(2026-01-30) Ford Claude Code For Web Ruined My Brain

Paul Ford: Claude Code for web ruined my brain. Anthropic recently launched a browser-based version of its Claude Code product. I’ve been using their desktop- (or rather, terminal-) based coding tool for nearly a year. Now it’s on the web, and in their mobile app

I knew what to expect—but multiple times in the last few days, I found myself staring in wonder at one of the screens in my life, whether phone, desktop, or laptop. Sweet banana flapjacks, I would mumble, as I compiled a complex native MacOS desktop app (which I’ve never done before), written in Swift (a programming language I don’t know). Great Caesar’s ghost, I’d say as a project I’d shelved five years ago was reanimated and completed in ten minutes

It feels radically different—some ineffable combination of product maturity, zero setup, and the fact that you “program” whole apps by typing sentences into your phone and then jumping on a train, checking back half an hour later.

I:...

Fully ported my old blog, which is crafted from a custom, incredibly obscure, disturbing data format I first came up with in 1999, to a tidy new CMS powered by Python

Created an attractive (IMO) MacOS-native music production app which not only produces MIDI events, plays songs, and integrates with Teensy

Migrated a legacy U.S. government database in Microsoft Access with obscure field names spread over 50 separate tables and around 8,000 separate variables, to a modern web application that more or less works, with text-based RAG querying.

Relaunched an old project focused on timeline visualization with a new TypeScript frontend and backend

Created a completely functional clone of OwnCast, which I sometimes use to watch old movies with other dads, simply because too many friends whined that they didn’t like the way chat worked

Did I just create a ton of tech debt? Yeah, but I have a tool to address it. Did I blow up my weekend? A little. But I was doing a lot of it on my phone, with time I might otherwise spend looking at Instagram

Programming in Claude Code is like playing with a Tamagotchi, if a Tamagotchi was a forty-person engineering and product team

Working this way feels weird. It’s less “thinking” and more “being gavage-fed cognitive nougat directly into your nougat brain.” Or I guess a nicer way to put it is that I used to feel like I was building a ship, and now I feel like I’m steering one.

The Claude Code app is also somewhat broken. The screen sometimes blanks out; they’ll fix that. Maybe if I was burning this money out of my own pocket instead of using free credits, I’d give up more easily. But I just unlocked five years of personal tech debt (admittedly, a concept that very few people might share) in a couple of days

What conclusions can you draw here? Right now, all of them.

What I’ve found is that when exposed to these tools, people sometimes fully reject them—which I get. Or they naturally ask: How do I thrive here?

People are thrilled to cut each other out, their managers are wondering if they need so many people, and their managers are wondering if they need so many sub-managers

I get why individuals and businesses want to capture this value for themselves, but they can’t: There’s too much happening too fast. I think the only way through this is to find what works and give it away—share prompts, open code (the groovebox is here if you want it; I’ll open the other stuff later)

For the first time in my life, I simply cannot think fast enough to fill up the pipeline of projects. Literally every dumb idea can become real software in an hour

maybe there’s some huge rug pull on the horizon, but I don’t think so

It’s just that it’s starting to deliver on its promises, and that the pace of advancement seems to be accelerating

there’s always the possibility that I’ve been taken in by magic tricks.

Except: My blog database works, the content migration was clean, the groovebox beep boops, the legacy database can be queried with vector search to find similarities, and my friends watched a movie with me and we used the chat interface.