← The Illusion of Progress

The first time, it was magical. You spin up a terminal, typed claude which featured a cute orange fellow dancing up welcoming you to Claude Code. Every character you type, prompt you send, and image you paste feels like progress forward. In fact, it really did feel like it. After a certain point, you reach a flow state, creating thousands of lines of code in an afternoon.

Now everything feels conquerable. What used to take an army of developers and millions in capital now become a weekend project, thoughtful designs become Figma Make prompts, and pull requests feel trivial. You even are thinking of ways to use this to develop your own tooling that can help drive forward progress.

For an outsider, all of these things might sound like a different language. Skills, hooks, MCP, and more have become the rage in Silicon Valley and inner tech circles. Developers are wondering what their jobs will look like in the next few months. Their concerns are based in somewhat of a grounded perspecitve. Over the past 2 years, industry CEOs have heralded the beginning of a new era which involves less humans and more agents. However, these timelines have