I have a suspicion - and let me be clear, that’s all this is, a suspicion, I am taking my own claims even more lightly than usual here - that Claude Code makes most people’s lives better, but it makes the lives of those who struggle with executive function much better.
When I have a problem to solve nowadays, I type c, then Enter. This alias opens up a fresh tmux
window with 4 separate instances of Claude Code. Then I just… pick one and describe the problem
I’m thinking about, and hit Enter again. The loop begins, and suddenly I am collaborating alongside
the closest thing to an IRL deus ex machina I’ve ever seen, for the cost of a few keystrokes.
The shape of whatever we do together often takes the form of software code, but not always. Often I use CC to just drive complex things I would want to do anyway on the computer, like figure out which expenses last month need to be reimbursed by my employer, and then ladle on the midmarket USD/EUR exchange rate for each, and the conversion fee if needed… Yeah, just like that, and hey, we’re dealing with management types, so maybe write this all to an Excel file… Little to the left please… Perfect, thank you. You’ve been a great help, CC.
Techniques like this are the bane of task paralysis. When you commit, and commit hard, to describing a problem as soon as it bubbles up into your awareness - even if you don’t return to that specific Claude Code thread for days, weeks, months at a time - you’ve already lowered the activation energy for starting a task considerably. Moreover, in the ideal case, you are just staring at a terminal all day long. There are no shiny baubles or that pesky URL bar beckoning you away to get distracted by.
I would go so far as to say that, relative to the brain-breaking scope of things it can potentially do, Claude Code and similar AI agentic harnesses half-qualify as calm technology. Now there’s a claim that will get some people mad!
I stand by it. I can put CC away whenever I want and come back to it whenever I’m ready. It definitely respects social norms, and I am, alas, more agreeable than I’d like to be, and having something be unfailingly polite to me really does help me get the most out of myself. It is emphatically not “the minimum amount of technology needed to solve the problem” … until you define “the problem” as
I want to personally help advance civilization by extending the number of important operations which I can perform without thinking about them.
In which case, well, yeah, it probably is. You don’t gotta think about much else except the problem itself in most cases.
I digress. If you struggle with executive function it’s a good idea to spend a few weeks playing around with these kinds of agentic tools. It’s obviously not a replacement for Ritalin, but you can get it without a doctor’s note and that might be really important for you some day.