IT: The Magic of Claude Code

I have been heads down in Claude Code for the last five days and am absolutely blown away. This may be early euphoria, but I believe it is a completely new paradigm for how to work. I’m planning to write something up on it soon but if you are using it for non-technical tasks (i.e. anything other than building software), would love to hear about it.

If you’re not into the AI scene, skip down to the psychology (one neuroscience paper and one book on developmental psychology), both of which I absolutely loved (and would also welcome any thoughts on).

Articles and Podcasts

The Magic of Claude Code [Article]

Noah Brier

If you are anywhere near my part of the social graph, you are hearing a lot about Claude Code right now. It seemed at first to me like the next in trendy AI tools. Having spent a few days using it, I think Claude Code represents something fundamentally different: a new paradigm for how knowledge work gets done.

AI coding tools have existed for years. GitHub Copilot pioneered autocomplete inside code editors in 2021. Cursor added Q&A on top of autocomplete. But Claude Code made a deceptively simple move that unlocked something more powerful: it gave the AI access to read and write files on your computer and execute basic Unix commands. Let me try to explain why this matters.

ChatGPT and Claude in the browser or app form suffer from a few limitations. One is that there is no memory between conversations and cramped context windows. You can only talk to it one topic for so long before it runs out of memory and you have to start again.

There's no meaningful state or memory. It's like having someone that's super capable and talented in certain ways but always on their very first day of the job where you can't give them feedback to make them better at things.

Claude Code solves this. It can write notes to itself, accumulating knowledge across sessions, maintains running tallies. It has state. It has memory.

Another is that you still have to do a lot of the work - write the code, connect the APIs, etc.

Claude Code is agentic. It can use tools . If you come up for a plan to build an internal app in your business, you can just ask it to build it.

If I'm using the Claude web app to write marketing copy and it does a bad job, then I can correct it in that chat, but if I want it to be corrected going forward for future chats, I have to go back into the project I'm using, look at the prompt, then edit it to make so it does it good in the future. In practice, this is a pain. As a result, I do it less often and only when it’s a big deal.

In Claude Code, I literally just say, "Hey, I don't like the way you did this. How can we update things so it doesn't happen again?” Then it just suggests some ways to do that by updating certain files. Because it’s so easy, I suggest a process improvement almost every time I do something.

So the iteration and constant improvement cycles are MUCH faster. And the ability to build up state/learnings over time allows for continuous improvement on how you use the AI apart from just waiting on newer and better models to come out.

The way I have started using it, it is more of a competitor to the browser or MacOS than it is a coding agent. When I start work in the morning, I open up Claude Code. For the last week, it has been the primary interface through which I've gotten things done. There are lots of holes to fill (security seeming like a big one), but all these seem solvable. I suspect this mode of working through Claude Code or other CLIs (Command Line Interfaces) will become the dominant paradigm for most knowledge work over the next few years.

Claude Code Can Be Your Second Brain - AI & I Podcast [Podcast]

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Building on the article above, Claude Code is unique in that can both read and WRITE files. The name is somewhat deceptive. It’s not really a coding product, it’s an interface for making stuff. The first thing most people made with it was software and that's pretty cool.

This podcast broadens the aperture of what you can make quite considerably. Noah talks about how he runs Claude Code out of his Obsidian setup and it set me off on my 5-day (and counting) deep dive into Claude Code.

Obsidian is ostensibly a note taking app like Evernote or Notion but it uses markdown files as the base type of note and LLMs are very good at reading and working with Markdown files.

Here's my little test project I have to get an HVAC unit replaced in my house. I set up Claude in Obsidian and told it everything I know about my house and the HVAC system. It recommended I measure the ducts and returns to calculate if the air flow was correct. I did that and put all the data into Claude Code. It then helped me do rough calculations of where I’m losing efficiency in the system and suggested the most cost-effective way to improve it.

It then helped me convert that into a scope document and find three HVAC contractors in my area to send it to for bids.

There was some pretty heavy oversight and prompting from me to do this, but it was still a near-magical experience. I could have done it with just the regular web app but the act of going through and organizing all the information would have taken me far longer. Drafting the scope document alone would have taken me longer than the whole project took me start to finish in Claude Code.

I found myself doing deep research projects on the web app, uploading them to my Obsidian/Claude Code set up then telling Claude to read it and update the scope doc based on what it learned. It really felt like a ‘future of work’ moment in a way no other AI product has for me.

He has a github repo if you want to set it up: https://github.com/heyitsnoah/claudesidian

Another interesting possibility discussed on the podcast is that language models create vocabulary for thinking probabilistically. We’ve associated “how we see the world” with deterministic tools because the Enlightenment and scientific revolution made a lot of those tools.

There’s always been another mode - more intuitive, vibes-based, comfortable with ambiguity - that Western culture deprioritized because our tools couldn’t work that way.

We now have an incredibly powerful tool that is probabilistically based. LLMs are not deterministic, they are probabilistic next token predictors. If you ask the same question twice, you will get different responses. (Try it if you haven't!).

The question is whether we develop the literacy to work effectively with systems that give you different answers depending on context, framing, and even randomness.

Some more Claude Code resources I found helpful for thinking of it as more than a coding agent:

Claude Code and What Comes Next — Good overview from Ethan Mollick on what it is and why it matters. I would probably start here.
How to Use Claude Code for Everyday Tasks—No Programming Required — Everyday tasks you can do other than programming to give you some ideas.
CodeLife: How I Use AI — Cool example of Dave Nadig's how it changed daily workflow

The Discerning Heart: The Developmental Psychology of Robert Kegan [Book]

Philip M Lewis

Ignoring genetics for the moment, most therapy modes I’m familiar with tend to frame issues as ‘wounds’ or ‘conditions.' I tend to think of these as growing out of two of the most influential psychological thinkers: Freud (psychoanalysis) and Skinner (behaviorism).

