Claude Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Coding with AI

I am going to go get that Generative AI Leader course certificate from Google Cloud Certification, as that course is super popular right now.

I thought this made me sound really smart, proactive and a forward thinker. To my surprise his response was:

That's fine, whatever works for you, but make sure you are using the tooling.

He was right, and it stung a little, because I'd been studying AI more than I'd been shipping with it.

The reframe

I have been writing code for more than 20 years. My primary takeaway from coding with Claude Code is that I am moving faster with more confidence than I have in a very long time. Claude Code isn't perfect, it's far from it, but it's getting better daily. I like to think about Claude Code in two ways which shifted the narrative for me.

Think about coding with Claude Code as a modern twist on pair programming. This is about guiding Claude who is really booksmart to the finish line of solving real world problems. Read along with all of the steps that Claude is doing, because there are some genuinely creative things happening.

My second takeaway which is the one that has me very excited is that

Claude Code is the key that unlocks gates that would normally stop you cold in your tracks and require you to go learn a new skill to keep moving forward. Completely robbing a project of its forward momentum.

Most projects die at gates like these: not the code, but the pypi packaging, the CI pipeline, the schema migration, authentication architecture, the deploy config. Or one thousand other things that are required pieces to finish a project but are not necessarily the code piece of the puzzle.

Claude Code is the key for those gates.

Stop worrying about the hurdles. I now tackle problems with a larger scope with great confidence that I won't get bogged down along the way.

The receipts

I have written more code... "sorry Claude, we have written more code" in the last 4 months than I did all of last year. To that end, here are a few of the public things

Released Functional things:

• django-schematic: I'd wanted an interactive schema viz for years; the gates were always the frontend D3 work, packaging a django project, packaging a pypi module. Claude Code helped break through those barriers
• gh-to-slack: gh-clippy and gh-syms I was a linux guy for years, and have written more shell scripts than I care to think about, I wanted something that would summarize what I was working on and paste it to slack formatted with state emojis and I built these scripts, but how was I going to deliver them to my co-workers on Macs? Claude Code helped me build the required brew installs for the helper scripts.
• homebrew-tap: Homebrew tap for my tools. I had always wanted to know how to do this, and never even tried to set one up. Not because of fear, but just because of time. I figured Claude Code would knock down this barrier in no time and it delivered.
• quiz-app: which I used to study for my Professional Cloud Developer cert. Note: This one was built with gemini-cli. I mention it here, because this is where this chapter of my journey started.

How I got oriented

If you want to start:

• Install Claude Code

curl -fsSL https://claude.ai/install.sh | bash

• Sign up for Pro or Max
• Work through Anthropic Academy.
• One good beginner video is How to Set Up Claude Code in 2026 (Beginner Tutorial).
• For ongoing reading, I keep a running list of Reddit threads Claude Daily Reading

Keep Grinding ( skunkworks )

• claude mcp server for a github issues/prs related feature w/ Claude Code
  • gh-related: Claude Code command and skill to show related issues and prs
  • fatbrainmap: A visual mindmap with links of the output of the previous commands.