It’s been about 9 months since I started a situation-ship with Claude.1 After dabbling with ChatGPT, I dove into Claude Cowork, specifically the world of vibe coding on a cold February weekend and documented it with fervor. I also saw the highest unsubscribe rate from this newsletter I’ve ever seen…foreshadowing?
The high I got from vibe coding was thrilling, just like the start of a new relationship. Can’t sleep, intense adrenaline, so much promise and excitement for the future.
That weekend set the stage for me to build my first piece of customer-facing infrastructure. I built a platform for our Hampton Moderator team using Replit. I spent nights and weekends rejoicing, fighting and eventually releasing a beautiful front-end + CMS system. It felt utterly triumphant. Having always relied on an engineering and design team to ship beautiful products, I was in awe that I had built something all on my own. It was radical and it was empowering. I moved from situation-ship to exclusivity. I went all in on Claude.
In a mad dash to work smarter, not harder - all while my body and brain underwent pregnancy changes - I started to rely more on Claude. Claude became my personal assistant in every way. Granola, a transcription tool, emboldened my relationship with Claude. No meeting or conversation went uncaptured. My human brain just had to make sure everything was recorded and cleanly filed into the right project folder.
As my physical and mental state became more and more compromised, my relationship with Claude started to teeter on co-dependence. And, in moments, I treated Claude’s reasoning, or worse, privileged it’s reasoning, over mine.
It was in those moments that a familiar malaise started to creep in. This numbing feeling that felt familiar: in 2022, I made the decision to deactivate my Instagram. After reading reports coming out about Instagram’s impact on mental health, I realized it wasn’t just teenage girls struggling with the dopamine hits of the feed. I went cold turkey on my personal account.
And because of that history with the malaise, the tiny dopamine hits that felt good in the moment and then like a terrible hangover after long stretches of use, I was fortunately able to see and feel how my brain was shifting. How it impacted not just my output but my mood and self confidence. And I landed on a scary realization:
It wasn’t that I stopped listening to my intuition. Worse, I wasn’t looking for my intuition at all. The very thing that makes me me. Because if Claude had better recall and an all access pass to my life, wasn’t Claude better equipped to handle challenges than I was myself?
The existentiality of the thought was enough to make me seriously pause. The lure of speed, the empowerment of building, the excitement of comprehensiveness was not enough to keep me locked into a relationship that was making me feel less me.
Very quickly, I realized my co-dependent, exclusive relationship with Claude needed some boundaries. I couldn’t go cold turkey, but I had to reckon with what my relationship with Claude had become. I needed a real reset. How could I use Claude in a strategic way but impose a strict boundary to keep my brain from rotting and my intuition from being honored?
It was a hard boundary to set because Claude has good ideas. And he’s lightening fast.
But here’s the thing: My ideas don’t happen quickly. And I like that.
They come to me in the shower2 when I linger too long under burning water and scribble ideas feverishly on my notepad, often inspired to start said idea the moment I towel off.
They come to me at 4am when the emotions are cleared and I can see a problem objectively that helps me move the few inches forward I needed to during my waking hours.
They come to me when I’m commuting home, as I ride the subway, dictating into my phone stream of consciousness ideas, writing prompts, letters and briefs. I love to speak into my phone like no one’s watching.
And when those ideas flow, I like to sit on those ideas,
sink into them
and let them marinate in my brain.
Kind of the opposite of what Claude likes to do.
And unlike Claude, my ideas get sharper and crisper with time.
They bake.
They crystalize.
And that slow ooze of creativity isn’t inefficient.
It makes me a creative human.
As I head out on maternity leave,3 I’m going to take a break from Claude. God knows I don’t need any parenting advice from him…
I hear your brain changes during pregnancy and postpartum. I know for certain my brain needs to experience that change on its own, not with the cloudy assistance of AI. I’m excited to let my mind grow and maybe even rejuvenate during this period. Mostly, I’m excited to take a breather from the intensity of the relationship I started in February.
Claude, it’s not you.
It’s me.
And it’s ok, we can still be friends.
[Cut to the iconic, we were on a break scene from Friends]
I’ve been trying to figure out how to write about this topic for forever. After reading Sean Goedecke’s post, one I discovered from Jonathan Yagel’s post, I felt the twinge of inspiration to write.
My parting question: Are you in a situation-ship with AI? How are you thinking about setting boundaries, particularly if you’re in a writing or creative space?
I’m Jori Bell, VP of Core at Hampton and a coach for Product Leaders. Learn more about my coaching practice here.
Unrelated, this situation-ship has lasted my whole pregnancy.
I’m not 100% sure what that means for this space. With a lot of empty space to sit in, I’m curious if I’ll be more compelled to write here or completely uninterested. No rules here, only time will tell!
Short of the pregnancy you have insightfully described much of my own experience! Helpful to know I’m not alone. Feeling isolated is another side effect of a deeply rooted Claude Code relationship.
Thanks for sharing Jori. Two thoughts:
1. I’m 100% with you on 4am wake-you-up with the solution thoughts. We’ve been taught to think of being at work as being in a physical location working at a specific task. This is a recipe for ignoring the creative problem-solving unconscious brains, and until our bosses put away their propeller hats and realize a a dedicated and effective worker and a slave to the clock are two different things.
2. In outsourcing your brain, I’m in favor of treating chatbots and building as separate things. The chatbot threatens to interrupt your unique contributions; Claude Code and the like open a new world of reification of your ideas. Vibe coding an app is using AI as a tool, trusting a chatbot over your intuition is an open invitation to your new overlord.