It is all too easy for non-coders — policymakers, journalists, and knowledge workers in general — to hear this and shrug. “AI can code” sounds like a development that affects software engineers, not the rest of us. When your job doesn’t involve GitHub repositories or terminal windows, a better coding assistant seems like someone else’s problem. This misses something crucial. When people hear “coding,” they picture a specialist skill for a specialist domain. They don’t picture booking theater tickets, analyzing spreadsheets, or processing invoices. But those are all tasks that happen through software — which means they’re all tasks that can be accomplished by an AI that can write and execute code. They are, in fact, all tasks that Claude Code has done for me in the last two weeks. Code, after all, is just a language by which we instruct computers to do things. An AI agent that can code, then, can … do almost anything you do on a computer. The question isn’t “is this a coding task?” It’s “can this be done digitally?” If the answer is yes, there is a very good chance that Claude Code can do it. (View Highlight)
This is crucial to understanding why Claude Code has implications for everyone, not just the developers that have already been wowed by it. Claude Code doesn’t just generate code for engineers to review and deploy. It uses code to accomplish tasks. The “Code” in its name is misleading, and undersells the actual product: a general-purpose AI agent that can do almost anything on your computer. (View Highlight)
Those who learn Claude Code will see their productivity skyrocket. Everyone else will wonder why they’ve been left in the dust. (View Highlight)