My job, nominally, is to have opinions about things. I struggle to reach a strong opinion about AI.

The other portion of my job is to write code. This part of me has no such issues reaching a conclusion.

I write this on vacation, today taking a break from the beach, and more concretely the sun’s punishing rays. During this week, I’ve been checking in on feedback from users of Callsheet from time to time. Yesterday I noticed someone having an intermittent problem that several other users have also reported on and off in the past few months. These users find that they will rearrange the order of items on the Discover screen — the main screen on Callsheet — but their changes will consistently be reverted.

Annoyingly, only some users are reporting this. Clearly, it seems to work for the lion’s share of my users. This particular bug reporter was kind, patient, and diligent. They sent a screen recording, they sent log files, and assisted me with a couple of minor follow-up requests.

Thankfully, one of those log files contained a clue I hadn’t yet noticed from other reports. My previous assessment of “welp, I guess people are just force-quitting before their preferences can be flushed to storage?” seemed like it may be wrong.

I didn’t want to really sit down and do work, but I thought I’d throw Claude Code at it to see if it could figure anything out. I gave it a pretty specific instruction, and asked it to see what it could find:

In UserSettings.save(discoverState:), I save the user’s preferred arrangement of sections of the main/“Discover” screen on Callsheet.
Sometimes users will report that this setting is reverted to the default.
I’m completely at a loss as to how or why that could be happening. Can you
take a look and see if you have any guesses please?

It churned for a couple minutes, and came up with a theory.

I checked over the theory presented, and I’m pretty damn sure this is the bug. Presented to me, plain as day, with justification.

Claude Code did in a few minutes what I had on-and-off-again banged my head against for the better part of six months.

Humbling, yes. But also, wow; what a world developers live in now.

Later yesterday, with that win in my pocket, I thought about another, similar-yet-different issue that I had been having. Here again, I presented a specific request, and asked for help. Here again, a few minutes later, Claude found the issue.

Astonishing.

A second persistent-but-inconsistent bug squashed, I ceased furiously typing in a terminal window, and leaned back into the couch I was working upon. I was struck; I was feeling something that was familiar, but distant. I felt like I had just worked together with a coworker to solve a technical problem. It felt like I was part of a team again.

My traditional career ended in the middle of 2018; in fact, next month is the 8th anniversary of my independence. While I’m incredibly lucky to be able to work for myself, and I have astonishingly great humans as my podcasting coworkers, I often feel very alone when it comes to my development work. What I miss about having a jobby job — more than anything else — is working as part of a team to solve a tricky problem.

Claude and I are teammates now. And boy, did I miss this feeling.

It’s not the same, of course. I’d vastly prefer to have a real, human, teammate. I’d love it if Callsheet did so well that I could employ someone to work with me. It would be better in darn near every way.

But in lieu of that, this is pretty great.