from the driver's seat to the dispatcher's desk

if you've been reading the last few issues, you've probably noticed i've drifted from the usual prospecting content. i have. and there's a reason for it that i'll share more about later this week.

but the short version is i haven't been prospecting this month. so instead of forcing a dm breakdown i don't have, i want to talk about what i've actually been doing. building with claude code.

i mentioned it in issue 4 when i switched from chatgpt. since then, things have.....escalated.

about a month ago my workflow with claude code looked like this: have an idea, talk with claude about how to build it, ask claude to build it, idea done. useful. but pretty manual.

i'd switched from chatgpt because i wanted better context control. chatgpt projects let you attach files, which is great, but the context is flat. everything sits at the same level. claude code gives you hierarchical context - project-level instructions, folder-level instructions, file-level context. that's what pulled me over.

once i was in, i started turning my workflows into reusable commands. /close-out wraps up a session. /remember searches my conversation history. 31 of these now.

then david arnoux posted about a /level-up skill he built for claude code. it assesses where you are with the tool and tells you what you're missing. i did my due diligence, couldn't find anything that exfiltrated data, and ran it. i went from a 6 to a 9 on his scale in about a week. not because i didn't know how to get there, but because i needed the inspiration to actually do it.

from there things moved fast.

i wired claude into slack, gmail, google calendar, and plaid. $0.30/month per account and i get a daily slack message on where i'm trending financially for the month and year. no spreadsheet. no logging in to my bank. just a message every morning with the numbers.

then things got autonomous.

i built a morning brief that runs at 6:30am every day. no human trigger. scans all my projects, ranks what matters, delivers it to slack. evening brief reviews the day and flags gaps. these run on schedules. i just wake up and the information is there.

then i built audits. eight of them. they scan every project, every database, every scheduled task. claude now knows the shape of the whole system - what's healthy, what's stale, what's broken.

and then last week i built /nightshift.

while i'm asleep, claude looks at everything i have going on. it decides what's worth working on, prioritizes it, and then starts building. i tell it to find 16 things to build overnight. each one works in its own sandbox so nothing breaks. i wake up, review what it built, and approve or deny what it's done.

this morning i woke up to 16 things built by nightshift. i approved 14 of them. it fixed a broken slack notification in my evening brief, added missing documentation to three projects, and wired up a new health check for my scheduled tasks.

i went from being in the driver's seat to being a dispatcher.

that's the principle. you start by doing the reps. you need them. but at some point, the move isn't more reps. it's building the thing that does the reps and getting good at reviewing what comes out.

i learn by doing. if you're wired the same way, my recommendation is simple. download claude code and start building stuff. it doesn't have to be clean. you can clean up later. just start.

just start using claude code. seriously. so many things i've had claude do started as something that would've been faster to just do myself. but having claude do it introduced me to a way of working through claude that ends up being faster long term. i had claude file my tax extension. now i have it querying websites for information i need without any input from me. it does it slower than i would, but it runs in the background while i do other things. the speed isn't the point. the leverage is.

leafcutter ants delegate 94% of colony labor to specialized castes, reserving the queen's attention exclusively for decisions that affect long-term colony direction.

normal programming resumes next issue.

this entire issue was written with claude.

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