Coding With Claude: How I Stopped Typing and Started Building

For most of my career, coding has been about patience. You sit in front of the screen, map out an idea, break it down into tasks, and then grind through it line by line. Every developer knows the rhythm: write, compile, debug, repeat. You accept that prototypes take months, that debugging is a kind of solitary detective work, and that shipping something new is as much about stamina as it is about talent.

That was the world I knew, until I tried Claude Code.

At first, I didn’t expect much. I had played with chatbots before. They could explain concepts, maybe generate a snippet of code if I framed the question well enough. Useful, but not game changing. Then I gave Claude a real task, something I’d normally spend hours setting up. Within minutes, it had scaffolded the project, spun up a server, and even started watching the logs. Suddenly it wasn’t just answering questions, it was coding back.

The experience was disorienting in the best way. Here was an AI not just writing a few lines of JavaScript, but building working systems end to end. I fed it my stack — Nuxt 3, Supabase, Tailwind, sometimes a Node crawler — and it handled the messy glue work with a fluency that made me stop and think: what exactly is my role now?

From months to days

The biggest shock was speed. Projects I used to scope for six months now looked like three-day sprints. A prototype that might have burned through endless boilerplate was suddenly standing up in front of me, functional enough to click through, test, and refine.

That kind of acceleration changes your mindset. Instead of cautiously committing to a long roadmap, I could afford to play. I could test half-baked ideas, throw away what didn’t work, and still come out ahead of schedule. I found myself “vibe coding,” as I started calling it, letting the tool carry momentum forward, riding the flow instead of obsessing over every detail.

But speed is never free. If I just handed off vague ideas, the results could drift. Sometimes Claude forgot its own plan, circled back to older solutions, or took shortcuts that weren’t aligned with my goals. I learned quickly that the more I planned, the better the results. Writing a detailed roadmap at the start of a session, almost like a conversation with a junior developer, gave Claude a compass. Then my job became keeping it on track.

Debugging with company

What surprised me most wasn’t the code it wrote, but how it debugged. Traditionally, debugging is lonely work: scanning logs, combing through stack traces, staring at a screen until you spot the missing semicolon or the subtle logic bug. With Claude, I suddenly had company. It read the logs with me, suggested fixes, tested hypotheses, and sometimes spotted patterns I would have missed.

It wasn’t perfect. Occasionally it got stuck or made an incorrect assumption. But instead of hours of trial and error, I had a dialogue. I wasn’t trapped in my own head. Debugging became something collaborative, almost conversational.

That shift was bigger than I expected. For the first time, I felt like I was learning while building at full speed. Architecture decisions that used to take months to internalize were arriving in compressed form, like a crash course in real time. The AI pushed me into CTO-level thinking: less “what code should I write?” and more “what architecture makes sense, and how do we make this system resilient?”

The fundamentals still matter

It’s tempting to imagine that with a tool like this, coding knowledge becomes optional. I don’t buy that. If anything, fundamentals matter more now. To steer Claude well, you have to know when it’s veering off course, when a shortcut isn’t acceptable, when an answer looks plausible but is subtly wrong. You need the instincts of a developer to supervise, to correct, to guide.

That doesn’t mean writing every line yourself. It means knowing enough to be a good editor, a good architect, a good teacher. Claude is the junior who never tires, never gets bored, but sometimes misses the forest for the trees. If you don’t know the forest yourself, you’re lost.

A new scale of productivity

Here’s where it gets interesting. With Claude, a small group of skilled developers can achieve what once required a whole team. I’ve seen prototypes that would have taken months emerge in a single week. That changes not just how we work, but what we choose to build.

Some projects I used to dismiss as too big suddenly felt possible. Ambitious ideas that once lived in the “someday” pile were now within reach. And that freedom is addictive. You stop thinking about what’s realistic in six months and start asking what’s possible in three days.

It also forces uncomfortable questions. If I can spin up a custom tool in half an hour, what does that mean for the SaaS product charging me $50 a month? Whole categories of software start to feel fragile when individuals can build tailored alternatives faster than they can sign up for subscriptions.

Collaboration in the age of AI coders

What happens when multiple developers, each armed with their own AI assistant, come together on a team? That’s still unclear. Collaboration used to be about dividing up tasks, sharing context, merging code. If everyone’s workflow now includes an AI that scaffolds, debugs, and writes tests, the dynamics will change. Will it make teamwork smoother, or will it create friction as different assistants interpret instructions differently? We don’t know yet.

But I suspect the role of the developer will shift toward orchestration, ensuring the project’s direction stays coherent while the AI handles execution. Less time spent in the weeds, more time ensuring the weeds grow in the right direction.

A personal turning point

For me, the real turning point came when I saw Claude orchestrate across my whole stack, my Supabase backend, edge functions, database, and front end — as if it understood the full picture. That was the moment I realized this wasn’t a toy. This was a revolution in how software gets built.

It felt like plugging my brain directly into the machine. All those side projects and backburner ideas I’d carried for years? They were suddenly real. Prototypes stood up in days, not months. It was exhilarating, a little terrifying, and humbling all at once.

Where it goes from here

I don’t think coding will disappear. But I do think the definition of “being a developer” is changing. It’s less about typing and more about thinking clearly, planning well, and managing the dialogue between human intention and machine execution.

For independent consultants like me, it’s a chance to punch far above our weight. For startups, it’s a new way to outmaneuver giants. For big companies, it’s a disruption that will be hard to ignore.

The future of development won’t belong to those who type the fastest. It’ll belong to those who can communicate most clearly with the machine that now codes back.

And I, for one, am not looking back.