Over the weekend, prompted by the Telegram blocks, I grabbed Claude, drove to a parking lot and set about integrating the Max messenger into my Botopotamus.
It turned out great. Besides the main goal, that every bot now works the same way (well, almost) in Telegram and Max, I also:
— set up proper asynchronous processing of incoming messages on queues
— added basic statistics to every bot (WAU, MAU, retention, messages by time of day, that sort of thing)
— got a message processing loop that isn't tied to a particular messenger
And yes, the Botopotamus now work in Max too. For example, here's Monitor Botopotamus for monitoring and TV Botopotamus for TV shows.
Max's API is still worse, of course, but it helps that a lot of it was deliberately made just like Telegram's. As for Claude Code, compared to what Cursor was like a year ago, it's night and day. The last commit touched 110 files, and of course there were bugs, unnecessary interfaces and duplicated code in it. But fundamentally the approaches and patterns were correct, and the tasks set were solved.
Perhaps skilled hands didn't hurt either. But the tool sped up the work several times over, plain and simple. Several times over.