Hey,
A year ago I watched a YouTube video on passive income through AdSense and got the idea to build a calculator site. Free tools, ad-supported, set and forget. The dream.
I tried. Web-app Claude on one screen, TextEdit on the other, copy-pasting code into files by hand, dragging folders into Netlify to test. I got a 5-calculator site live, but I couldn’t shake one thing: I had no real way to verify the math was correct. So I put it on the back burner and went off to learn other AI tools.
Last month I came back to the same idea with Claude Desktop + Cowork: the setup where Claude can actually read and write files on my computer, instead of me hand-couriering text between windows. I sat down and started over.
By bedtime: rebrand, custom domain, SSL, full SEO foundation, all 5 original calculators rebuilt with verified math, Search Console submitted, AdSense resubmitted. Over the weekend I added 31 more, taking the live count to 36 across Finance, Cooking, Measurement, Time, Math, Health, and DIY.
You can see it at calchive.org.
Here’s the part I keep thinking about.
The lesson wasn’t really about AI. The model I was using a year ago and the model I’m using now are both Claude. What changed was where AI sits in the workflow.
In version one, I was the bottleneck. Every code change had to pass through me as the courier. Claude wrote the code. I translated it to a file. I deployed. I screenshotted. Claude saw the screenshot, suggested a tweak. I translated again. The AI was capable. The wiring around it was 1995.
In version two, Claude reads the file. Claude writes the file. Claude runs the test. Claude verifies the math against a reference. I direct.
Same AI. The friction was gone.
Most of the people I talk to who’ve tried building with AI and walked away frustrated had the same problem I had a year ago. The AI wasn’t the limiter. The translation overhead was.
If that resonates, my honest recommendation is to spend a weekend setting up the proper tooling around whatever AI you’re using, before you try to ship anything bigger than a one-off prompt. For me that meant Claude Desktop + Cowork. For you it might be Cursor, or Windsurf, or n8n with API connections, or something else entirely. The specific tools matter less than the principle: minimize what the AI hands back that you have to manually re-input.
A small test for whether your current setup is the right setup: count how many times in your last hour of AI-assisted work you copy-pasted between windows. If the answer is more than five, your wiring is the problem.
Anyway. Calchive.org is live. 36 free calculators across 7 categories. No signups. No paywalls. No ads above the answer. And when AdSense approves, the ones that do appear will be respectful.
If you have a use for any of it, great. If you don’t, no problem. Reply and tell me what tool YOU wished existed, and I’ll add it to the queue.
Thanks for reading.
From copy-paste to direct.
— Jay
P.S. If you want the longer origin story (what shipped, what I deferred, and the moments I almost gave up again), the full blog post is at https://calchive.org/blog/how-calchive-came-to-be