There’s a weird-to-me pattern I’m guessing most folks run into while working with coding agents. It starts with, “Oh, cool! Claude can do X! That’s amazing!”

Then, by default, I change my work to doing Y, which usually includes invoking Claude to do X.

insert SpongeBob “3 Days Later” interstitial

Then, at some point, the thought finally occurs: “Oh! Claude could ALSO do Y!”

I’m months into using Claude, but still I have these head-smack moments, at a rate that might be harshing my mental health. There are a lot of turtles down there, and it weirds me thinking about which turtles to hand off to Claude and which one I should tether myself to.

I’m no doubt more productive in the small with Claude. But I still have to manage something. Am I more productive in the large? Probably, but I think there are plenty of things I still have to do that will be blockers.

Enter Steve Yegge’s Gas Town. That’s ambitious! I’ve been thinking about individual turtles while Steve is cattle-driving hordes of them. (Turtle Horde — cool band name — I called it.)

Can Gas Town really work? For some problems maybe? My mind is too small to know. But people still gotta do SOMETHING with what is created, right?

Then we have the tweet from the googler saying Claude did in an hour what it took them a year. That also feels off to me.

Didn’t the year involve a year’s worth of learning, and if you could really go back without ANY of that experience, could Claude have really done it in an hour? I’m doubtful. “It” was still unknown, undiscovered.

And even if it COULD do it in an hour, I’m presuming “It” is still something that will require a lot of ops work to get going and continually be maintained? And sure the Claude Cloud Army could eventually be built out to handle that too I suppose, but ... anyway.

I don’t have a great zinger here to wrap up with. Claude?

Wry acceptance:

• “Anyway. Back to my one turtle. It’s not much, but it’s honest work.”

Welp, that sucked. Ta-ta for now!