Claude saved me hours of link cleanup

April 28, 2026

Today I was working on a blog project collecting a bunch of post links to use in another project. When I need to visit a lot of posts on my blog, I do it through a localhost:8080 version of the site instead of the live one. I run an AppleScript that opens it in Terminal:

set projectPath to "/Users/lorenstephens/Documents/GitHub/ldstepweblog"
tell application "Terminal"
   activate
   do script "cd " & quoted form of projectPath & " && npm start"
end tell

This fires up the Eleventy dev server and serves the site locally at localhost:8080. So what I ended up with was a list of markdown links that looked like this:

http://localhost:8080/posts/why-write-when-no-ones-reading/

To use them in the new project, I needed to swap http for https and localhost:8080 for ldstephens.net. A lot of manual work. On a lark, I asked Claude to handle it and it built a small interactive widget right in the chat: paste your list, click a button, copy the corrected output.

Three minutes with Claude saved what would have been a couple of hours of manual work.