At my work and in my personal projects I have been making heavy use of Claude Code, and I wanted to share some other useful things it can do besides writing code. The cool thing about Claude is it has access to command line tools so the possibilities are endless. Here’s some things I have used it for.

But before that, one of the best tips for getting good results for coding is to use Planning Mode. Press Shift+Tab until it shows under the prompt box. In this mode you can work through a plan before any code is written and it drastically increases the quality of the result.

Now, on to other things…

Manipulate video files

Install FFMPEG and have it available on your path, then you can get Claude to manipulate video files – compress, convert format, or anything else that FFMPEG can do. You don’t need to search for the correct command and arguments to pass, Claude will figure it out…

Compress the video file 'myfile.mov' so that it's under 10mb and in mp4 format.

Claude will come up with the correct command for FFMPEG and execute it!

Free up ports

Sometimes, either from a crashed VS Code instance or some process the Claude has spun up earlier, I go to start an app and the port is in use. Since I don’t have a terminal open with it I don’t know how to stop the process so it requires manually killing the process. I have no idea what the command is for that, but Claude can figure it out…

I am trying to run the app but it says port 4000 is already in use, can you kill whatever is running on port 4000?

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I'll find and kill the process running on port 4000:

⏺ Bash(lsof -ti:4000)
  ⎿  26898

⏺ Bash(kill -9 26898)
  ⎿  (No content)

⏺ Done! I've killed the process (PID 26898) that was running on port 4000. The port should now be available for you to start the app. The process was the background instance I started earlier.

Create PRs on Github

With the Github CLI installed, Claude can look at your branch commits and come up with a detailed PR for the changes and push it up to GitHub. If you wan’t it to be a draft so you can review it first, just tell Claude to create a draft.

Use the Github CLI to create a draft PR for this branch

Working with Git

Claude is pretty good at working with git too, I used it recently to merge 3 repos into a monorepo and it took care of all the git commands to retain and merge the commit history.

So there’s a few things I have found it useful for besides writing code, and there are many more opportunities for AI to make things simpler too.