AI vampires

Couple of weeks ago Marc Andreessen shared how his friends were turning into "AI vampires." At first I expected it to be about becoming so engrossed with new technology that they sucked the life out of everyone else with their boring stories.

My expectations were quickly proved wrong—it turned out that Marc used the term to describe his friends loosing sleep because they used the new tech to become twenty times more productive. This in turn led them to resume working on numerous coding projects they abandoned years ago. Some were hobby projects (e.g. home automation), some were curiosity projects (e.g. single-purpose tools), and some were product related improvements (e.g. new features and functionality).

Apparently, all of them were so engrossed they began neglecting sleep, and thus they developed that signature pale look and puffy eye bags. There were no mentions of growing fangs or sucking on anything. Perhaps AI zombies would be a better name?

That aside, something fascinating happened last week. Playing Lean website suffered a catastrophic failure and was taken out of commission. It was a WordPress installation and I guess that some plugin auto-updated and broke the whole thing. We were unable to login, and there was no backup available.

Then Simen, in a moment of inspiration, used Claude Code to whip up a completely new website using nothing but plain HTML and CSS. We have been discussing that for months, but neither of us had time to sit down and do the work. Plus, I am not really a developer, but do know a bit of both of aforementioned.

Within two hours he had a completely functional website up. It was on brand, with our fonts, colours, and assets. The text was not optimal (first iteration re-wrote content from old website), but everything was here. Within a day we had set up a working workflow with Slack, Claude Code, and GitHub. By the end of the week we had a polished website and a functional workflow.

And I found myself slightly more vampiric. I couldn't stop thinking about many ideas we had for Playing Lean website over the past decade. And now I was naught but a mere sentence away from doing so. Indeed, I staid up late at night tweaking code left and right, instead of getting the much needed sleep...

This experience confirmed something I have been seeing with my clients as well: those that have good command of underlying structures, can provide clear direction and guidance, and are aligned on desired outcomes, achieve much better results from using AI technologies.

Now excuse me, I'm off to sunbathe and enjoy some garlic bread.