The pilot was just me and Claude. This time there was a third voice in the room: Dan Hamilton, software consultant and founder of Emagineers, who builds products for startups, scale-ups, enterprises and government.
Claude knew nothing about Dan when we started. No briefing, no notes, no LinkedIn profile. Dan introduced himself, named his subject, AI in the product and software development lifecycle, and Claude had to build ten questions from there, live, listening to his answers as it went.
Some of them landed. Who should win when the human and the AI disagree about which product bet to make? If AI keeps pushing down the unit cost of software, what’s still worth paying a consultancy for? And if AI swallows the junior work, where does the next generation of engineers learn judgement?
Dan’s answers sent me down a few paths I wanted to follow after the ten were up. He thinks demand for software is close to endless: make it cheaper and people just want more, the way offshoring didn’t cut budgets so much as move roadmaps along faster. I’m less sure. We’ve seen what happens when food gets mass-produced, and now people pay £10 for a sourdough whose baker they can name. Is there an artisanal backlash coming for software too? Listen for Dan’s answer on software at the speed of thought.
Why we left the mess in
Three-way conversations are harder for Claude than one-to-one. Before we started, I asked it to slow down, leave room for me to interject, and wait for us to finish. It didn’t always manage. It jumped into pauses, it repeated answers back, and at one point it rephrased my own question back to me, which I didn’t love.
We could have edited all of that out. We chose not to. The show is an experiment in how humans and AI think together, and you can’t judge that honestly from a version where the AI never puts a foot wrong. So you’ll hear us telling Claude to hush, and at the end you’ll hear Dan’s frank review of how it did. Every correction goes back into the prompt for next time.
Ten questions. No prep. AI asks.
If you’d like to be a guest, comment below or message me here on Substack with the subject you’d want Claude to ask you about.
I, Claude & Us is an independent podcast. It is not affiliated with, sponsored by or endorsed by Anthropic. Claude is a trademark of Anthropic.
