This is my writeup for the talk I gave at Claude Code Anonymous meeting in London.
Hi, my name is Peter and I’m a Claudoholic. I’m addicted to agentic engineering. And sometimes I just vibe-code. Most of you know me as @steipete on Twitter. I was an iOS developer/Entrepreneur in a previous life, and now I do… everything. I work on a ton of projects.
So. Now you might understand why we call it Claude Code Anonymous. This meetup is for builders. For full-breadth developers. For the people who see the revolution and can’t sleep anymore.
Since I’m one of the organizers and knee-deep in AI, I’ve thought quite hard what I wanna talk about in these 5 minutes.
- My latest strategies how to best use agents?
- My adventures in running open models on Nvidia’s H200?
- Alternative agents like opencode, charm?
- A preview of my upcoming talk “You can just do things?”
Yes, you can just do things. That’s the beauty and the problem. Once you realize how powerful these agents are - this realization that you can finally build everything you ever wanted to build. All these ideas and side projects that you’ve been thinking about for years, but never had the time to do.
And it doesn’t stop. The more I build, the more ideas for projects I get. And then I worked on multiple projects at the same time, manically yelling at my computer in the middle of the night, because who even types anymore?
AI was supposed to save time, yet I work more than ever before, I have more FOMO than ever before. I dedicate pretty much all my waking time to this, yet it doesn’t feel enough. One week in AI feels like a month in the real world.
I’m fun at parties when I tell people about the coming AGI apocalypse, and the 1000 stories of moments where AI just abso - fucking - lutely blew my mind. Don’t get me wrong - I am having a blast. I learned so so much, I built incredibly cool stuff, and my spark is back.
You might not realize how important that was for me. I burned out after selling my company in 2021 and basically didn’t touch my computer for 3 years. I only used my phone… like a normie! So, having found my way back, the pendulum did swing heavily in the other direction.
The last few months feel like a blur, and I’m on a new journey how to better control my slot machine addiction. Honestly, I’m failing quite hard. I’m having way too much fun here, and there are all these ideas in my head that need to be codified.
I know I’m not alone, when I text my friends at 4am and they are also still up. I call them the Black Eye Club. And on Reddit there’s plenty of reports as well, about people that can’t sleep anymore.
Gergely Orosz wrote in his Pragmatic Engineer Newsletter just a few days ago:
“New trend: extreme hours for AI startup workers. Pulling 80+ hour work weeks – including weekends – is becoming the norm across AI startups, and is unlikely to stop while AI is so hot.”
I also see this as a theme that’s industry-wide. Cognition CEO Scott Wu posted on Twitter:
“Cognition has an extreme performance culture. We routinely are at the office through the weekend and do some of our best work late into the night. Many of us literally live where we work.”
Kennan Davison from Icon, an AI Marketing generator tweeted:
why do 6 [days of work] when you can do 7
Google cofounder Sergey Brin told staff in the tech giant’s AI unit:
“60 hours a week is the sweet spot of productivity”
I allowed myself to be sucked into the vortex for a while. This is exactly how I started my last company. I don’t believe you can do that with “regular” working hours. Or to be more specific, I can’t do that with 40h weeks. I work in waves, a period of very intense work, followed by a period of slacking off. Heck, I even know which game I’m going to enjoy next, once I manage to rip myself away from the slot machines.
One of my passion projects is VibeTunnel, a Mac app that tunnels terminal cli’s to the web, so you can talk to your claude or gemini or codex or whatever straight from your phone. I realized I literally built something so I have better access to my drug. It’s really cool btw.
I also realize that it’s time now to slow down a bit, as it’s gotten to an unhealthy level. A tiny yet meaningful tweak I did the other day was adding the session time to Claude’s status line. Serves as a reminder that time is just FLYING when you’re in the flow.
So here it is. My story. May it serve as a warning for some here that aren’t mainlining cli just yet. If you love to build things, if you are a full-breadth developer, you are at risk. I’d love to hear your strategies after our talk round is done.
Thanks for letting me share.