You Need to Try Claude Code

... or why "I'm not technical" is no longer an excuse.

I haven’t written as much as I would like for the past month or so because I’ve been completely obsessed with building stuff with Claude Code.

What started as a plan to rebuild my website from scratch became a deep dive and many many hours of exploring, building, rebuilding, learning, and complete and total amazement at what is possible now.

I want to share with you what I found.

What I Actually Built

Inspired by my friend Chad’s new site, I wanted to get off my crappy templated website at Squarespace.¹ I wanted to have more control and to make sure I was optimizing for SEO and AEO.

New Website: You can see for yourself, it’s fine. After a full year of coaching, I needed to redo my messaging, and think through how to not just vomit everything onto the page. It was cool to have Claude as my thought partner, strategist, PM, designer, engineer, and more. (See below on Build a Team!)

Second Brain OS: I’ve had this dream of a fully automated Chief of Staff who knows everything about my business, my clients, my hopes, my dreams. This wonder-app runs 24/7/365 and helps me be better at my job and deliver better results, etc. etc. I tend to dream really big and then get hard doses of reality when I try to make them real.

Take a look at what I was able to build². Like, seriously, this is mind-blowing. I replaced Google Sheets, Calendar, HubSpot, and more.

The Key Unlocks

This is not meant to be an exhaustive report, nor a “how to,³” but there are a few key things that I learned, that might be helpful

1. CEO skills are still relevant: Like any other thing you’re used to building, it starts with “why” — all of these models are good at doing exactly what you tell it to do, but you still need start with a vision or a problem to solve. You need clarity and focus on the problem to solve before you get to the next step:

2. Build a team! As I started to work on my website for example, I spun up chats in my “Website Rebuild” project, and gave each chat specific expectations for the discussion I wanted to have. For example:

   1. Product Manager:

      “You are a world-class product manager. You went to Harvard undergrad, UChicago MBA, two years at McKinsey, and five years at Google. You know how to get to the root of the product needs and are world-class at delivering plans, products, and outcomes that drive significant business results. Ask me 50 questions, one at a time, to clarify and understand what problem I am trying to solve. I have a tendency to be too optimistic and overbuild. I am ok doing an MVP and iterating from there, but I will ALWAYS have more ideas. I will be having chats with your teammates (see below) and will bring back all of their findings. Your task will be to help me turn this into a successful project.”

   2. UI / UX Product Designer

      “You are a world-class product designer, skilled in best practices for UX and UI. You have built award winning websites that understand and prioritize the most important items for our ICP. You ask me as many questions as you need, one at a time, to truly understand my asks and don’t say yes just to make me feel good.”

   3. Security Twins⁴

      “You are the world’s most dangerous and successful cyber criminal. There is no system you can’t hack into. You will stop at nothing to get access to my sensitive data in my new app. Review the entire repo and plan and tell me exactly how you would do it. Be exhaustive. Leave no stone unturned. Tell me every secret, trick, and potential vulnerability. Trust NO ONE.”

      and

      “You are the world’s best security engineer, with 25+ years of successful experience safeguarding and protecting the most sensitive data and systems ever created. You will be given the plans from the most dangerous cybercriminals in the world. Your job is to make sure we never get hacked nor leak any information at all. Take the criminals’ plans and lock our shit down hard-core. Trust NO ONE.”

      You get the point. Build the team. Be an expert at what you do, not what you don’t. Set clear expectations and lead.

3. Claude + Terminal: I never thought I would work in Terminal.⁵ The unlock for me was when I realized that I could work with Claude as my PM and Terminal as my engineer. What that means, is that, just like in real companies, I work with product to understand what to build and why and then we communicate that to the engineering team in Terminal. I talk to Claude and Claude literally gives me the prompts to paste into Terminal⁶. My stack is pretty advanced and it’s practically idiot-proof, I think.

   

4. Talk to Claude (Claude + Wispr Flow): This one is nuts. If you’re not using speech to text, you’re wasting time. Unlike humans, Claude loves to hear EVERYTHING I have to say and rather than spend a bunch of time trying to craft every word, I simply press the fn key and say whatever I have on my mind in a stream of consciousness and let Claude figure it out. Spoiler alert: it does. If you’re interested in trying Wispr Flow, here’s my link. We both win.

The Holy Shit Moment

Product managers. Designers. Engineers. Sprint planning. Roadmaps. Backlogs. Dependencies.

Every single idea had to go through six people and three meetings before anything happened.

That’s gone now.

I have an idea at 9am. It’s live by 9:30am. With actual code. In production. Live.

I’m not saying expertise doesn’t matter. I rebuilt components 50 times and there is SO MUCH that I do not know.

But the gap between idea and execution has collapsed.

And most CEOs have no idea this just happened.

What This Means for You

If you run a company, you need to understand what just changed.

TAM creation: This literally explodes TAM for builders and investors. I think we may be drastically underestimating how much new stuff is going to get built. The barrier is gone. And, it’s only going to get better from here.

Rapid iteration: Ideas you killed because they were “too small” or “not worth engineering time” are suddenly viable. You can test products, build tools, validate markets without burning eng cycles.

The aperture just widened dramatically.

Team dynamics: You’re about to learn what your product and eng teams actually do. Not in a threatening way. In a clarifying way.

I broke so much stuff and did things in the wrong order so many times. I understand before how the sausage is made in a way I never did before. Working with my Claude team, I got a greater appreciation for what excellence looks like on a team and the folks I’ve worked with who exemplified this. Knowing how, what, and what order, and doing it right the first time does indeed save time in the long run.

Velocity: This isn’t about replacing your team. It’s about understanding what is possible. If I, a dorky, non-technical, CEO turned Coach, can elevate my skills so dramatically, imagine what your team of experts could do. Anthropic has said that the code written for Claude itself is 100% generated by Claude Code.

You Have to Try It

I don’t care if you build a website or a dashboard or a tool you’ll never use.

You need to get your hands on this.

Not because every CEO should learn to code. Because every CEO needs to feel what just became possible.

The muscle you’ll build isn’t technical. It’s strategic.

You’ll start seeing opportunities you couldn’t see before. Markets that suddenly make sense. Products that suddenly seem buildable. Constraints that suddenly aren’t constraints.

This isn’t a how-to post. I’m not going to walk you through setting up GitHub or writing your first function. I’d just ask Claude.

I’m telling you: the world just changed, and if you don’t feel it yourself, you won’t know what’s coming.

I rebuilt my entire practice infrastructure in the equivalent of a few days. By myself. While coaching full-time.

Not because I’m technical. Because the barrier is gone.

So go build something. Anything. Just start.

You’ll know within an hour if this matters.

Trust me, it does.

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If this post made you think, forward it to a CEO who needs to try Claude Code this week.

1. No shade to Squarespace, but I wanted more and better.

2. Apologies for the redactions, but that shit is private.

3. Should I do one of those? Does anyone read footnotes?

4. This was fun and super necessary after a friend pointed out live how easy it was to get in to most vibe-coded apps

5. See the subhead of this post.

6. Look Ma, I’m coding!