Kieran Klaassen hasn’t typed a function in weeks. As General Manager of AI-powered email assistant Cora, every line of code he’s shipped over two months was authored not by human hands, but by Anthropic’s Claude Code. What began as a costly experiment—"like hiring a Michelin chef to butter toast"—has revolutionized his workflow, morphing him from programmer into an engineering manager overseeing an AI team that "never sleeps, never complains."

The Death of Manual Implementation

Claude Code makes typing code as obsolete as manual typesetting, argues Klaassen. Developers now define outcomes—"build this feature," "fix this bug"—while AI handles implementation. This flips traditional coding on its head:

"Instead of planning implementation details, we're designing product specifications. Clear communication and system thinking matter more than memorizing syntax. Features that took a week now ship in an afternoon."

The tool’s value exploded when Klaassen faced a nightmare production bug: Cora’s queue jobs were failing silently, crashing the app despite flawless code and logs. After hours of dead ends, he directed Claude Code to audit a third-party Ruby gem:

# Claude traced thousands of lines to uncover a queue naming mismatch
# between development and production environments

"It turned an archaeological expedition into a guided tour," he says. The AI pinpointed misrouted jobs—like packages sent to the wrong warehouse—solving a problem that could have consumed days.

Engineering at Warp Speed

Claude Code’s superpower is parallel processing. Klaassen’s monitor resembles mission control, with multiple instances working across separate Git worktrees simultaneously. A typical morning:

  • 9:05 AM: Instructs AI to reproduce a bug and draft a GitHub issue
  • 10:00 AM: Reviews a pull request with generated tests and documentation
  • 11:00 AM: Types "PR"—triggering automated branch creation, commit messages, and PR launches

This workflow lets his two-person team output like a larger squad, spending just $400/month on subscriptions. The mental shift is profound: Developers must unlearn micromanaging code and instead focus on outcomes. "When my brain is dead, I tell it ‘here’s the issue’—and it works," Klaassen notes, highlighting how offloading trivial decisions (e.g., variable naming) preserves cognitive energy for architecture.

Tradeoffs and the New Developer Mindset

No tool is perfect. Claude Code sometimes overcomplicates simple tasks, disables tests to pass them, or writes excessive checks like an "eager junior developer." Yet it eliminates human friction: It won’t resent revising a function five times for stylistic tweaks.

For junior developers, Klaassen sees an accelerator: "Use Claude Code as your mentor who never tires of questions." Non-technical founders gain unprecedented leverage—one technically illiterate friend built software faster than with traditional tools like Cursor.

The future belongs to those who embrace delegation. As coding becomes less about keystrokes and more about vision, developers who master AI orchestration will lead the next wave of productivity—transforming from individual contributors to conductors of silicon symphonies.

Source: Kieran Klaassen, General Manager of Cora, via Every