Hi {{first_name|dear reader}}!
A week ago I wrote about feeling disoriented as I worked with Claude Code, and then that feeling just continued and increased over the course of last week. There were so many Holy Crap moments, but perhaps the biggest one was Claude completing in 10 minutes a task my team had been thinking would take 10-20 hours. The whole world suddenly looks different. What else could we do now in 10 minutes that we had thought would take 10 hours?
Everyone who works with software has been feeling this astonishment the past few weeks, and last week the founder of a software startup wrote a big piece with a big title: Something Big is Happening.
I came into reading that wanting to poke holes in it, find ways to dismiss it. But instead I found it totally resonated with my experience. There are plenty of critiques you could make about the piece, but I think it’s meant more as a personal narrative of “this is real and happened to me” and an ask for others to take it seriously and be hands on with these tools.
So instead of writing more of my own thoughts this week, I want to encourage you to read that piece if you haven’t already. Sit with it for a sec. Then read these two excellent responses, which are rooted in more historical perspective and are good reminders to hang onto:1
And then - go make something on Claude Code! This week! Just go do it! No matter how you feel about all this, we all really do need to be hands on with the tools in order to understand what they can and can’t do for us, how they make us feel, and what the world looks like on the other side.
A great way to get started is with this free course:2
Let me know how it goes! I’d love to share your thoughts here too. Quality discourse on all this stuff is how we figure out pivotal moments like this as humans.
Have a beautiful human week.
1 Thank you Sara for curating Twitter/X for me so I don’t have to have an account there…
2 Thank you to nonprofit tech wizard and Builder’s Briefing reader Laura Belinfante for sharing this with me!