There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen
No attribution, but fun Quote Investigator dive.
Sorry for dropping off the daily blogging train; it just turned out to be a week of pleasant surprises and life-changing events. I’ll share with y’all the second-most exciting one.
I know I’ve been pushing you all to learn the AI coding stuff as deeply as possible, and I have been doing some myself, my favorite a few years ago, a script to count when we had too many words in a presentation slide, but I knew Claude Code was something different and better.
However, I fell into the trap of bookmarking and downloading tens of hours of Claude Code tutorials and not installing the thing itself. And work has been busy! My colleague Dave Martin was hosting an internal livestream. I joined late, then had to leave because an important call came in. I decided to forget it all, throwing caution to the wind, and just install Claude Code and play with it without reading anything.
The next 24-36 hours are a bit of a blur. I haven’t locked into a multi-day coding session fueled by energy drinks, sugar, and cheesy carbs since my early 20s! There were some interruptions for previous commitments, but I basically became addicted to the feeling of that steep learning curve. Every minor annoyance or workflow became an opportunity to create new software in languages I’d never touched before.
It also really rewired my brain, even in how I talk. (Found myself saying “thinking” after a colleague’s question. 
) I’m thinking about problems in a much more structured manner now, how to divide and chunk tasks, and provide appropriate context and skills. I really do feel like my brain is being terraformed a bit.
So far I’ve written scripts or apps for grabbing daily summaries from my calendar, spinning up new projects and syncing them with Github, switching between Brave tabs better, an app to search and launch Brave tabs quickly…
Did you know that macOS Preview regressed and no longer lets you export a single page of a PDF as an image? I have an app that does that. What do I do with it? Do I open source it? Am I a Mac App developer now? Do I want to support this for other people forever? Should I even put it in source control? Or publish a set of tests and prompts, as Drew Brenig did with whenwords.
It’s a strange and wonderful time to be a lover of software and computers. A little bit of code goes a long way. I’m at a CCL leadership training this week so offline during the days and exhausted at night but I gotta keep all those little bots running.