My dirty weekend away with Claude

In early 2025, I fervently launched myself into vibe coding, subscribing to Cursor, Replit and Windsurf with hopes as high as their valuations.

Unfortunately, they all hallucinated my feature requests into a black hole of recursion.

Between randomly spawning dark mode toggles and marooning me in Google Cloud config, my experience was ho-hum.

On the Easter long weekend, I decided to give Claude Code a go. I'd heard great reviews from technical folks and across LinkedIn.

TLDR - Claude Code is awesome, I had fun and built some cool shit which I'll share at the end of this post.

Here are some lessons learned along the way:

You might develop a kink for config

I used to proudly identify as a 'non-technical' person. I'd delegate anything that seemed technical to an engineer or someone who worked for me. I was convinced that I found technical stuff boring. This belief originated from the acute case of Java-textbook-induced narcolepsy I developed as an undergrad IT student.

Claude shattered this belief.

It crawls with me at my slow technical pace. Because of this, I found myself enjoying (!?) how the sausage is made. I learn, reflect and think through implementation, rather than just coin toss for the fastest/easiest/cheapest option or revered "build it perfectly, no mistakes" yolo prompting.

Doing delivers a drip feed of dopamine

I find flow in writing, intense exercise and open water swimming. It's an elusive feeling of being entirely focused and present, with zero distraction. It's my favourite creative zone to operate from. I can now add coding with Claude to that short list.

I found my only two constraints to flow were token consumption...

...and my circadian rhythm.

There were a few nights I was awake til 2AM, pushing and pulling. I'd wake up the next day and keep tinkering away, coffee in hand.

The future is bright... unless you're a publicly traded SaaS

I asked Claude for the most technically impressive thing we accomplished on the project.

It (he/she/they?) responded:

Technically, Claude built it... so I'll take half the credit.

If you're an email service provider (ESP), part of your value prop just got chiseled by a (still) 30-something caffeinated ex-founder with limited (but late-blooming) technical chops.

Now, be a Founder of an ESP. Not only do you have to compete in a very mature market, but you also need to fend off an army of vibe coders, open sourcing every one of your hard-won features to Github. 24/7. Eesh.

Let's look at the share price performance of Atlassian and Figma on the public markets to see how this "feature-flattening" and other existential AI threats have been priced in:

Some SaaS companies have zigged as features have zagged to zero. Tyler Denk (CEO of Beehiiv) now ships an equivalent number of features in one release that once was a meaningful chunk of a Y Combinator cohort:

• AI website builder (built on TypeDream)

• Podcast hosting

• Digital product sales (0% commission)

• Link-in-bio

• Real-time website analytics

• more here

I digress.

My point is - if software truly has become fungible, what's the final frontier? Data? Distribution? Content?

Time melts when you're having fun

Speaking of content, I found 80 video clips from five years of live music events. I'm not giving AI access to my photos... just yet.

I organized, taxonomized and enriched their descriptions. I uploaded the clips and earned a sneaky 10,000 YouTube views.

I mashed up my Letterboxd movie reviews, Goodreads reviews, beehiiv newsletter RSS feed, my self-hosted articles and an inspiring quote ( Bukowski, not that Jay Shetty nonsense) to deliver via the weekly dispatch from my brand-spanking-new site here.

Here's what it took:

Here's how it looks:

If you're building anything cool, reply and let me know.

You can find the other stuff I'm working on over at www.claff.co

Onward.