From Vacation Brain to Workflow Gains: Two AI Tools Worth Your Time

Happy Monday and welcome to another edition of the newsletter. I'm back after a nice vacation to Hilton Head with the family and feeling refreshed. I spent some time last week cleaning up Notion which is a tool that I use to track everything I do. What this means for you is that I have a good backlog of what videos I will be working on next and I published 2 videos last week that I will tell you more about in this newsletter.

Next up for me is going to be working on more videos and preparing for a bunch of talks over the next few months. In August I will be speaking at KCDC and SpringOne. These are a couple of my favorite conferences to attend and speak at. KCDC brings a wide variety of sessions and some of my favorite BBQ. SpringOne at VMware Explore is our flagship conference and a great opportunity for me to connect with so many customers and developers from the community. As always if you want to find out where I will be speaking next you can check out this page on my website.

In this edition of the newsletter I will be focusing on the 2 new videos I published last week.

From Chatbot to Code Collaborator: Why Claude Code Changed My Development Workflow

Forget everything you think you know about AI coding tools. Claude Code isn't another chatbot that spits out random snippets you'll spend hours debugging. It's an agentic command-line tool that actually understands your project context, respects your existing workflows, and builds complete applications without breaking your codebase.

To demonstrate Claude Code's capabilities, I walked through building a Spring Boot application that integrates with the JSON Placeholder service, implements caching, and follows production-ready patterns. What impressed me wasn't just the code quality—it was the intelligent planning mode that lets you iterate on architecture before writing a single line. Instead of immediately generating code, Claude Code helps you think through the implementation strategy, respects your coding guidelines (stored in a simple claude.md file), and even runs integration tests to verify everything works correctly.

The game-changer here is the sandboxed approach: Claude Code operates within your project directory, understanding your entire codebase structure while maintaining security boundaries. Combined with smart features like automatic branch management, cost-effective pricing through Pro plans ($20/month vs. expensive API usage), and seamless IDE integration, it feels like having an experienced pair programmer who never gets tired and always follows your team's conventions.

Key takeaway: Stop trying to replace your existing tools with AI—enhance them instead. Use start.spring.io to scaffold projects, then let Claude Code handle the implementation details while you focus on architecture and business logic.

Try this: Start with project exploration (explain this project to me) before writing any code. Use planning mode (Shift+Tab) to iterate on implementation strategies, and always work in branches for complex features.

Building Real-World MCP Servers: My Beehiiv Newsletter Automation

Last week I tackled a workflow problem that had been bugging me for months. I write my newsletters in Beehiiv because I love the editor, but getting that content onto my personal website required tedious manual conversion to very specific markdown formats. Every single time, I'd copy content, reformat images, convert YouTube embeds to my custom components, and handle Twitter embeds - it was eating up way too much time.

So I built something to fix it: a custom MCP server that connects to the Beehiiv API. Now I can simply tell Claude Desktop "grab my latest draft and create the markdown file for my website," and it handles everything automatically. The MCP server provides tools for getting posts, publications, and subscriptions, while Claude does the heavy lifting of content transformation, spell checking, and file creation. What used to be a 30-minute manual process now takes seconds, and the result is exactly the markdown structure my Vue/Nuxt site needs.

This isn't just another "hello world" MCP tutorial - it's a real automation I use every week that saves me significant time. The video walks through the complete code, shows the Claude Desktop integration, and demonstrates the actual workflow in action.

Watch the full walkthrough here to see how I built this MCP server and get inspired for your own workflow automations. If you've been wondering about practical MCP applications beyond simple examples, this one's for you!

TWEETS

I don't understand why this is happening.

Working on improving my video creation process so I began documenting it this week. Happy to share more on this if anyone is interested.

UNTIL NEXT WEEK

I hope you enjoyed this newsletter installment, and I will talk to you in the next one. If you have any questions for me or topics you would like me to cover please feel free to reply to this email or reach out to me on Twitter (I'm not calling it X).

Happy Coding,
Dan Vega
https://www.danvega.dev