Rebuilding dbatools.io: From Notepad++ to Cursor to Claude Code

calendar Oct 31, 2025 · 6 min read  ·
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I just rebuilt dbatools.io in a day. The new site is developer-focused, modern, and actually useful. And I did it all with Claude Haiku, which until recently was completely useless to me.

The Origin Story: Notepad++

When I first designed dbatools.io back in 2016, I based it on Notepad++. At the time, I had no idea they were open source—they looked like a polished commercial product. That's exactly how I wanted to position dbatools: as a tool you didn't have to care about who developed it or whether it was open source. You just used the product.

That worked for a while, but the website was designed to introduce people to dbatools, not to help people who were actually using it day-to-day.

The Problem

Three years ago, someone came to the repo and said: "Hey, I heard a lot about your project and I wanted to use it. I went to your web page and it was extremely not useful to me. I can't do anything with 'dbatools is free, fun, and open source.' What does it actually do?"

They had a great point.

The site had been WordPress since the beginning. We got hacked all the time, and during the pandemic in September 2020, I was exhausted and just wanted it done. I exported WordPress to static HTML and called it a day. That was nearly 5 years ago and I haven't touched the design since.

I tried like five different times to use someone else's theme, but with each theme you have to go in and make so many small tweaks. I was like, wait—it could just be me and Claude designing this.

The Inspiration: Cursor

I went to cursor.com and liked what I saw. It's a developer-centric webpage. I think cursor.com is based off of openai.com—they all sort of look alike now. But what I liked was that it was made for developers.

So that's what I did with dbatools. I told Claude: "Make it look like cursor.com but for dbatools."

The New Site

The new site is live at dbatools.io. Here's what changed:

Developer-focused design. No more marketing fluff. The homepage shows actual commands that solve real business problems:

  • Copy-DbaDatabase for migrations
  • Test-DbaLastBackup for disaster recovery
  • Backup-DbaDatabase for compliance
  • Invoke-DbaDbLogShipping for high availability
  • Update-DbaInstance for patching

I went through our logs to see which companies are using dbatools and put those logos front and center. Turns out a lot of big names rely on this thing.

Actually useful content. The old site was just "dbatools is free, fun, and open source." The new one highlights our combo commands that address specific business needs. It also features our book (Learn dbatools in a Month of Lunches) right on the homepage because people love it.

Interactive demos. There's a fake migration demo on the homepage that actually runs and shows output. It migrates Northwind and Pubs—throwback to the 90s. Those are still my favorite sample databases.

And the migration was cheap too

Here's the wild part: I did all of this with Claude Haiku 4.5, Anthropic's cheapest model.

Haiku is basically Anthropic's answer to GPT-4 Mini—fast, cheap, and designed for simple tasks. Sonnet is the middle ground, smarter than Haiku but slower and more expensive. Opus is the heavyweight for when you actually need serious reasoning.

I'd tried Haiku before and it was garbage. Completely wrong about everything. Couldn't even handle basic tasks. But there were so many Haiku posts on Reddit that I almost wondered if it was a marketing campaign.

Turns out Haiku 4.5 is surprisingly useful. It's become my default model and I didn't even notice any reduction in quality. Compared to GPT Mini, Haiku handles longer prompts and complex context without dying on you.

I just read that it's about as smart as Sonnet 4 and that makes complete sense! I absolutely loved Sonnet 4.

The Process

I'm currently working on so many projects that I could hit my weekly Sonnet limit on Claude Pro. But Haiku's limit is way higher, and it's been crushing through work.

I had Claude Code running in the background processing 97 files. Here's what I had it doing:

1. WordPress to Hugo migration

I exported WordPress to HTML back in 2020. Now I'm converting everything to Hugo markdown with proper front matter.

1Get-ChildItem *.html | Invoke-AITool -Prompt .\prompts\wordpress-to-hugo.md

2. Title case conversion

For years, I wrote everything in lowercase because that's what a lot of open-source Linux projects did. The internet and AI didn't care—they made it "DBA Tools" anyway. It finally annoyed me enough to fix it.

I had Haiku go through every blog post and convert titles to proper Title Case.

All the old wp-content links needed to be updated. Haiku handled that too.

4. Missing metadata

I forgot to preserve the author on the first pass. No problem—I gave Haiku another long prompt telling it to infer the author from the post content, and even browse the web if needed. It knocked it out of the park.

The Prompts Were Long

Here's what's impressive: my migration instructions were LONG. I'm talking pages of detailed examples and edge cases. In the past, only big models like GPT-4 could handle prompts that long. The mini models would bomb out or lose track.

Haiku 4.5 handled it without breaking a sweat.

Claude Code Online

Anthropic just launched Claude Code online at claude.com/code. You can connect it to your GitHub repos and it'll find small todos in the codebase and submit PRs for you. I've been using it to knock out issues in the dbatools repo.

Someone filed an issue about Docker support, and I just told Claude: "Please look into this issue. If it's a problem with our code, submit a fix and a PR." It did exactly that.

This is the most fun I've had with computers in years.

The AI Tools PowerShell Module

I'm also releasing a PowerShell module soon called aitools that wraps multiple AI CLIs (Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Gemini, Aider, OpenAI Codex, and Ollama) into a standardized PowerShell interface.

Instead of remembering whether it's -p or codex exec for each tool, you just use PowerShell commands that work the same way across all platforms. It handles installation, updates, and execution for Windows, Linux, and Mac.

The entire module was written by Claude, including all the cross-platform tests that run on Windows, Linux, and Mac in CI/CD.

Five years ago, I never would have imagined rebuilding an entire website in a day. But here we are.

Check out the new site at dbatools.io and let me know what you think.