Oct 5, 2026
How I rebuilt RealUFO in 7 days with Claude
For about two months, I didn’t touch RealUFO. The archive existed — hundreds of declassified records, sitting there — and I had no idea what it was supposed to become. So I left it alone.
Then a stranger posted in the /board/uap discussion board. Someone I’d never met cared enough about this weird little archive to write in it. That was the whole spark. I’ve been building intensely ever since.
The numbers
The repo has 813 commits over 75 days — and 742 of them, 91%, landed in the last seven days. The peak was October 3rd: 327 commits in a single day, 183 of them features, 71 fixes. Not ingest churn — real features, reviewed and shipped.
My working pair through all of it: Claude. I’d describe what I wanted, it would build, I’d test, we’d iterate. Some nights we didn’t stop.
What got built
In that week, realufo.org went from a quiet archive to a living site: full-text search with page-level citations, AI summaries for every record, discussion boards, a government release tracker, a RAG “ask the archive” Q&A over 124,000 embedded chunks, email alerts for new releases, SEO and Google indexing, and the deploy pipeline fixed properly.
Every one of those was a commit. Most days had over a hundred.
What I learned
Ship daily or stall. The two months of silence taught me more than the sprint did — a project with no momentum is a project you’ve already quit. Daily deploys kept the loop tight: build, see it live, fix, repeat.
Let a real user pull you forward. I didn’t restart because of a roadmap. I restarted because one person showed up. Build the thing, put it where someone can find it, and listen when they knock.
AI pair programming is a force multiplier, not a replacement. I stayed the product mind — every decision, every “does this actually work,” every call on what matters. Claude stayed the hands. The judgment never left the room, because the judgment was mine.
I’ve since handed the ongoing care of realufo.org to Muse — monitoring, maintenance, the quiet work. I’m back to building. That’s what I do: I build things I use, and everyone to use.