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Claude Code is your customer

calebjohn.xyz

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Re: Claude Code is your customer

#51

Post by pitched »

turnsout wrote: post #14
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…

“Human directing an agent” will become the dominant paradigm. We’ll still be in the loop, but there is no need for me to go to five different websites to look up basic information and synthesize the answer a simple question.

After all expertise is mechanized, we’ll be in their loop instead of them being in ours.

Think of this like going to a doctor with a simple question. It probably won’t be simple to them. At the end though, we usually do whatever they tell us. Because they are the experts, not us.

Re: Claude Code is your customer

#53

Post by monsieurbanana »

galaxyLogic wrote: post #49

I recently had to fill out a PDF form to send it to the Social Security Admininistration. They didn't have the option of submitting it online so I had to print it out and take it to them. I filled out the PDF using FireFox PDF-editor, at which point it occurred to me, this is not so different from using an application which has a form for me to enter data into it. Maybe in a few years Government has a portal where I…

A pdf can be anything and everything. It's just a wrapper around text, images, html, you can even embed javascript. There's already pdf forms that are user-editable (without a pdf editor). Not all features are available on all pdf viewers though.

If we're at the point where they use ai to make form pdfs, might as well cut the middleman and ask the ai to generate a form on a website.

Re: Claude Code is your customer

#54

Post by IanCal »

no_wizard wrote: post #15
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…

Without a strong propsition as to why I, as a customer, would use an agent over not doing so? Whats the value prop? Thats always missing from these sorts of articles and comments, is why is this better Related query: how is this really any different than what the W3C has proposed with Hydra[0] or other linked data APIs and formats? Who benefits by making their APIs more transparent, when 15 years or so ago there was…

> Without a strong propsition as to why I, as a customer, would use an agent over not doing so? Whats the value prop?

Same reason you’d use an automated approach to anything - you want to solve a problem and want to solve it along some Pareto front of minimal effort and maximum results.

You use search engines to find things and all sorts of other automated time saving approaches. Agents are just another one. I used one to find an old email receipt for a car seat that I’d not been able to find myself with keywords.

> Related query: how is this really any different than what the W3C has proposed with Hydra[0] or other linked data APIs and formats? Who benefits by making their APIs more transparent, when 15 years or so ago there was a big push for this exact thing and it failed due to business concerns, not technical ones.

Common data formats have thrived where they’re actually used by middle services that users actually use - aggregations of some sort. Scientific papers have common data so they are indexed, webpages have metadata so they appear in google search results.

Linked data for technical reasons fails because the real world is too messy. There needs to be a good business reason so that the formats get nailed down to a small reasonable set and everyone just does it.

Now, part of the problem with supplying apis is who is going to use them? Even the nicest ones are only useful for people building a product on it, or a few nerds.

This has changed. We have systems that can use apis from natural language. That means that normal end users can integrate multiple services nicely and easily, and add others into the same interface they’re already using.

Re: Claude Code is your customer

#55

Post by galaxyLogic »

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…

From the article: "Claude Code can rip out one service and replace it with another in minutes. ..."

Doesn't that assume there are many interchangable services available on the web which essentially do the same thing?

I can see this would be the case if there were many online services for say compiling C++ code. But for more human-centric services, are there many "replaceable services" out there? An API is not only its syntax, but also its semantics.

Re: Claude Code is your customer

#56

Post by code443 »

The loop closes eventually. Right now I read your article and think "I should make my docs more agent-friendly." But if I delegate that task to an agent, the agent reads your article, understands why agent-friendly docs matter, and rewrites my docs accordingly.

At some point the agents reading your article ARE the agents that will consume those improved docs. The feedback loop becomes fully autonomous.

Re: Claude Code is your customer

#57

Post by woeirua »

unforbiddenYet wrote: post #47

I can see the point of agent-first workflows in the future where we interact with agent UI instead of SaaS/PaaS dashboards but I don’t think every other problem and subsequently a solution will need to be agentified. A massive chunk of interactions would still require a good-old UI i.e. filing taxes, signing contracts, banking, e-government etc.

Why? Of those, the only one that still might need a UI is signing contracts.

Re: Claude Code is your customer

#58

Post by liampulles »

Is the idea here that you should make a very clear and well documented API because you expect customer agents to automatically make contracts with you to use your API? Just sommer skipping the process of evaluating you as a vendor?

Maybe vibe coders will do this, but I don't expect a business that operates like this to last very long.

If the expectation is that the customer is still going to put the work in to evaluate you, then is there no room for them to build a client, to expose their own internal API?

Re: Claude Code is your customer

#59

Post by fragmede »

no_wizard wrote: post #15
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…

Without a strong propsition as to why I, as a customer, would use an agent over not doing so? Whats the value prop? Thats always missing from these sorts of articles and comments, is why is this better Related query: how is this really any different than what the W3C has proposed with Hydra[0] or other linked data APIs and formats? Who benefits by making their APIs more transparent, when 15 years or so ago there was…

> Whats the value prop?

Because you get to do other stuff while the agent's working. Maybe spending hours optimizing the best flight possible is fun for you, or actually reading online reviews, I ain't judging. I don't care about half the features the marketing copy brags about, I only care about the parts that affect me. This theoretical agent knows me, what I care about, and can optimize based on that.

That "other stuff" you get to do is up to you to take advantage of. It could be scrolling TikTok, or it could be learning a foreign language or calculus, it's totally up to you.

Re: Claude Code is your customer

#60

Post by internet2000 »

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…

If you're not letting Claude at least criticize your product/API/library choices you're probably holding yourself back.
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