I'm Still Clauding

like a true survivor?

A couple of months ago, I wrote about starting to use Claude Code.

I’m still there, still living in Claudeville. I’m still feeling plenty of things, including being conflicted in many ways. And it all comes down to energy use — that is, what energy I have to dedicate to this work.

The biggest thing that I’m feeling now relates to my position as a consultant, not “just a developer”. Being a consultant at a small company means wearing a lot of hats. Even if you’re primarily a developer, you don’t have the luxury of dedicated PMs, or client management / liaisons, or ops, or all these things that would let you concentrate on just the software. And while I can do these other things, it’s difficult for me to do them all and do the development, the building. It’s not just that I enjoy the building part (the “craft”) the most, it’s also what I’m best at. And what that means for me in practice is it’s also the part I’m best at pulling back from and giving direction and review on. It’s the part I’m best at giving over to automation, to assistance, to an agent. It lets me concentrate on all the other things I have to do, and truly do myself.

I’m also feeling plenty about the amount of stuff to do, and the velocity with which it gets done. There’s just so much to deal with — mountains of LLM output, context-switching with bouncing between separate problems (and even separate projects) — and it’s hard to keep up. Yes, LLMs are truly a “force multiplier”, but consider what forces are being multiplied. I’m not fond of the military origins of the saying “slow is smooth, smooth is fast”, but I do strongly agree with it. I’m feeling so much demand for so much, and giving in to moving at speed means a future where you get caught in a tangle or run fill-tilt into a brick wall. This can only be countered by slowing down, looking around, and doing things well — or as well as possible. It takes all that time and effort to produce less — the right kind of less.

With so many people using these tools to create literally inhuman amounts of — let’s face it, cruft — that will need to be rescued, I’m remembering my earlier days. I’ve done rescue missions before. It used to be something of a specialty. But now, without some of these same tools in my tool chest, how will I possibly dig out that amount of rubble?

So yes, I’m continuing to dwell in Claudeville. I figure if I’m going to do this, I should do it “right”. I should use the tools at my disposal. So I’ve done plenty to understand the tools and fit them into my tool chest, to shape them to my hands. I set up my dotclaude repo, so I could have a dependable(?), consistent(?) assistant/colleague(?) that goes with me from project to project (and I have plenty of projects to deal with). And as my understanding has grown, so has that repo, accreting with the sediment of lessons learned, and (hopefully) coral of helpful skills and scripts, and (most likely) the barnacles of wild-attempt stabs at stopping or redirecting away from certain unwanted behavior. If you like, you can take a look at the history, and watch these things happen. And in my not-so-humble opinion, that repo and its history show two things that are not always found in other such places.

Ownership. My biggest issue with what’s going on is the lack of ownership, the common anti-pattern of, as Simon Willison puts it, “inflicting unreviewed code on collaborators”. So my CLAUDE.md starts with “You help; I own the result.” This is probably as much a reminder to myself as it is to the agent. It can be seductive to delegate more and more, and try to take yourself out of the equation. This is another aspect of the vigilance I wrote of last time.
Cleanup. It’s not all about doing more, building up. It’s not all about addition. There’s also removal, deletion. Call it refactoring. Call it consolidation. Call it judgement. This dotclaude repo is a project like any other — maybe more so, given its foundational nature, and how every bit I add there has the potential for knock-on effects everywhere I use Claude. Which is, of course, everywhere. Or everywhere I’m working professionally. And I do try to put the emphasis on professional there (refer to the previous point on ownership).

So that’s where I am now, moving along with the world as it is, as best as I can. I hope you, too, are doing the best you can.