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Custom Module Error Correction by a Non-Developer using Claude
I've had a business website running in Drupal since 4.x. While I have some technical background, I always had a developer setting up the initial site and creating some custom modules. I would add some contrib modules as needed. I occasionally would make very minor changes in the custom modules.
I'm currently running a 10.x site that I had a developer help migrate up. One particular part of the custom module displayed some charts via the Google Charts contrib module. My developer set it up initially and it worked fine.
At some point during upgrade cycles, the charts stopped working. I was busy, they weren't mission critical, my developer was busy, and I didn't make it a priority to get fixed. It didn't look bad for my customers, just one relatively minor feature was not appearing.
During a recent security upgrade, the module started creating errors that showed up on the live site. Stuff that potentially looked off-putting to my customers.
I wanted to continue with the upgrade and thought: "How about this AI coding stuff?" I have only done one coding thing in AI before, a script for the CAD package I use. I can understand error messages enough to understand what modules were involved. I figured this would be a pretty safe experiment, just fixing some code to make it happy with the current Drupal environment.
I went to Claude, fed it all the files I thought might be involved. Fed it the errors I was seeing on the screen and from the system log and asked it if it could fix the problem. It said it could, it suggested changes to various files, and I obediently made the changes. It generated errors, I fed the errors back to Claude, more changes, more errors, changes, etc. until I hit a dead end...
Learning from my previous effort, I did a hard reset, started a new chat session, fed it more files than last time, fed it errors, made one query to send it in a direction that averted the dead end from last time, made the suggested changes, reported the errors, repeated that a few times until the errors disappeared, and then low and behold, the charts worked again.
Again, I know virtually nothing about the coding structure of Drupal, how to create modules, or make API calls. I can use Composer, Drush, and git, that's about it. My experience with Claude and ChatGPT is primarily researching the history of stuff and drafting legal documents. I understand that there are ways to set up Claude to do coding work, but I don't know what they are. I just asked it to fix the errors and learned enough during the 40-something minutes of effort to make it work. I will not vouch for the quality of the fix, but my site looks good.
I would have happily paid my developer to make the fix; they had more pressing jobs. I would have just let it slide, but I was interested to see what was possible, and I am impressed. Its not that Claude did something that is difficult, but that it allowed me to do something that was fairly easy but I didn't have the skills to do alone.
BTW, I let my Mac proofread this. It added some commas and a semicolon.
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