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I Built Claude Cowork Before Anthropic. Here’s the Tension Every Builder Faces Today.
This little experiment surfaces deep tensions everyone is feeling in the AI landscape. It's evidence that the distance between individual and institutional capability is collapsing. The structures we built careers on—tools, artifacts, execution—are becoming shackles. What comes next?
Read the essayfuture(memo)No. 01
I Built Claude Cowork Before Anthropic. Here’s the Tension Every Builder Faces Today.
PrefaceI loathe the hustlers flooding the internet with claims of cloning billion-dollar apps in a day. This piece isn't about how fast you can build with AI. Much to the contrary, it's about how pointless that mindset becomes in the age of AI. Speed without direction leads nowhere. The interesting question isn't how quickly can I ship. It's what does it mean when anyone can ship quickly. January 12th, 2026. Anthropic announces Claude Cowork. Ten days of work. I spent all of 2024 convincing people, mostly non-coders, to use Cursor. The premise was simple: making things with nothing but natural language was now possible. Product Managers. Designers. Researchers. Sales. Marketers. Anyone who participated in the making could now be empowered to bring their ideas to reality independently. No waiting for engineering. No translation through tickets and specs.
future(memo)No. 02
How Future Designers Will Win in the Age of AI
Recap of the Series so farParts I-III established the crisis. The paradigm shifted. Designers control 5% where they once controlled 85%. Design Leadership is paralyzed. But critique without action is performance. This final part outlines three paths to sovereignty: Brand, Product, and Intelligence. And what it takes to seize them before the window closes. In 1450, a blacksmith in Florence possessed something that very few knowledge workers in our modern society possess: sovereignty. From raw iron to finished horseshoe, from commission to delivery, they controlled the entire value chain. They didn't need permission from a VP of Horseshoe Strategy. They didn't wait for the Metallurgy Team to approve their approach. They didn't coordinate through six layers of management to validate market fit. They had iron, a forge, a hammer, and skill. That was enough.
future(memo)No. 03
A New Class of Software Builders is Emerging
Software powers every industry, yet its creation is limited to a small pool of experts. There are only about 30 million professional developers worldwide, and it takes years to train each one [Sequoia: 1]. This bottleneck stifles innovation – we simply “cannot yet create software at the speed of our imagination” [Sequoia: 2]. Generative AI now offers a chance to break this barrier. Generative AI is lowering the barrier to software creation, enabling “tons of code to be generated by people who are not otherwise coders” [Reid Hoffman: 3]. In other words, non-technical individuals with ideas – from kids and creators to solopreneurs and business operators – can increasingly build software without traditional coding [NYT: 4]. Evidence of this shift is growing; everyday consumers are for the first time able to build fully interactive apps (not just simple websites) using AI-driven tools [a16z: 5].
