I haven't written anything here about artificial intelligence, even though I use it every day. My work life is entirely dependent on it now. Being without it would feel like doing my job with no internet.

The main tool for me is Claude Code. I run a tech company, and we have far more tech problems than we can solve. I carve out the ones that I'm best equipped to tackle:

Unknown ROI: It's probably not worth it for one of our engineers to go spelunking down an uncharted path. There are plenty of known positive ROI problems that they can solve.

Requires full context: Doing the job well requires some detailed knowledge about the entire company. Only a few of us here have that breadth of perspective.

Is modular: Despite needing full context, it's not really part of the existing infrastructure and can be tinkered on without impacting anything in production.

I love these kinds of projects. It's like going from 0 to 1 all over again, but within Shovels, so I have a lot of resources. I have servers, databases, and smart people I can ask when I get stuck.

Most importantly, I have Claude Code.

I've been messing around with web applications for about 15 years now. I understand web frameworks and database architecture. I've built Ruby on Rails and Python Django apps from scratch. Looking back, those were hard times. It was slow. When I ran into the inevitable errors, I had to Google them and scroll through Stack Overflow answers until I found the one that worked. On the plus side, I actually learned how to build.

With Claude Code, I punch far above my weight. Instead of writing code, I prompt for output. When I know the destination, I can have Claude do the hard work of setting up the Python code structure and writing all of the modules. For my projects that meet the criteria I laid out above, "vibe coding" is fine. I don't need to read every line. Eventually, if the project is successful, somebody else on my team will do that. While I'm spelunking, code quality matters much less.

As I write this, I'm having Claude Code confirm that a data migration worked. It noticed that there were 244 files out of some 200,000 that appeared to have not transferred. This particular challenge is interesting because we just acquired a company, and they stored about 190gb of files in Google Drive. The founder wanted me to sync that drive to my laptop. No way, I thought. We need this in S3, and I need to translate all of his code to Python.

Over 24 hours, I had Claude learn everything about this project. I gave it access to the founder's GitHub data processing and website repositories and a Google Drive that ties it together. Claude had to analyze PowerShell scripts with sparse notes about the data processing flows. Claude asked me clarification questions and made me think. I took breaks to make sure I was nudging Claude in the right direction, but I had to rely on it to tell me what all of these scripts do. Together, we learned the founder's process. We looked at the git history and metadata on his files to see what's been kept up to date and what's obsolete. The pieces started to fit together, and we came up with a plan that simplifies a lot of what the founder was doing and sets us up to efficiently take over operations.

This would have taken me days, maybe weeks, because I wouldn't have been able to focus on it. It would have required a lot of context switching, and as a result, the process would have slowed down significantly. Instead, Claude Code is a focused process. It can run on a single task while I toggle back and forth between Slack and email and other daily items. Claude can wait patiently for an answer, for hours at a time, and pick up immediately once I provide a response. This is not human, and it's wonderful.

For someone like me, doing the projects I'm actually best equipped at my company to be doing, Claude Code is perfect. It's the ultimate complement to my regular work brain. It loves to chew through complex, modular projects that need a lot of context. It makes me feel 100X more productive to outsource most of this deep thinking to Claude.

I don't know what the future holds, but I do know I'll be able to influence it more with this tool.