Are You a Claude-O-Holic?

If not, here’s why you might want to become one.

Every single day right now, I discover something I can do that I could not do the day before.

I mean I do the thing myself, that same afternoon.

That has never been true before in my working life. Software used to arrive in versions. You learned a tool, you got good at it, and it stayed roughly the same until the next release. The ground held still long enough for expertise to mean something.

The ground is not holding still anymore.

What Claude Did With 7 Phone Clips Without Me

I stood in my kitchen and recorded 7 clips on my phone, one take each, talking off the top of my head. That was my entire contribution to the production.

Then I handed the folder to Claude and said: make this a vertical video for Instagram.

7 Things Claude Delivered

1. The 7 clips stitched in order
2. Every dead pause cut out. 25 silent stretches removed, tightening the video from 80 seconds to 72 without ever cutting me off mid-word
3. Captions in my brand typeface, sized so no line ever overflowed the frame
4. Those captions positioned so the second line passes behind my head, which required tracking where my head actually was in every shot, because it moved 300 pixels between the tight and wide framings
5. 7 original motion graphics cut in as B-roll, each timed to the exact words I was saying
6. A first frame built so Instagram’s auto-thumbnail shows me mid-sentence with the hook already on screen, replacing the blank half-blink you usually get
7. The whole thing uploaded to Dropbox, and then published to Instagram

I gave direction the entire way. The captions came back in the wrong typeface, so I said so: Inter Black, heavy and thick. It spelled my coined word wrong and I corrected it. When it asked whether to publish, I said yes.

That is the actual skill now. Knowing what good looks like, and being able to say so clearly.

The 3D Printer Conversation

I talked with a friend who bought a 3D printer. He does not know CAD and has no plans to learn.

He is producing custom parts right now. He describes what he needs, the AI produces the design, the printer makes the object. The expertise he never acquired stopped being a prerequisite.

That is the whole pattern in miniature.

For most of history, the distance between wanting something and having it was filled with skill you had to personally acquire. Years of it. That distance is collapsing, and it is collapsing unevenly. The unevenness is the part that should get your attention.

Some of Your Peers Are About to Leapfrog You

I mean something far wider than the usual margin, where a colleague is a bit sharper and you can catch up with effort.

I mean people in your same role, with your same budget and your same constraints, about to operate with capabilities, creativity, and strategic range that are light years past yours. They started playing with this 6 months ago and you did not.

The person who started experimenting in spring is not one step ahead of you now. They built instincts, and those instincts generate more experiments, which build sharper instincts.

Forget Competitive Comparison

If you are reading this as a competitive threat (someone might outrank me, outperform me, make me look slow), you have grabbed the wrong end.

Impact comparison is the measure that matters.

If you lead a nonprofit, a church, a mission-driven organization, your ceiling has always been capacity. You could see what needed doing and could not get to it, because there were 4 of you and the work needed 40.

That ceiling is moving. Right now. For the first time in the history of your organization, the constraint that has defined every hard decision you have ever made is loosening.

The real question is how many people you could have served and did not, because you were too busy to find out what was possible.

The Parable Nobody Wants Pointed at Them

You know the story. A master leaves, entrusting portions of his wealth to 3 servants. 2 of them invest and multiply what they were given. The third, afraid of losing it, buries his in the ground and hands back exactly what he received.

We usually teach it as being about money. It is also about this moment.

Something extraordinary has been placed in your hands. It is unproven, a little unsettling, and you could look foolish using it. Burying it is defensible. Nobody gets fired for waiting to see how this shakes out.

Notice the third servant’s defense: I was afraid. He was careful, and careful is what got him the rebuke.

So: are you the servant who buried the talents until the master came back? Or the one who invested them, and risked something, for good?

3 Things You Should Do With AI This Week

1. Pick One Task You Have Been Avoiding

The one that needs a skill you do not have. Design, video, spreadsheets, data cleanup, whatever keeps sliding down your list. Try it with AI this week. The goal is to find where the edge is.

2. Give Real Direction and Correct What Comes Back

The people getting extraordinary results are art-directing. They say “that’s not the right typeface” and “the pacing drags here,” the same way they would with a human contractor.

3. Do It Again Tomorrow

Repetition is the whole point. One experiment teaches you almost nothing. 30 days of experiments changes what you believe is possible, and that belief is the real asset.

One Video, Multiplied

Everything in that video after I put my phone down was done by Claude, including publishing it.

I mention it because 6 months ago that video would have cost me a freelancer, a week, and a few hundred dollars, and I probably would have skipped making it at all.

That is one video. Now multiply it across everything you have been meaning to do and have not had the capacity to reach.

The talents are already in your hands. What you do this week decides if you’re going to bury or invest them.  What's your decision?  Let me know!