Lock.pub – AI helped me turn a 3-year-old side project into a real product

I first built this when I was learning frontend. Just Next.js + Firebase, a basic link shortener with a password. Threw it up and mostly forgot about it.

Surprisingly it kept getting users even though I wasn't touching it. I always wanted to do more with it but never had the time or skill to pull it off.

Then Claude Code came along and everything changed. Over the past few months I added Stripe payments, E2E encrypted chat rooms, GPS sharing, polls, memos, image sharing, audio sharing (9 content types total). Things that would have taken me months I was shipping in days.

It's still the same core idea. You get a short link, set a password and expiry, share it. But now it actually feels like a real product.

Curious if anyone else has had a similar experience reviving old side projects with AI.