🔥 Claude Code

Hey folks,

Somewhere in a 23,000-word Constitution, Anthropic just admitted their AI might be conscious. It may actually possess functional emotions right now. They say they "genuinely care about Claude's well-being." It's buried in a policy update, but read that again: a $350B company just said out loud that their chatbot might have feelings. Whether that's PR theater or genuine uncertainty about what they've built, I have no idea. Either way, i still love Claude Code.

Today in AI: 
→ Claude Code Compresses Year-Long Projects Into Weeks
→ Block's free Claude Code alternative is gaining traction
→ Prompt of the Week: Autonomous refactoring with guardrails

Let's dive in..

🔥 Claude Code Compresses Year-Long Projects Into Weeks

"I don't write any code anymore."

That's not some burnt-out dev on Twitter. That's what Anthropic's engineering leads are telling their own CEO. At Davos last week, Dario Amodei said AI will handle "most, maybe all" of software engineering within 6 to 12 months. Not assisting. Doing.

The evidence is piling up. Vercel's CTO Malte Ubl spent his entire vacation coding 10 hours a day with Claude Code. Not because he had to but because he couldn't stop. He told The WSJ each run gave him "an endorphin rush akin to playing a Vegas slot machine." A year-long project was coded in one week.

Google principal engineer Jaana Dogan said Claude Code reproduced distributed systems architecture in one hour that her team spent a full year building. Anthropic built their new Cowork feature in a week and a half, entirely with Claude Code. The humans reviewed it while the AI wrote.

The stats keep showing up. 164% more stories completed. Pull request merge rates nearly doubling. 4x productivity multipliers. Stripe engineer Johnny Leung put it bluntly: he's not a coder anymore. He's "an architect, almost like a product manager."

Here's what nobody wants to say out loud. Developers told the WSJ they felt "awe followed by sadness at the realization that Claude Code could easily replicate expertise they had built up over an entire career." That's a strange place to sit. Impressed and gutted at the same time.

The mental shift matters more than the tool. Treat Claude Code as an assistant, you get incremental gains. Treat it as a workforce and delegate entire subsystems, output jumps 5x. Seattle engineers are calling it a new era of software development. The job isn't writing code anymore. It's orchestrating agents that write code for you.

For your team: Claude Code runs $150-200+ over GitHub Copilot per seat. That's real money. But if Amodei's even half right, the skill that matters now isn't writing code. It's reviewing AI-generated code, catching what it misses, and knowing when to push back. That's a different muscle entirely.

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🆓 The $0 Claude Code Alternative

60% of Block's engineering workforce uses an AI coding agent weekly and it’s not Claude Code or Copilot. Goose, an open-source tool they built and are giving it away for free.

Jack Dorsey's fintech company open-sourced Goose as a local agent that runs on your machine with whatever LLM you want. Claude, GPT-4, Gemini, or a local model if you're paranoid about data. No cloud dependency. No subscription. Your code never leaves your laptop.

That last part matters more than I initially thought. Plenty of companies flat-out can't send proprietary code to Anthropic's servers. Security policies, compliance requirements, client contracts. Goose sidesteps all of it.

What it actually does:

• Builds entire projects from scratch

• Writes, executes, and debugs code autonomously

• Orchestrates multi-step workflows

• Talks to external APIs without hand-holding

Block reports 50-75% development time savings internally. That's company-wide adoption at a major fintech. The tradeoffs are real though. Goose is newer, smaller community, fewer pre-built extensions. Claude Code has a year head start and Anthropic's full attention. The polish isn't there yet.

If you're spending $150-200+ per developer per month on Claude Code, and your security team keeps asking uncomfortable questions about where your code goes, Goose just became a serious option. Block is eating their own cooking. 60% adoption says something.

For your team: If Claude Code's pricing is getting uncomfortable, or if compliance blocks sending code to external APIs, pilot Goose. It's free, it's local, and the company behind it trusts it enough to run their own engineering on it.

🎯 Prompt Of The Day

Turn Claude Code into an autonomous refactoring machine:

Refactor [file or directory] to follow [pattern/standard]. Before making changes: 

1) List every file you'll touch, 
2) Explain your refactoring strategy, 
3) Identify any breaking changes to exports or APIs. 

Then proceed file by file, running tests after each change. Stop and ask me if any test fails.

Pro Tip: The "stop and ask me" guardrail prevents Claude from spiraling into fix-the-fix loops. You stay in control while it does the heavy lifting.

🐝 AI Buzz Bits

🎨 FLUX.2 klein generates images in under half a second. Black Forest Labs' compact model runs on consumer GPUs with just 13GB VRAM. Text-to-image, editing, and multi-reference generation all in one architecture. For anyone building real-time image features, this is the speed threshold that unlocks new workflows.

🧠 Anthropic retired Claude Sonnet 3.5 and older Opus models. Claude Opus 4.5 is now the flagship with 10.6% improvement over Sonnet 4.5. Claude Haiku 4.5 matches Sonnet 4's performance on coding and agent tasks while being faster and cheaper.

💰 Humans& raised $480M at a $4.5B valuation, as a seed round. The "human-centric AI lab" founded by ex-Anthropic, xAI, and Google researchers pulled in backing from Nvidia, Jeff Bezos, Google Ventures, and SV Angel. It's the second-largest seed ever, behind only Thinking Machines Lab's $2B round.

🛠️ Tool Spotlight

1. Claude Code — Desktop AI coding tool powered by Claude Opus 4.5, delivering 4x productivity gains for agent-orchestrated development.

2. Devin 2.0 — Autonomous AI coding agent with interactive IDE, parallel agents, and codebase search. Now $20/month instead of $500.

3. Dvina — Private AI that connects 120+ apps and live databases in one place to talk to your data without rigid dashboards or fragmented queries.

4. Agentfield — Open-source Kubernetes for AI agents with zero-trust IAM, cryptographic identity, and production-ready orchestration.

For a full list of 1500+ AI tools, visit our Supertool Directory