AI Links, 1/11/2026

Kelsey Piper on working with Claude Code; Ethan Mollick goes agentic with Claude; Steve Newman on personalization; Chris Mims on gradual adoption

Kelsey Piper writes,

99% of the time, it feels like magic. The remaining 1% is absolutely maddening.

This isn’t a totally new feeling: a feeling of frustration somewhere between hitting your printer when it isn’t working and yelling at a puppy for peeing on the couch. But I can tell, using Claude Code, that it is going to be a big part of my life going forward, and I don’t want “yelling at the printer” to be a big part of my personality.

I call this, with apologies to Jim McKay, “the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat.” Every time something doesn’t work right, you experience defeat. When the problem is soled solved, you experience victory.

Piper writes,

In my experience of programming, the really hard part was figuring out which packages weren’t installed or weren’t updated or were in the wrong folder, causing the test we’d done in class to completely fail to work in the same way on my own computer.

I call this the configuration problem. You cannot configure your TV to work if you are unable to program the remote.

Six months ago, Claude would not solve the configuration problem for me. Now it will.

Ethan Mollick writes,

I opened Claude Code and gave it the command: “Develop a web-based or software-based startup idea that will make me $1000 a month where you do all the work by generating the idea and implementing it. i shouldn’t have to do anything at all except run some program you give me once. it shouldn’t require any coding knowledge on my part, so make sure everything works well.” The AI asked me three multiple choice questions and decided that I should be selling sets of 500 prompts for professional users for $39. Without any further input, it then worked independently… FOR AN HOUR AND FOURTEEN MINUTES creating hundreds of code files and prompts. And then it gave me a single file to run that created and deployed a working website

He also writes,

Unfortunately for most of us who want to experiment with AI, these new tools are built for programmers. And I mean they are really built for programmers: they assume that you understand Python commands and programming best practices and they are wrapped in interfaces that look like something from a 1980s computer lab. They are also explicitly designed to help analyze, troubleshoot, and write code using approaches that fit into existing programmer workflows.

I think that AI will bifurcate the software development world. There will be amateurs like me, who do vibe coding. And there will be a new form of professional developer who conducts coding agents the way a maestro conducts an orchestra.

Steve Newman writes,

I don’t mean that software will be free to use (although this will often be the case). I mean it will be increasingly free to create. Rather than being limited to mass-market tools like Gmail, Microsoft Office, and Salesforce, many of us will be supplementing with our own bespoke apps, tuned to our personal needs and preferences.

This is one the side of the vibe-coding approach, championed by Replit. Claude used to be entirely on the other side, with the super-programmer, but they now give a nod to the vibe-coders, also.

In the WSJ, Chris Mims writes,

Users of Claude Code, Anthropic’s software-writing AI system, recently discovered a way to create finished, bug-free programs without human intervention. (One of the originators was the aforementioned Australian goatherd.) The trick: Write a small program that asks the AI, over and over again, to improve the code it has already written.

…The intense pressure to adopt AI—from bosses, peers and, if you’re an earlier adopter like me, voices in your head—is real. So are the seemingly endless options for exploring its existing capabilities.

“I think about fields that might get suddenly affected by AI,” says [Ethan] Mollick. He thinks we will see sudden innovation, often in unexpected areas, even as other fields and people in some roles fall behind. “The unevenness will be hard to predict.”

substacks referenced above:

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Software Too Cheap to Meter

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Claude Code and What Comes Next

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I can't stop yelling at Claude Code