that’s an altogether bad thing.
