They hired me to add features. The codebase had less than 1% test coverage. Azure was retiring .NET 8, but upgrading seemed too hard, so they'd waited years. The kind of problems you know you should fix but never do.

Four weeks later: 560 commits, 65% test coverage, 13 database improvements, and yes, we shipped features too. Two programmers, four hours a day, one $17/month Claude subscription.

Here's what nobody tells you about AI: Day one, it took us eight hours to fix one nullable reference. Week four, I did fifty in under an hour with five minutes of my time. We didn't get faster because AI got smarter. We got faster because we built the infrastructure—scripts, CLIs, knowledge docs—that let AI scale what we'd already figured out.

This is a field report on what's actually possible when you stop thinking "AI makes me faster" and start thinking "AI lets me solve problems that used to be too expensive to touch."

Scripts CLIs for AI CI automatic improvements Refactoring Nullables Unit testing Full stack testing Database migration patterns Database cleanup Database optimization Knowledge documents Code coverage Bug mitigation Feature development

Come see how we got a codebase under control.