Your Obligations to the Gospel of Claude

This is the Protestant revolution of software.

I was indoctrinated into the Claude Code Cult in December, and I can say without a hint of doubt that is the single greatest change in my working behaviour since the Blackberry in 2008. There is something addictive in the loop; the first evolution of the “bicycle for the mind” in my lifetime. This is the Protestant revolution of software.

Software in November 2025 was the religion that I worshipped, but I lacked the wrinkles on my frontal lobe to ever be a priest. I witnessed the clergy tap out their incantations, summon the Holy Spirit, and yet I could never join them. I paid my tithe, I mumbled the latin, I was a devout believer, but I did not lead the worship.

Claude changed that. By Christmas of this year, I found myself ideating, planning, writing, executing, and delivering all by myself.

It’s hard to overstate just how infuriating it can be to be non-technical in the software engineering world. To have baseline skills but never be able to really dig in to any project. To endlessly search for collaborators and things that you believed in but did not seem obvious to technical people. And then at the same time to push projects that you knew were obvious to technical people but not useful to users or other people in the world. To seek to find space around the edges where you could participate knowing that the warm center was forever something you needed another person to interpret for you.

I remember in my very first start-up, in the endlessly patient engineers who would explain to me very simple ideas of software engineering like servers, front-end and back-end, not knowing that I would ever understand them properly but glumly tucking me under their wing. Those days are long since past, but just because I understood the principles that brought good engineering into the world did not mean I could ever participate in that process.

To their endless credit, software engineers seem to have precipitated this revolution all on their own. They neither tried to jealously guard their secrets, nor did they attempt to monopolize access to these tools. This revolution is by the Church for the people, and I’m endlessly appreciative of it.

Spreading the Gospel

Over the next few months, something unprecedented will start happening in America, spreading from San Francisco outward into cities, groups, communities all over the states and eventually the world. That will be Claude Code or its close followers.

We are now at a moment where only yesterday, Claude launched a platform to be able to do this kind of thinking without having the benefits of the terminal and all of the friction involved in setting that up for the first time. These tools will drop like an atomic bomb on our economic model that has sustained us for 45 years, and I expect the changes to be monumental. I don’t make predictions about the future of the economy or of work very often, but I have real conviction about this one. This is the first time that you will “feel the acceleration” from AI. It’s here.

I believe very strongly that there is an opportunity here for everybody to smooth this transition and to make the principles of good software engineering abstracted from the principles of coding to show people how to use these tools to maximum effect to make people understand how to make something secure, something fast, something useful, and something instinctually easy to use. In other words, good software.

If you are a good engineer, it is incumbent upon you to spread the gospel in the coming months. To show people how to do your métier well, not just have them produce endless amounts of sloppy stuff. If you’re in media, you should be writing tutorials for this. Not only because people will want them, but also because it will help improve the software that runs our world. It’s important to do this work.

It’s also important to reach out to the 5 smartest non-technical people you know and teach them how to use Claude Code. It may be some months or years from now, but you won’t need to think about the good software engineering that goes into making a good piece of software. Today, you most definitively do, and for Claude to do a good job on the code is nearly inevitable. But for the applications themselves to be well-designed, fast, easy to use, and useful, we will need to spread this. We will need to have ways of teaching people how to do this, and most importantly, we will need to teach the right people how to do this.

As a non-technical person, you don’t spend your days on Hacker News tracking trends, you don’t spend your days seeing GitHub repos and how many stars they have. You can very easily spend six months drilling down on something that is equally non-technical as you and miss this big revolution.

So this week, if you are a good software engineer, take an hour and message the 5 people you know who are most deserving of these tools and spread the gospel of Claude.