So the deal was simple. One month of Claude Code on Pro-Max x20, no safety net. May 21 was day one, and day one is always the same thing: install.
That sounds trivial, and for most people it is. For me it wasn't. I've shipped with agentic tools, editors and APIs for years — but never the CLI. After almost 20 years in this job, letting something install itself straight into my terminal feels less like a tool choice and more like handing a stranger the keys to the flat.
nerd: I started on a C64 and learned on machines we booted into DOS. My terminal is sacred ground. So no, I did not take this lightly.
And then it ran.
I expected "good". AI had already been doing extremely good for a long while — I wasn't new to any of this. But this was another level. The thing that got me wasn't raw capability, it was how natural it felt to drive the most powerful tool I'd touched from the one place I'd been guarding for two decades. No tab-switching, no copy-paste dance between an editor and a chat window. Just me, the prompt, and something that actually did the work.
That was the moment the challenge stopped being a gimmick and started being the most interesting month I've had in years. I didn't know it yet, but two days later I'd stop talking to one agent and start building a whole team.
