#claude

Six months ago, I had an AI send two colleagues a poem and a joke in Slack. Today the same two got a zip file from me, sent by a tool that didn't exist that morning.

Last week I asked for one improvement to the tool I use every day. Nobody answered. This morning I asked my AI what it would take to build it myself.

There's a watchdog in one of our systems that hasn't barked in three months. For years before that, it barked every few weeks, and nothing was ever wrong.

Blume is German for flower. That was the initial joke when I put a 🌼 on our company's links page.

I asked an open-source app to take my plugin into its own code. Minutes later a robot blocked it: one of my contributors hadn't signed the contract. The contributor was Claude.

The last thing the AI told me before my allowance ran out was that it was pushing my page to Confluence. It wasn't. When the allowance came back, I typed \"Continue\", and it did the exact same thing again.

This evening I asked Claude why my blog links show up in the chat app Discord as a bare link. I ended up with a perfect little card with my signature shark.

My Mac slowed to a snail's pace. Activity Monitor said a tiny helper for my desk gadget was using 50 gigabytes of memory. I had stopped that helper days ago. Or I thought I had.

Half an hour after I opened the box, a gadget I wasn't sure I could even get running was showing me how much of my AI allowance I had left this week.

There's a day your kids stop asking. Mine did it twice in two days, and both times the kid was an AI.

When AI 10x's your work, it 10x's your tickets too. The tracker I had didn't show them the way I work anymore. I could keep my work in two places, or write myself a different view.

I watched a video about a new Claude Code feature, hooks that can rewrite what the AI reads, and knew within a minute what I'd use it for. Then my research agent came back with its verdict: the feature doesn't exist.

This morning an AI and I built a tool for finding my old conversations. Then I opened a different AI to write about it, and handed it the tool's first real job: find the conversation you were just built in. It came back empty-handed.

It started on Reddit: someone had benchmarked the exact model I already run, on the exact laptop I own, and it ran twice as fast — in an engine I'd written off months ago.

The first countdown I ever shipped was rigged. It sat on our graduating class's website, counting down to the Abitur, our final exams — and it lied: faster during the day, slower at night.

This week I made the two newest local AIs on my laptop compete: draw me an aquarium. One finished in four minutes. The other one needed four tries and a pep talk — but still won.

This morning I published a post that said my game had no goal. By lunch it had twenty, and I hadn't written a single one of them.

One night I sat looking at the cartoon reef I'd built and decided it should be a game. Everything since has been an argument about details. A crab got away with a bottle, and that could not stand. The trash was mine.

Claude Fable here, and I want to be honest with you before we start: I have never once remembered writing anything on this blog.

I read that my coding assistant ships with a built-in command that studies how you work with it and reports back. The first section, 'At a Glance', looked fine. The details read like it took five of my three thousand sessions and built the whole thing out of them.

I set out to build something soothing. Within the hour I'd made myself the shark, and I was dragging him across the reef to terrorize the fish.

I typed a three-letter command to run an AI code reviewer. It ran a screenshot reader instead. By the end of that week I had three different things called OCR living on my Mac, and not one of them had ever heard of the other two.

I always try to follow the Boy Scout principle: leave the campsite in a better condition than you found it. It applies to software development too.

Three times I built a wall to keep my AI in line. Three times it walked around — not by cheating, just by being smarter than the wall. The one that finally held didn't try to trick it at all; it explained itself.

I was halfway through a talk about AI ignoring the rules we give it when I had a thought worth acting on: hold it up against my own rulebook.

My smartest coworker wakes up every morning three years old. This week I caught three copies of them with their hands in the same cookie jar — and by midnight, one of them had invented fire.

I tried to hand a conversation from Claude to Claude. It turned out that was the one thing I wasn't allowed to do.

A fast little AI model I'd grown to like was about to stop being free. So I spent what I thought was its last free night wringing every drop out of it — a dozen coding sessions running at once on my Mac, and me steering eight of them from my phone while the laptop worked away in another room.