Claude Code won’t fix you

Spend any time on x.com and you'll be told that Claude Code will change your life.

So I did an audit of my last few weeks at Vercel, including meetings that I went to, projects that I worked on, and fires that I was pulled into. In each situation, I tried to identify the AEIOUs [1] as well as the opportunities for where automation/AI could help.

In most situations, the opportunity was a micro-optimization of some form (like cleaning up meeting notes), much more than a macro-optimization (like automating an entire planning cycle).

This is because most of the high-leverage opportunities for improving how teams work or work together are still in the world of atoms, not bits. Things like managing people's energy and emotions, building (and breaking) trust, and the way that we think about and make decisions.

As the world continues to "asymptotically approach zero friction" (h/t Ryo Lu), so many of the obstacles to progress are not about our tools, they're about us. If you believe that good outputs require good inputs, remember that you're the primary input.

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[1] AEIOU is a data classification framework in observational research. Each letter represents a different element within a specific scene.

• Activity

• Environment

• Interaction

• Object

• User