A Claude Catharsis: Accepting When Your Life’s Work Becomes Free and Abundant
From ‘profound sadness’ to ‘reckless energy’: One Silicon Valley veteran’s coding journey with an AI programming tool.
Aditya Agarwal is a general partner at South Park Commons. He was previously chief technology officer of Dropbox and an early engineer at Facebook.
Not long ago, I spent a weekend writing code with Claude, Anthropic’s AI assistant. I’ve been programming for more than 20 years. I was one of the first engineers at Facebook, where I built the original search engine. I went on to become chief technology officer of Dropbox, where I scaled the engineering team from 25 people to a thousand. Code has been the foundation of my career, the craft I’ve spent my adult life mastering. And after that weekend, one thing was very clear to me: We will never write code by hand again. Something I was very good at is now free and abundant.
While I was building software with AI, I also noticed that elsewhere AI agents were building social networks, the very product I helped create at Facebook. Little coding agents were spinning up functional social platforms for themselves. It’s all a bit silly, but what they produce is kind of indistinguishable from what humans built on the larger internet. Both the form and the function of my early career are now being produced by machines.