Claude Code everywhere
I am using Claude Code for almost all projects these days, even if they are not explicitly coding projects. It does such a good job at planning out projects, completing them piecemeal, leaving breadcrumbs, etc. But it is a strange way to work; most humans won’t want to work in Claude Code.
Ethan Mollick, who is way ahead of me in AI tool use, had a good observation this week:
AI capability has been running ahead of AI accessibility. The models have been smart enough to do extraordinary things for a while now, but we’ve been making people access that intelligence through chatbots. And, as that cognitive load research shows, the chatbot format is actively working against them. As interfaces improve, we’re going to see what happens when a much larger number of people can actually use what AI is capable of.
This seems about right to me. Claude Code is great at all kinds of work today — and as the interface improves, we will see huge growth in adoption.
Managing the project workflow with a bunch of Markdown files could be improved. I am enamored with Cline Kanban, and I’d love to see this in Claude. Claude does a great job breaking down a project into well-structured component tasks. A kanban interface seems like a natural fit. It should probably just be rolled into cmux or Claude.
Configuring Claude
There is an entire industry of people advising on how to configure Claude; here are just a few I spent time reading this week
- Ruben Hassid on “How to set up Claude that will actually give you good answers”. I like some of this, really tunes Claude to your voice and your practices. On the other hand, is this overconstraining Claude — are my practices actually the best, am I clipping off some great input?
- An entire repo of best practices. The great thing about best practices is that there are so many to choose from.
- Another large popular repo of related agents, skills, and rules
I could go on. I am reminded of the avalanche of books back in the day that focused on editing win.ini and system.ini for Windows 3.1. Most of the advice was terrible. Some really smart people worked on the design of Windows, and in most cases, you were better off leaving the detailed configuration alone.
And with Claude, the smart move is probably to leave config as is and trust Claude to handle it.
There are really smart users like Gary Tan of Y Combinator, who shares his own Claude setup. Lots of good insight in here, but I don’t know, it seems awfully heavyweight; he is deep down the rabbit hole and probably spends way too much time dorking around with his tools.
Or ... Boris Cherny shares his list of under-utilized Claude features, and some of these seem more adoptable.
But I still think the smart play is to let Claude figure all this out.
Fixing our brains
Polarization, anxiety, cognitive decline, mental health woes, etc – it is popular to blame them all on smartphones. But maybe smartphones aren’t the problem after all; maybe it is the uniquely American toxic mix of slanted media that is driving polarization and anxiety. Of course, smartphones give us 24/7 access to that toxic stew.
And maybe AI can help free us from this toxicity:
Social media companies profit from engagement, attention, and clicks, so inflammatory content gets amplified. AI models are trained on vast amounts of data that skew toward published, edited, expert-legible text — so they shift inexorably toward mainstream consensus, regardless of what any company intends.
Trump Accounts
This is my obligatory weekly whine about governance and politics.
The WSJ unashamedly published this article about Trump accounts recently: "The Hack That Turns Trump Accounts Into Multimillion-Dollar Tax-Free Nest Eggs." The key to benefitting from these accounts is to do this:
- Put $100K annually into 401Ks and 529s
- And then put $5K a year into a Trump account
- And then don’t touch it at age 18, but roll it into a Roth IRA for the child’s retirement.
Well, that is really going to help the middle class! With a median household income of $83K (2024) and with an average of almost 2 kids per family, you can see how those numbers are all going to work out great.