Killing Creative Constipation With Claude Code
Andrew Wilkinson’s Tweet struck a chord with me and others.
The best part of business is manifesting an idea.
Seeing a problem, then fixing it for yourself and others.
The worst part of business is trying to herd cats…
…Claude Code has brought back my fire.
I felt that fire last Thursday night.
Why? I had been sitting on it for 2 years. It was something small, but very important to me. Finally, I had enough. After I put my youngest to bed, I fired up Claude Code with Opus 4.5 and went at it.
45 minutes later… it worked!
I felt elation! Joy!
This isn’t about the thing I built (it’s a Claude slash command called “Markdown Provenance” if you care).
No. This is about the sheer rush of empowerment running my soul because of the knowing (really, really knowing) that this could be my new normal.
Overcoming Learned Helplessness
Years ago, I wrote about the pain of “Creative Constipation.”
If you’re a builder, you know exactly what I’m talking about.
You have hundreds or thousands of ideas… but you lack the time, capacity, or expertise to manifest them into reality.
Like Andrew, I had come off a long few years of depression.
My career path started as a builder (developer, architect, product), but then later evolved into management, leadership, and eventually became a CEO at my last company.
As I moved from contributor to executive leader, I could feel my skills as a builder atrophy.
Whenever I wanted to see something built, I was increasingly reliant on others to see and manifest my vision.
Sometimes they nailed it, often they couldn’t quite get there.
And what about my side projects?
On the job, my engineers were there to help. But what about passion projects and side quests where I needed to scratch an itch? Those hit a brick wall. My skills had waned so much that even spinning small proofs of concept became frustrating.
Enter Claude Code
A lot of AI is overhyped. I get that.
But it can also do a lot of incredible things in minutes. Things that would have taken some of my best engineers days or weeks in the past.
Case in point, the Markdown Provenance tool I shipped.
I don’t know the exact numbers, but a previous version of that tool took a few days of development time to ship a few years ago. And it took a few iterations of back-and-forth to tweak some features and functionality.
However, with Claude Code, I was able to give 5-6 fast rounds of feedback, and it was all buttoned up in one 45-min session.
Joy.
I’m not kidding.
Sheer joy.
As an entrepreneur, founder, builder, etc., you are always coming up with new ideas while simultaneously living within the constraints of reality.
Claude Code has been the closest thing to having a magic wand. It’s not, but I feel more powerful and empowered every time I use it.
And this, as we are always reminded, is the worst AI will ever be. It’ll continue to get better, faster, and more powerful for years/decades to come.
Now onto the other 100 ideas that have been stuck in my psyche.
No more creative constipation. It’s time to build.