While leading PolicyEngine full-time, I still found time to ship personal projects in 2024. GitHub says I made 3,721 contributions this year. Here’s a look at some highlights built with help from AI coding tools like Claude.

CodeStitch

CodeStitch combines GitHub repos, PRs, and issues into single files optimized for AI context. When you’re using Claude or ChatGPT to help with a coding task, you often need to provide relevant context from your codebase. CodeStitch makes this easier by letting you select specific files, PRs, or issues and combining them into a single copy-pasteable document.

Built with React and deployed on GitHub Pages, it’s become a tool I use regularly when working with AI assistants.

PR Improver

PR Improver is an LLM-powered tool that suggests improvements to pull requests based on repository guidelines. Point it at any PR, and it analyzes the changes against the repo’s contributing guidelines, CLAUDE.md, or other documentation to suggest improvements.

It’s helped catch issues before review and has been particularly useful for repos with specific formatting or documentation requirements.

OEWS Explorer

The OEWS Explorer is a dashboard for exploring BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics data. It lets you search for occupations, compare wages across states, and visualize employment distributions.

Built with Streamlit, it makes government labor data more accessible without needing to navigate the sometimes-clunky BLS website.

Personal Website Redesign

I rebuilt maxghenis.com with React, Vite, and Tailwind. The previous version was a simple static page; the new one has a proper CV page and better organization for projects and writing.

Looking Forward

AI tools have transformed how I build software. Tasks that would have taken days now take hours. The limiting factor isn’t implementation time anymore—it’s having good ideas and clear requirements.

I’m excited to see how this evolves in 2025, both for personal projects and for PolicyEngine’s mission of making policy analysis accessible to everyone.

Originally published on Substack.