Confidently Wrong

At some point over the past year, you may have heard of the buzzy Anthropic product Claude Code and understandably thought, “This isn't for me.” After all, its name implies that only seasoned or aspiring software developers should fire it up. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Plenty of non-techies have discovered that they can use it to do a bevy of cool things—even if they've never heard of an if-then statement or a while loop.

Momentum behind Claude Code has been building for a while. At some point last month, though, it entered the zeitgeist. Articles in The Atlantic tend to signify cultural relevance.

I'd already gone all in on Claude. Why not play around with its powerful AI Swiss Army Knife? After going down the YouTube rabbit hole in early January, I got the hang of Claude Code. I soon started using it to:

• Create bespoke apps and websites.
• Make stylistic changes to this website. (You may notice that I retired the bright orange accent color in favor of a more subdued hue.)
• Analyze data.
• Build new custom Claude skills and tweak existing ones.
• Create and modify local Microsoft 365 files on my MacBook Pro.

That's not to say that I batted 1.000, though. Along the way, I made plenty of mistakes and wasted thousands of tokens in the process.

I was curious about how I could use Claude Code more efficiently in the future. That straightforward request proved far more eventful than I expected.

Asking Claude for Honest Feedback

In this vein, I prompted Claude on January 31, 2026, as follows:

Long story short: It tore me a new one. When it came to Claude Code, I was all hat, no cattle. I suffered from commitment issues. (That is, I never followed through on my promise to use it.) I couldn't follow basic instructions when installing software.

About halfway through reading Claude's jarring and lengthy critique, I started thinking about this recurring question in The Big Lebowski.