Freud basically said you’re acting in a particular way because childhood trauma left psychological wounds that need healing and modern psychotherapy more or less has continued down that path.

Skinner said your environment conditions specific responses through reward and punishment. Though there is much to disagree on between the two camps, the frameworks are essentially deterministic and backward-looking—you’re a product of what happened to you, and the work is about fixing what’s broken or reconditioning what was learned.

There is at least one other way of thinking that grew out of developmental psychology and Jean Piaget. The school I am most familiar with is Robert Kegan’s developmental theory which offers a fundamentally different frame: you’re not broken, you’re at a particular stage of meaning-making.

The way you construct reality isn’t a wound to heal, it’s simultaneously a developmental achievement compared to earlier stages and a limitation you can evolve beyond.

Kegan identifies five stages of increasingly complex meaning-making that humans are capable of.

Stage 1 is infancy where you are unable to separate your needs from others, you cannot imagine that others have different needs.

At stage 2 (childhood), you coordinate your own needs with others’ needs—you understand others have separate desires, but relationships are essentially transactional exchanges.

At stage 3 (adolescence into adulthood), you are able internalize others’ perspectives—your partner’s disappointment becomes your experience of yourself, their view of you becomes part of how you experience being you.

At stage 4 (mature adulthood if you get there, most don’t), you develop self-authored values that let you maintain deep relationships without being psychologically dependent on others’ approval.

Kagan posits that most adults never develop past the psychological sophistication of a teenager - research shows they plateau at stage 3, typically reached in late adolescence or early adulthood (~age 15-25).

This framework explains phenomena that seem mysterious otherwise. Why do some people require constant reassurance in relationships? They’re operating at stage 2, unable to internalize that someone cares about them - they need that caring demonstrated over and over in concrete ways.

Why do teenagers make obviously self-destructive decisions despite knowing the consequences? Stage 2 individuals have separate present and future interests, experienced one at a time rather than held together internally. They cannot think about their future selves in the way a Stage 3 individual can. In the moment, present interest wins.

Why do so many adults feel chronic guilt about disappointing parents or partners? They’re stage 3, embedded in shared psychological experiences, taking responsibility for how others feel about them rather than being able to feel secure in their self-authored values.

The knot in your stomach when your partner is angry—that’s being subject to shared psychological experience. You literally can’t sleep until you repair how they feel about you, because their view of you is constitutive of your experience of yourself. Moving to stage 4 means making those shared experiences “object” rather than “subject,” something you can reflect on rather than something you are.

The practical question: how do you encourage movement through stages? The authors suggest it requires both confirmation (recognizing current capability) and disconfirmation (inviting something beyond).

I think group therapy, good coaching, and deliberate work in an existing relationship can provide this.

I find this idea so helpful: different people are literally constructing different realities—not because they’re difficult or damaged, but because they’re operating from different developmental structures.

I have benefited a lot from traditional insight therapy, but, it does in my experience sometimes fall down at the point where you can understand intellectually why you do something without having the structural cognitive capacity to do anything different. You need the developmental capacity, not just the insight, and Kegan’s framework is a way to develop that.

The Theory of Constructed Emotion (Article)

Lisa Feldman Barrett

There is no “fear circuit” in the brain. Decades of neuroscience research have failed to find one—no consistent facial expression, autonomic pattern, or set of neurons that fires for fear across all people.

Lisa Feldman Barrett argues emotions aren’t hardwired responses. They’re predictions your brain constructs using past experience.

Your brain is constantly running simulations of the world to maintain physiological balance (allostasis). Its internal model tracks two things:

Patterns in the external world (what you see, hear, smell, etc.)
Patterns in your body’s internal state (heart rate, blood pressure, glucose levels, etc.)

Your brain compresses what’s happening in your body (2) into affect—a background feeling with two dimensions:

Valence: pleasant vs. unpleasant
Arousal: activated vs. calm

Everyone has some affect, all the time. You are always feeling some amount of pleasantness and some amount of activation.

Feldman’s idea is that your brain is using that affect plus your past experience to assemble a distribution of possible interpretations, each with some probability of matching the current situation.

The same affect can be experienced as different emotions by different people based on past experience.

Take someone activated (high arousal) with neutral valence about to give a presentation. If past experiences with high arousal in performance contexts were positive, their brain categorizes these sensations as excitement. If past experiences were negative, the identical physiological state gets categorized as anxiety or fear.

The exact same affect and same external situation can trigger excitement in some people and anxiety in others, depending on their past experiences in similar situations.

A therapeutic implication: If you have bad conceptual models built from past experiences (trauma in therapy-speak), you can get stuck in a local maximum.

Your brain needs fewer sensory inputs to confirm existing patterns, even when they’re not accurate.

Example: You meet an emotional man. Your priors say “men who share emotions are manipulative.” So you interpret weak evidence as confirmation, he acts defensively in response, and your brain treats that as further confirmation.

To get out of it, you need something like exposure therapy. You need a set of good interactions in a challenging scenario that alter your distribution of priors. If conflict generates a fear response, you need to engage in conflict and see that nothing bad happens. Over time, conflict gradually stops triggering fear responses because your brain updates its conceptual model with new statistical regularities.

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