Tech bro day 8: CCC - Claude Code: Cracked

Most fun day by far at Fractal Tech bootcamp! I was so locked in that I missed the 5pm session, oops. Straight up didn’t even register that everyone was getting up for lecture. Was it the Adderall? Or did I just totally fall in love with Claude Code? It’s the latter. I finally had my magic moment. The flow state where it really clicked for me. Claude Code is so damn cracked.

The excellent morning lecture first developed our intuition for the true nature of Claude Code. It’s not a stochastic parrot (a criticism lingering from the GPT-3 days in 2020), and it’s not even a predictor. Or rather, predictor doesn’t quite capture what it is.

Claude Code is a simulator. In particular, a type of simulator called a harness. chatGPT may simulate conversations, but Claude Code can do that AND simulate a person using a computer. All through text! How? How does Claude Code, whose fundamental building block is just text, simulate using a computer?

To explain very basically, a language model takes some textual input, feeds the input into a magic black box, and returns an output. Recursively feed the text + output into the black box, and you simulate a conversation. When the conversation is too long, you run out of space (“the context window limit is reached”).

How to leap from simulating conversation to simulating using a computer? With tool calls aka giving the black box access to an external program. The black box can take actions that a typical chat-interface isn’t setup to do e.g. get real-time data, look through your files, call your mom.

So today, we spent the whole day learning how to drive our computer using Claude Code. We’re teaching Claude Code to act as if it were ourselves, using our own computers. That’s how I started experiencing the magical flow state. I’ll need to really sit with this tool and use it well, learn with it for the rest of the week. And only then can I really write a halfway decent post about it.

For now, I’ll just be enamored. It’s midnight and I’m still buzzing with excitement. Not even React routers tomorrow can kill this frenzied lightness!