Claude Code

05 Jan, 2026

Mostly out of curiosity—Jesus TapDancing Christ you can’t get away from it in my Twitter feed—I installed Claude Code last night and used it to add a minor functionality to a copy of a small web app, following along step by step with one of the 6 billion tutorials available online. It took me about 90 minutes start to finish, which I think is remarkable because up until last night, I had never:

• Used WSL for Windows;
• Done anything with GitHub; or
• Used Cursor.

In addition, it had been 27 years since I did anything you could remotely call coding, unless you count running regressions in Stata, which I don’t. And I promise you, I wasn’t setting the world on fire in CS 201 in 1999.¹

Honestly, the installations and configuring of WSL and Cursor took the most time, and second was the overhead of figuring out what the hell I was actually looking at in the Cursor windows and such. Once I had Cursor working and integrated with Claude Code and a basic sense of what buttons did what, the whole thing was a cinch.

My main provisional takeaways were/are:

1. I learned more about app development last night than probably the previous 25 years combined. I used an API key, I copied a repository from GitHub, I found out what a Spec file is and edited it, and I ran a web app locally on my machine. Who knew! Whatever Claude Code can bypass for you in programming, it isn’t a turnkey development solution via vibe. At least not yet.

2. I don’t see anyway that, wherever this leads, it’s not eventually going to be world-changing. It honestly felt like a magic trick when I added the functionality to the web app. This is presumably the worst the vibe coding tech will ever be, and it’s already reasonably remarkable. Even if this isn’t actually saving anyone time yet, it seems like proof-of-concept of something huge.

3. There are a lot of obvious downsides. Security vulnerabilities being the most prominent. Arming programming morons like me with the potential capacity to create this stuff with no real understanding of the underlying concepts and structures seems like six different disaster. Forget about the unknown unknowns, I don’t even know the known unknowns!

4. Skill and expertise is not going to disappear in this field. Not by a long shot. It’s obvious that traditional coding skill will be worth something (perhaps a lot), but it was equally obvious to me last night that working with a tool like Claude Code is going to have its own associated skills.

5. I forgot how much fun it is to create digital stuff. Even absent the line by line coding, it was just so easy to get lost in the flow state of building something.

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#AI #Claude