Field Notes

I’ve been thinking a lot about how we teach AI — not the big, dramatic stuff, but the tiny architectural nudges I give Claude Code every day. The ones that feel obvious to me but invisible to a model. This piece is about that moment, and the larger shift it signals in how humans and AI actually learn from each other.

Pair-programming AI has completely changed how I work. As a PM, I used to move ideas through layers of hierarchy before learning whether something was even feasible. Now I can see the architecture myself. While building the Waterwitch Studio blog, Claude casually suggested extending the CMS to support a feature I wanted. In corporate life that kind of idea would have been shut down immediately. Here, it was simply… possible. The limit was never the tech. It was the structure around it.

I spent years working near complex technical systems without touching them, convinced they belonged to someone else. It took running my own messy, real-world operations to realize the only thing I’d been missing was permission.