A couple of months back, I started experimenting with Claude Code. When I get deeply into a task or technical concept, my brain starts pattern matching outside of that scope. Perhaps you’ve experienced something similar, like when I was younger and got obsessed with Doom, I would start dreaming video game concepts. Your brain works in the background, matching patterns and applying them to different scenarios.
I had exactly that experience with Claude Code. One day I had to prune some trees that would be difficult to deal with using a handsaw. We decided to buy an electric power saw. We already had Makita battery-operated tools, so we went to Bunnings and found a Makita pruning tool that fit our existing battery system.
The power tool cut the time by a factor of 10 or more, without blisters, but with the added concern of not wanting to chop my finger off. This is where pattern matching kicked in. I immediately thought, “This is just like coding agents.” It really is an acceleration of ability, hard to describe to someone who hasn’t used it. It has different things you need to learn, like the double switch safety arrangement, and little tricks like getting speed up before starting a branch. It’s a different set of operational knowledge needed between the handsaw and the power pruner.
I initially dismissed the idea of writing about this analogy as a bit naff. Then yesterday, I was listening to an interview on Latent Space with Steve Yegge, and he made that same power tool analogy, plus one about combine harvesters for coding agents at scale. Someone with a much more elevated presence in the technical space said something similar, so I thought it was worth resurrecting that original blog post idea.
I said in my talk today, they’re like they’re like a power saw or a power drill. A skilled craftsman can do a lot of good with them and then you can also cut your foot off with them
Using coding agents feels like using a power tool, and that demands respect for what they can do. But power tools are just tools. For this blog post, I won’t wade into the broader debate on whether AI is fundamentally different. My current worldview is that this is a powerful technology, and it’s worth treating it as such and getting the benefits from it.
