I'm the co-founder of Transistor.fm (podcast hosting and analytics). I write about SaaS marketing, bootstrapping startups, pursuing a good life, building calm companies, business ethics, and creating a better society.
Banning all consumption during the workday
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Happy Saturday. Hope you're finding some calm in the midst of the storm. A few observations about struggles folks are having with LLMs / Claude Code... (You can also read this online) Tired of the Claude Code hacksI think I'm officially overwhelmed by the number of people sharing their bespoke Claude Code plugins, skills, agents.md, harness, etc., on social media. Everyone has a system. All I want is something simple that actually works. I've been really happy with Brian Casel's philosophy. When I asked about this in his Builder Methods discord, he replied: Generally, I believe that people's opinionated packaging of their own systems is just noise and adds complexity. I'm more interested in [building] our own systems that fit our own mental models, team/org culture, etc. So far, I've mostly stuck to using Claude Code's TUI with a simple claude.md file. I'm also getting it to record daily "what we did today" journals in a history/ folder. Aside: so much of these "LLM productivity hacks" feels similar to other productivity hype cycles we've seen – like when everyone got obsessed with Notion. ---- Don't be a feature creepLLMs make it easy for anyone to add new features to the product. Even before AI, teams were battling feature creep, where the product becomes increasingly complex, bloated, and cluttered. On X, Dax Raad posted this internal memo from Open Code's team chat: He said: "Everything great comes from being able to delay gratification for as long as possible, and it feels like we're collectively losing our ability to do that." I'm hearing from lots of teams that are struggling with this! ---- Prompt Claude Code... watch a video?Loved this bit from Caleb Porzio's latest episode: It starts with: "Oh, I really need AI to help me with this thing. Oh, it's taking too long. Okay, I'll open YouTube." Right?
But how it ends is you're like, "Oh, I really wanna get something prompted so that I can watch YouTube while something else works." You know? It's just this knee-jerk reaction.
It's like, oh, I just want the relief. I just wanna watch, like, a golf video, a comedy video, a physics video, or some guy making a magnetic hoverboard.
So I've been restraining myself pretty hard. I'm gonna have to institute some sort of ban on all forms of consumption during the workday, or something, because it's just too damn tempting when you have all these prompts going and nothing else to do.
---- How are you doing in all of this? Reply and let me know. Cheers, PS: I've got some changes coming to Marketing for Developers. If you're not signed up for that list, now's a good time.
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I'm the co-founder of Transistor.fm (podcast hosting and analytics). I write about SaaS marketing, bootstrapping startups, pursuing a good life, building calm companies, business ethics, and creating a better society.
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The first time I sat down and used Claude Code's Opus 4.5 to build software, I couldn't believe how good it was. My next thought was: this is going to change the dynamics inside software teams. Read this article online See comments on Hacker News The standoff between roles Marc Andreessen described this moment as a “Mexican standoff:” Every engineer now thinks they can be a PM and a designer. Every PM thinks they can code and design. Every designer thinks they can do the other two. The risk...
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