Claude Code and What Comes Next

I opened Claude Code and gave it the command: “Develop a web-based or software-based startup idea that will make me $1000 a month where you do all the work by generating the idea and implementing it. i shouldn’t have to do anything at all except run some program you give me once. it shouldn’t require any coding knowledge on my part, so make sure everything works well.” The AI asked me three multiple choice questions and decided that I should be selling sets of 500 prompts for professional users for $39. Without any further input, it then worked independently… FOR AN HOUR AND FOURTEEN MINUTES creating hundreds of code files and prompts. And then it gave me a single file to run that created and deployed a working website (filled with very sketchy fake marketing claims) that sold the promised 500 prompt set. You can actually see the site it launched here, though I removed the sales link, which did actually work and would have collected money. I strongly suspect that if I ignored my conscience and actually sold these prompt packs, I would make the promised $1,000.

This is Claude Code at work, one of a new generation of AI coding tools that represent a sudden capability leap in AI in the past month or so. What makes these new tools suddenly powerful is not one breakthrough, but a combination of two advances. First, the latest AIs are capable of doing far more work autonomously while self-correcting many of their errors, especially in programming tasks. Second, the AIs are being given an “agentic harness” of tools and approaches that they can use to solve problems in new ways. The result of these two factors has led to big leaps in the latest AI tools made by the big AI companies.