Disorientation

Hi {{first_name|dear builder}}!

Welcome to yet another briefing about how wild AI is getting right now. To those of you who couldn’t care less about that topic, I’m sorry. Also, please tell me more about how you get through your days. When I go to work, everywhere I look feels like squinting into the fog, standing at the edge of a cliff, a blustery wind whisking my hat off my head.

We are witnessing the end of an era: humans writing code. These are tweets from the past couple weeks:

I appreciate “roon” saying programming always sucked. I was a Comp Sci minor in college - I took those courses because I loved what technology can enable, but wow was the coding part annoying. Spending half an hour squinting at a screen trying to figure out where I was missing one tiny character. Errors that didn’t tell you why they were erroring. Random packages no one told you that you absolutely had to use to get the site deployed.

Instead, now we just get to do the fun parts. I’ve spent the past couple weeks playing with Claude Code and every time I use it something happens that gives me chills, the way I felt when I first used ChatGPT three years ago.

I’m using it to make a custom interface for our OpenTent sales proposals. I’ve had a vision to replace all our template docs/slides/PDFs with one custom page on our website for each client, which incorporates their own organizational language and business priorities into an outline of how we would work with them. I took the project to Claude - first I put into a folder:

Then I told it about my vision, how I want it to match the style of opentent.com, and I gave it some more pointers about what it should look like. Then it went to work. The first version was pretty darn good, but then I just started talking to Claude like it was the best programmer in the world only it has zero emotions.

the design should be more interesting when i hover on stuff and it does it

why did you set it up like that and it tells me

make it easier for me to tell you what to edit with this section and it gives me a numbered list of items

Fix that error so we don’t have to deal with it again and it does it

pull some client quotes and put them in relevant places throughout the page and it does, even editing the grammar to fit

make a signature section at the bottom and send the user a confirmation email after they press submit - and it works for 11 minutes and 30 seconds before telling me “It’s done, just need you to go get your API keys for resend.com and paste them here” which I do and then it WORKS 🤯

The whole process was easy and FUN. And, like any time you get access to a new tool, it opens your mind up about all kinds of other cool things you have been wanting to do for a while but couldn’t. I already have so many more ideas for what Claude and I can make this week.

AND - it’s just going to keep getting better. The pace of change is so darn fast. The new development that is enabling all these expert coders to stop writing code is Anthropic’s Opus 4.5 model, which came out at the end of last year, only three years after ChatGPT was launched. And then just last Thursday Anthropic released Opus 4.6, which enables users to 5x their context window and orchestrate multiple agents at once. What will Opus 4.7 be able to do?

The conversation online about this era shift is fascinating and moving - here is one of Facebook’s first engineers:

Happy…but disoriented. That feels right. “Orient” comes from the Latin oriens which means where the sun rises - the East. In the root sense, disorientation means we are not able to point to the direction from which the sun rises. Squinting into a dense fog, standing on the edge of a cliff, blustery wind whisking my hat away…

In the way we have Orientation for a new job or a new school, perhaps these days we should have Disorientation. Make the learning and processing we all are going to need to do into something structured, deliberate, communal.

Hi, welcome. Thanks for being here. We can’t really tell you what it’s going to be like because everything is changing and everything will continue to change. We’re going to need to build our comfort with discomfort. We’re going to need to be beginners, every single week. We’re going to be hands on with whatever is currently happening, teaching ourselves as if we are total newbies, because we all are right now. How can you disorient yourself this week?

And then - when we’re deep and murky in our disorientation - we ask “what is it like to be human again?”

The sun is rising on the AI era. Let’s make sure it also rises on humans trying to be the best humans they can be.

Google published a sweet set of free marketing tools called Pomelli. You give it your website, and it pulls out your brand colors, art, logo, values, tone, and content. You can then create marketing campaigns with different product themes, and in a couple clicks make the images/graphics you need for social media. It’s delightful.

One of the sharpest takes I’ve read about “human readiness” for teams implementing AI - highly recommend!