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Claude Code is your customer

calebjohn.xyz

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Re: Claude Code is your customer

#21

Post by vbezhenar »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #9
wiether wrote: post #8

> I think by 2030 any product without an API designed for agents will be dead And I think that products making billions today by only exposing a 20yo SOAP API are still going to make billions in 4 years. I hate having to work with them, but I've been playing this game long enough to know that most of the world is running on legacy software and it won't change in about 1400 days.

How many VB6, Java 6, Delphi, etc web apps and services, and GUIs out there today in production you think? Still churning

I worked on a system which used Oracle 9i database run on Itanium with HPUX OS.

User-facing side was written with Delphi 7 (quite a huge client application, it even had constructor to build new forms inside the application and GUI to build algorithms, like n8n of 90-s, I learned a lot working on that system).

I've used Java 6, then migrated to Java 7 to write some new components for that system with web UI. I was bad at Delphi and they didn't really care about consistency, so I went that route.

AFAIK this system is in use nowadays. They wanted to update it with modern database and other modern stuff 15 years ago. They wanted to update it every year since that, but every year this modernization project is postponed. So probably one day they'll replace everything, but so far it works.

I won't delve into details, but this system serves as a database of criminals and some other stuff for a small country, so it's actually quite important one.

TBH I don't think that AI could even build it. When I had to build it last time, the build consisted of several VMs. You had to build various DLLs and then build final application. Every part was built in a separate VM with separate installed Delphi components of a specific versions. It was a huge mess.

Re: Claude Code is your customer

#22

Post by [deleted] »

ianbutler wrote: post #18
windowshopping wrote: post #17

I use claude code daily, but I've never been in a situation where Claude code was "deciding which product to use," that doesn't make sense to me. Claude is never on the web reading documentation - as far as I can tell that's not even in its toolkit. Can anyone give me more context for this? How do you end up having Claude code reading documentation and "choosing" a product to use? What type of prompts lead to this? I…

It has full web search I often have CC search out docs and compare opinions on an approach

[deleted]

Re: Claude Code is your customer

#23

Post by lmeyerov »

windowshopping wrote: post #17

I use claude code daily, but I've never been in a situation where Claude code was "deciding which product to use," that doesn't make sense to me. Claude is never on the web reading documentation - as far as I can tell that's not even in its toolkit. Can anyone give me more context for this? How do you end up having Claude code reading documentation and "choosing" a product to use? What type of prompts lead to this? I…

we were evaluating some marketing / crm platforms, and ai automation + api, ideally w/ mcp, were in the top 5 eval criteria

Re: Claude Code is your customer

#24

Post by dangom »

windowshopping wrote: post #17

I use claude code daily, but I've never been in a situation where Claude code was "deciding which product to use," that doesn't make sense to me. Claude is never on the web reading documentation - as far as I can tell that's not even in its toolkit. Can anyone give me more context for this? How do you end up having Claude code reading documentation and "choosing" a product to use? What type of prompts lead to this? I…

The choice happens implicitly rather than explicitly. If Claude tries an approach and hits a wall, it'll try a different approach. If an API call keeps not working, it'll choose a different API. It a tool is broken, it'll use something else. If it can't find docs nor read the code, it'll try to implement functionality from scratch. If you give it messy tools with confusing docs, you'll notice Claude not calling them as you'd expect, and instead trying something simpler instead.

Re: Claude Code is your customer

#26

Post by risyachka »

All websites had all incentives to be api-first for 2 decades now.

They aren't API first not because they can't - but because customers will use whatever GUI website supports to use it.

Unless your product has no value - users will fill out those forms manually if you don't provide API if they need your product.

Agents don't change this.

Re: Claude Code is your customer

#27

Post by candiddevmike »

nine_k wrote: post #2

> "Going into 2026 the single best way to build an "AI native startup" is to build an API first product that can easily be used by Claude Code. I believe in this so much that I think by 2030 any product without an API designed for agents will be dead." IOW, a human customer is not the customer your business is going to directly serve, their agent is. What's required from the human is to provide a payment method, I as…

How can agents possibly accept EULAs and enter into contracts?

Re: Claude Code is your customer

#28

Post by candiddevmike »

hk__2 wrote: post #7
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #3

I'm going to say an unpopular opinion here: I think agents are going to turn out mostly useless, even if they worked almost perfectly. How many jobs involve purely clicking things on a computer without human authorities, rules, regulations, permits, spending agreements, privacy laws, security requirements, insurance requirements, or licensing gates? I wager, almost none. The bottleneck in most work isn't "clicking th…

> How many jobs involve purely clicking things on a computer without human authorities, rules, regulations, permits, spending agreements, privacy laws, security requirements, insurance requirements, or licensing gates? > > I wager, almost none. Without any of these, yes. With very basic rules, a LOT of them.

At what point do these "basic rules" turn into boring automation and a rules engine? Especially when you need determinism and reproducibility?

Re: Claude Code is your customer

#29

Post by piker »

pitched wrote: post #12
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #3

I'm going to say an unpopular opinion here: I think agents are going to turn out mostly useless, even if they worked almost perfectly. How many jobs involve purely clicking things on a computer without human authorities, rules, regulations, permits, spending agreements, privacy laws, security requirements, insurance requirements, or licensing gates? I wager, almost none. The bottleneck in most work isn't "clicking th…

These AI agents have been such a burden to open source projects that maintainers are beginning to not take patches from anyone. That follows from what you’re saying here because it’s the editing/review part that’s human-centric. Same with the approval gates mentioned here. Another parallel here is that AI agents will probably end up being poor customers in the sense of repeat business and long-term relationships. Lik…

Yes, in the worst case they will be super fast to churn. That's unless they just forget to unsubscribe and you end up with a charge back because the principal has no idea he ever even signed up for your product.

Re: Claude Code is your customer

#30

Post by zmj »

dangom wrote: post #24
windowshopping wrote: post #17

I use claude code daily, but I've never been in a situation where Claude code was "deciding which product to use," that doesn't make sense to me. Claude is never on the web reading documentation - as far as I can tell that's not even in its toolkit. Can anyone give me more context for this? How do you end up having Claude code reading documentation and "choosing" a product to use? What type of prompts lead to this? I…

The choice happens implicitly rather than explicitly. If Claude tries an approach and hits a wall, it'll try a different approach. If an API call keeps not working, it'll choose a different API. It a tool is broken, it'll use something else. If it can't find docs nor read the code, it'll try to implement functionality from scratch. If you give it messy tools with confusing docs, you'll notice Claude not calling them…

Yesterday I had it using an internal library without documentation or source code. LSP integration wasn't working. It didn't have decompilation tools or the ability to download them.

I came back to my terminal to find it had written its own tool to decompile the assembly, and successfully completed the task using that info.

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