Working with Claude — Scott Willis on AI partnership in P21 ERP, pro se litigation, threat intelligence, and zero-ad-spend content

Working with Claude

How one person uses AI to create, iterate, and ship — across enterprise software, law, security, and content — with zero ad spend.

Scott Willis  ·  Enterprise Distribution Software Specialist  ·  Pro Se Litigant  ·  Builder

What We'll Cover

1
How I actually work with AI (the honest version)
2
Professional work: databases, automation, migration
3
Legal: representing myself in a fraud case
4
Personal project: building a threat intelligence honeypot
5
Getting real users with $0 and no marketing background
6
Using multiple AIs together — and knowing when not to
7
What I got wrong, what I'd do differently

~45 minutes  ·  Q&A at the end

How I Actually Work with Claude

These aren't tips from a blog post. They're patterns I learned by shipping real things and failing first.

1Know what "done" looks like before you start — I decide the exact output format before writing a single prompt. Vague asks get vague results.
2Give it real data, not descriptions of data — I paste actual queries, actual error messages, actual court documents. Summaries lose the details that matter.
3Be surgically specific when something's wrong — "Row 47 returns NULL on the join" gets fixed in one round. "It's broken" gets five rounds of guessing.
4Re-establish context every session — Claude doesn't remember yesterday. I treat every conversation like onboarding a new team member.
5Nothing ships until it's copy-paste ready — No placeholder text, no "insert X here." If I can't deploy it or file it immediately, it's not done.

Professional Work
Databases & Automation

The same problems you have at work — just with an AI collaborator

Auditing 300+ Database Views

The Process, Not the Tech

I fed Claude real production queries one at a time — not theoretical examples. It identified performance patterns I'd been living with for years. Things that looked correct but were silently slow.

We worked in batches: 7 scripts first, then 62 more. The second batch revealed a critical lesson — Claude generated placeholder syntax in several scripts. My "nothing ships until it's ready" rule caught every one before production.

The AI accelerated the work. My standards were the quality gate.

~27%
performance improvement
measured after deployment

Replacing What Nobody Understood

9 Macros → 1 Automation

The warehouse ran on 9 fragile Excel macros that nobody fully understood. Instead of documenting them, I described the end-to-end workflow to Claude — scan, look up, validate, ship — and we rebuilt it from the intent, not the legacy code.

Tested against legacy output until we hit 99%+ match. The team validated daily before we cut over.

Migration: Conversation as Strategy

Multiple locations needed to move between enterprise distribution platforms. Instead of hiring a consultant, I walked Claude through the data domains one by one and we built a phased migration plan together.

The mapping strategy came out of conversation. The domain knowledge came from me. The structure came from the collaboration.

Legal
Representing Myself

What happens when you can't afford a lawyer but you can think clearly

The Fraud Case

What Happened

An opposing attorney filed a false address with the court — an address I hadn't lived at in over a decade — just 103 days after her own team served me in person at my real location. Based on that false filing, a judge entered a default custody order I never knew about. I lost access to my children for over 490 days.

What I Did About It

I filed suit pro se. Every legal document — the petition, the response to their motion to dismiss, the bill of review — was co-authored with Claude. I brought the facts and the anger. Claude helped me structure them into something a court would take seriously.

There's now an active criminal investigation. The State Bar and TREC have received complaints.

Trial set: February 2, 2027  ·  189th District Court  ·  Judge Tamika Craft-Demming

What "Co-Authoring" Actually Means

Claude didn't write my case. I lived my case. Here's how the collaboration actually worked:

I broughtThe timeline, the documents, the emotional weight, the public records proving the fraud — and the refusal to accept what happened
Claude broughtLegal structure, case law research, statutory formatting, and the ability to organize my facts into causes of action
The key momentTheir attorney moved to dismiss, arguing immunity. Claude helped me frame the 103-day gap as the dispositive fact — using their own legal standard against them
The resultPro se filings that forced a 30-year attorney to respond substantively. The court set the case for trial — not dismissal.

Personal Project
safesapcrtx.org

Building a threat intelligence honeypot from scratch

Why Build a Honeypot?

The Idea

I wanted to understand how attackers actually behave — not from reading about it, but from watching it happen. So I built a site that looks like a vulnerable WordPress install, deployed it for free, and started logging every probe.

The domain name does double duty. "SAPCR" is the legal filing type from my custody case. Anyone researching Texas family law might find it. Every bot scanning for WordPress vulnerabilities definitely finds it.

