So the deal was simple. One month of Claude Code on Pro-Max x20, no safety net. May 21 was day one. Here we go.
npm install -g @anthropic-ai/claude-code
cd AwesomeProject
claude
That sounds trivial, and for most people it is. For me it wasn't. I've shipped with agentic tools, editors and APIs for years — but never the CLI. After almost 20 years in this job, letting something install itself straight into my terminal feels less like a tool choice and more like handing a stranger the keys to the flat.
And then it ran.
I expected "good". AI had already been doing extremely good for a long while — I wasn't new to any of this. But this was another level. The thing that got me wasn't raw capability, it was how natural it felt to drive the most powerful tool I'd touched from the one place I'd been guarding for two decades. No tab-switching, no copy-paste dance between an editor and a chat window. Just me, the prompt, and something that actually did the work.
I started small. One project, and I'll admit I went in skeptical. It worked right away — extremely well. A couple of nudges by voice — "please use these style sets", "use my plugins, my components" — said once, and it just ran with them. No fighting, no babysitting.
It ran so well that I pulled in a second project the same evening — and not an easy one. A very, very old thing: frontend long outdated, backend not much better. "How's it look? Let's just run an update through it." By day two I already wanted a third folder in the mix. You start with one window — wow — and before you know it you've got a handful open at once. The first impression already floored me, and it felt like the possibilities were only just getting started.
That was the moment the challenge stopped being a gimmick and started being the most interesting month I've had in years. I didn't know it yet, but two days later I'd stop talking to one agent and start building a whole team.
