Dispatches from Claude Psychosis: Episode 1

I regret to inform you I have become an accelerationist.

Just over two weeks deep into using Claude Code as my only working platform, I’ve come to an inescapable conclusion: very soon we will cross a critical threshold. This threshold won’t be self-improving AI, or breakthroughs in continual learning, or even some FLOP milestone in LLMs. It will simply be that the marginal cost of training a new team member will exceed the marginal cost of getting better at Claude Code.

In other words, when any team anywhere in the enterprise feels a burden of work, it will be easier to deepen their expertise in Claude Code than to add another person.

I should say upfront: I’m a turbo-normie in the world of Claude Code. I’m not building revolutionary software. I’m not redesigning processes from scratch as some great architect of the future. I’m definitely not researching how to make better AI.

I use Claude Code for operations, for sales, for building dashboards, for updating stakeholders—a million small tasks that, although dry and boring, are incredibly important for the churning billions of lines of code being written by AIs to interface with the world that they were already leaving behind.

And yet even from this vantage point, I struggle to imagine a world where I would need to hire somebody to do knowledge work given the depth of the tool in front of me. Hitting context limits is one thing. Understanding the limits of my own capacity and labour is another.

When Doug O’Laughlin of Fabricated Knowledge wrote recently that everything is becoming a skill issue, he’s right. But the skill issue goes beyond human proficiency with AI; it’s also about velocity. Consider how much better people will get at Claude Code in the coming weeks and months. The gap between those who adopt now and those who wait will compound.

This feels like the first concrete evidence of exponential acceleration I’ve experienced in my career. I’ve touched moments like this before, but never with this clarity.

This takeoff will leave behind millions, perhaps billions, of knowledge workers who won’t adapt to these tools fast enough for their labor to have utility in the new economy. I know how that sounds. But if you’re working in these platforms today, you need to stare this down. Similar to my last post: we have an obligation to teach people we like how to use Claude (and its progeny) properly, so they can continue to grow with us as we enter this new world.

This is a fundamental upset in how we think about work, how we grow teams, how we value labour. If everything is a skill issue and there are still only 24 hours in every day, the calculus between hiring someone and simply getting better at Claude Code has shifted in ways we’re only beginning to understand.