Simple on Purpose

Netlify hosts the site for free and runs edge functions that act as a serverless firewall.

Supabase stores every probe in a database — IP, path, user agent, headers — structured and queryable.

Claude helps me analyze the logs, cluster threat actors by behavior, and build dashboards.

Total monthly cost: $0.

What Attackers Actually Do

Real probes logged in the last 48 hours — every one hit my site automatically:

What They TriedWhy
/wp-login.phpTrying to brute-force WordPress login credentials
/xmlrpc.php (POST)Exploiting WordPress's remote API for amplification attacks
/wp-admin/setup-config.phpChecking if WordPress was installed but never configured
/admin/.envHunting for accidentally exposed passwords and API keys
/shell.phpLooking for web shells — evidence of a previous compromise
/backup.sqlHoping someone left a database dump in a public folder
/phpmyadmin/Trying to access database admin panels directly

Every probe is logged in real time. No servers to manage. No infrastructure to maintain.

$0 Ad Spend
Real Users Anyway

What happens when you build something people actually want to read

30-Day Analytics

74
New Users
40
Active Users
1:50
Avg Engagement
356
Page Views

What People Search For

sapcr lawyer — 51 impressions
how to file a sapcr in texas — 35
sapcr meaning — 29
trcp 239a — 12 impressions, 1 click
sapcr texas — 22 impressions

Where They Come From

Countries: US (35), Egypt, China, Ghana, Taiwan
Channels: Direct (64), Organic Search (5), Social (1), Referral (1)
Return rate: 3.5–8.3% come back weekly

$0

personal ad spend

$0/month hosting
80+ bot probes / day = free threat intelligence

Strangers Ran Paid Ads for My Site

People I have never met or spoken to noticed my work and independently paid for advertising campaigns promoting safesapcrtx.org.

I didn't ask them to. I didn't know they were doing it. They just thought the content mattered enough to spend their own money on.

The content spoke for itself.

Using Multiple AIs Together

Claude is the primary builder. But I use other AIs to stress-test, analyze, and create feedback loops:

Claude — Where Things Get Built

ChatGPT

SEO audits, content gap analysis — "what's missing?"

Grok

Real-time social signal analysis — what's getting traction?

Copilot

Bing indexing behavior, alternative perspectives

Gemini

Google Search patterns, traffic analysis

The other AIs analyze the site. That feedback loops back to Claude for the next build. Social posts force real-time Google indexing. The cycle runs continuously.

What I Got Wrong (Honest Version)

Over-Engineering

Not every problem needs a pipeline or a multi-step workflow. Sometimes a clean prompt in a fresh session is faster and better than an elaborate system. I built complexity that didn't earn its keep.

Trusting Without Checking

Claude's Batch 2 placeholder bug taught me this permanently. The output looked right. It was structured correctly. But several scripts had syntax that would have broken in production. You lose nuance and edge-case details if you don't verify.

Forgetting the Tradeoffs

AI gives you speed, but speed costs something. You lose experiential texture. You lose the thinking-through-it process that sometimes is the point. I had to learn when to use Claude and when to just sit with the problem myself.

The rule I follow now: If the problem is well-defined and the output format is clear — delegate to AI. If the problem is ambiguous and I need to think — I do that myself first, then bring Claude the result.

The Iteration Loop

This is the actual cycle. It ran dozens of times across every project in this presentation.

Define the
outcome
Claude
drafts
Test against
reality
Specific
feedback
Ship or
repeat
The critical insight: Most people stop at step 2. They get a draft and try to use it. The real value is in steps 3 and 4 — testing against your actual environment and giving feedback precise enough that the next iteration converges instead of wandering.

What I'd Tell Someone Starting Today

You're the expertClaude amplifies domain knowledge. If you don't have the knowledge, you get confident-sounding garbage. The human is the quality gate.
Specificity compoundsOne precise correction saves five rounds of guessing. Invest the time to describe exactly what's wrong.
Ship real thingsThe gap between "playing with AI" and "using AI" is whether something goes into production. File the motion. Deploy the script. Push the site live.
Side projects matterMy honeypot made me better at log analysis at work. My legal filings made me a better writer. Everything cross-pollinates.
AI levels the fieldA pro se litigant produced filings that survived a motion to dismiss from a 30-year attorney. That wasn't possible five years ago.

Questions?

"The best AI results come from people who know their domain and refuse to accept anything less than production-ready."

Scott Willis  ·  iamnotcheckingit@gmail.com