Within the past few weeks, something changed in AI. Every release is better than the last, sometimes in obvious ways, sometimes in a way that feels like placebo. But this time, with Anthropic Fable, it’s crossed a line into something that feels different than previous releases.
The best way I can describe it is that Fable now feels like a full-time employee who is better than me at nearly everything, works harder than me, and can accomplish about 20x what I can in a day. It’s actually probably more than 20x, but I’m trying not to be hyperbolic.
I remember when Claude first came out. I was on a Norwegian Fjord cruise with my friend Michael and we were so excited that we could copy and paste code snippets into Claude, it would suggest some changes, we’d copy and paste them back in the right places, and sometimes it would work. It was amazing.
Now I wake up, look at my projects (because I gave Claude some instructions as I went to sleep and I want to see how they came out), give it a to-do list of new things to do, and then move on with my day. I make tea, I read my email, I scroll through X and Hacker News. I check back with Claude. It’s done three of the five things I told it to and it has found some other bugs (with my original code). It writes tests, fixes them, takes screenshots so that I can see, pushes the changes to a Pull Request in GitHub, and keeps going through the list.
There was a CruiseSheet feature that I avoided doing for years because I thought it was probably impossible, but at the very least would be miserable to implement and would take weeks. Claude did it in an hour. Sometimes I run out of things I want to do, so I ask it what we should do next. Its suggestions are excellent.
The funny thing is that its time estimates are clearly linked to human development. So it will give some suggestions and say, “We can do A B and C this week. Next week we can focus on X Y Z”. I say “Do All Six” and they’re done in 30 minutes.
I’ve been a coder for 20+ years, and I like coding, but I never really loved the craft of it. There were moments of coming up with a clever solution to something, but the day-to-day building user interfaces and new features wasn’t always a dream.
I have always loved coming up with ideas and building them, though, so for that reason I loved coding. What’s amazing is that now I get to do the 5% part that I love, and the 95% that I don’t love gets done for me faster and better than I’d do it myself.
Anyway, the main reason I feel some urgency to write about this is that if you’ve wanted to start a business, you are absolutely insane if you don’t do it right now. There has never been a better time to start a small business. Labor is free. This will become normal and commonplace 12-24 months from now, but right now no one really knows. You can build a useful and valuable business in a week if you have a good idea. And if you don’t have a good idea you can make 10 different things over the next couple months and see which one was the best.
You could probably just ask Claude to help you come up with a good business, and I bet it would.
But seriously, now is the time. You could make a web site, and app, a service, etc. You don’t need to know anything. Claude knows everything.
My Setup
Part of why I’m so excited is because I just happened to make a much better AI development setup right before Fable came back. There are probably a lot of good setups, but I’m surprised at how many people are still using Claude through the web or Cursor or something like that. This will be a little technical, but you could just paste it into Claude and it would explain it tell you how to set it up (or do it for you).
First, I have a virtual machine on a server that Claude owns. It can install software, edit config files, do whatever it wants. Each project has its own folder. In each folder I start a screen session, run claude –dangerously-skip-permissions, type /remote-control, and then detach the screen. In plain English, this starts a Claude session on that machine where it can have full reign. The remote control command allows me to control it from my phone, the web, or the desktop app. For each project I pin one or two sessions (sometimes I have one for development and one for asking it questions / analytics).
Then, whenever I feel like “working” I just open the Claude app, give it a list of stuff to do, and close the app. 95+% of the time it executes it flawlessly. The remaining 5% is usually some visual presentation I don’t love.
I also set up Tailscale, so that all of my servers and devices are on the same virtual network. So if I’m working on cruisesheet, I just go to cruisesheet.lan to look at the changes before approving them to be pushed to the site. When I approve them I just say “go ahead” and it runs hundreds of tests, stages it, and pushes it to the live site.
Like so many things these days, AI feels unnecessarily polarizing. People just love to hate it. A quick rebuttal of a few common objections:
“AI produces slop” Not really. It used to, but it’s definitely better at programming than I am. It’s also much easier to say “make CI tests for every major part of this project and also do a full security audit” than it is to manually do that yourself.
“AI is a waste of water/power/etc” Sort of a pointless argument. It exists, you using it isn’t going to increase either of those things meaningfully (also, it actually generally doesn’t use much water anymore). If you actually care on principle, use it to make a lot of money and then buy up some nature and put it in a conservation trust.
“I’m a craftsman and I want to look at my own code” I think this day has passed. Code by hand if you really love it, but you don’t see many people taking horse and buggies across the country anymore. The difference in performance between horse and buggy and a modern car is far less than hand coding and AI coding.
“But I’m not technical” This day has also passed. I’ve made two games for me and my friends, and they’re both written in a language I don’t know with a game framework I don’t know. I haven’t seen a single line of code. Claude also made a script to compile them for both phones and computers. I don’t really know how to do that either.
I also made a watchface for my new Pebble Time 2 watch. I don’t even know what language the face is in, but when I posted it on X the creator of Pebble retweeted it (as did Paul Graham!). So… probably not slop, and also it wasn’t really necessary to be technical.
At its best, AI is a force multiplier. It doesn’t eliminate programmers, it frees them from the miserable parts of coding and allows them to bring their creations to life far faster and more robustly than ever before.
Soon everyone will have these tools and companies will package them up to make them even easier. But right now is a rare window where no one really knows how quickly and effortlessly you can go from idea to published product. It’s a rare opportunity to get way ahead while others are figuring it out.
Get a Claude subscription, and make sure you switch it to use Fable. The $100 plan is probably enough to make almost anything. If you run into the limit, you’ll be happy to upgrade to the $200 plan.
Show me what you make!
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Photo was from the Seven Sisters hike in the UK. Really cool unique landscape!
Sorry for not posting more… still waiting to get the photos for my AT gear post.
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