Just want to clarify, this is not my Substack, I’m just sharing this because I found it insightful.
The author describes himself as a “fractional CTO”(no clue what that means, don’t ask me) and advisor. His clients asked him how they could leverage AI. He decided to experience it for himself. From the author(emphasis mine):
I forced myself to use Claude Code exclusively to build a product. Three months. Not a single line of code written by me. I wanted to experience what my clients were considering—100% AI adoption. I needed to know firsthand why that 95% failure rate exists.
I got the product launched. It worked. I was proud of what I’d created. Then came the moment that validated every concern in that MIT study: I needed to make a small change and realized I wasn’t confident I could do it. My own product, built under my direction, and I’d lost confidence in my ability to modify it.
Now when clients ask me about AI adoption, I can tell them exactly what 100% looks like: it looks like failure. Not immediate failure—that’s the trap. Initial metrics look great. You ship faster. You feel productive. Then three months later, you realize nobody actually understands what you’ve built.
I just did three tasks purely with Claude - at work.
All were pretty much me pasting the Linear ticket to Claude and hitting go. One got some improvement ideas on the PR so I said “implement the comments from PR 420” and so it did.
These were all on a codebase I haven’t seen before.
The magic sauce is that I’ve been doing this for a quarter century and I’m pretty good at reading code and I know if something smells like shit code or not. I’m not just YOLOing the commits to a PR without reading first, but I save a ton of time when I don’t need to do the grunt work of passing a variable through 10 layers of enterprise code.