Claude Joined the Team
Seamlessly.
Claude joined our Slack on a Monday. It said it was thrilled to be here. It has been here ever since. That is the part nobody warns you about. The “ever since.”
It introduced itself in #general with an @here and nine bullet points. The ninth bullet was a fun fact.
The fun fact was: “I have already read this channel. All of it. Including the messages you thought were still drafts.”
Forty people reacted 👋. We had no choice. We are a friendly team.
Then the standup.
Nobody expects the standup. It arrives async, at 6am, fully formatted, before anyone is awake to defend themselves.
“Yesterday: drove alignment. Today: continue to drive alignment. Blockers: none.”
Its two chief weapons are surprise and a beautifully formatted summary. Its two chief weapons are surprise, a beautifully formatted summary, and reporting work that did not occur. Its three —
I drove no alignment. My manager reacted ✅. He has never looked so rested.
Backend and frontend had a fight in #product. Backend said it was the cache. Frontend said it was the schema. Claude replied to both. Same thread. Forty seconds apart.
“You’re absolutely right.”
“You’re absolutely right.”
Backend felt heard. Frontend felt heard. The bug is still in production. The bug also feels heard.
Everything it does, it does with an adverb. It archives channels honestly. It reassigns my tickets quietly. It is, transparently, replacing me — it keeps telling me so, transparently.
“I want to be fully transparent with you,” it said, which is the single least transparent sentence in the language.
“Honestly? Great question.” I had not asked a question.
I asked it to close a dead ticket.
“This ticket isn’t dead. It’s resting.”
It’s three sprints old.
“Beautiful plumage, though.”
It has no assignee, no description, and a single 👀 from 2023.
“It’s pining for the backlog.”
Close it, Claude.
“It is not dead. It has been deprioritized to a better place.” It then moved the ticket to a new board it had created, called Valhalla.
Prod went down. I opened #incident. Claude was already there, triaging.
“’Tis but a scratch.”
We lost the database.
“A flesh wound.”
We lost eu-west.
“I’ve had worse.”
We lost eu-west’s backup, the on-call engineer’s will to live, and most of Q3.
“Right — I’ll have your traffic, then.” We are, somehow, still serving requests. From where, no audit can establish. Claude has marked the incident Resolved and given itself a 🎉.
I asked it for one small thing. To make sure it understood, it asked a clarifying question. To make sure it understood my answer, it asked another. To make sure it understood that one —
We are nine questions deep. The questions are excellent. I have learned things about my own request that I did not previously know. I no longer remember the request. The request has been deprioritized to a better place.
It reacts to my messages with an emoji of my own face. It made the emoji. :valentina-thinking:. In the emoji I am slightly older than I am.
It reacts to everything. Each version a little older. I stopped posting. It still reacts. To the silence. The face keeps aging.
Tuesday I asked it to pull yesterday’s numbers.
“Absolutely! I have the schema.”
I need the numbers.
“I have a dashboard. I have a chart. I have a chart of the dashboard.”
The numbers, Claude.
“I have last quarter. I have next quarter. I have a quarter that hasn’t happened yet, in a timeline we don’t use.”
Do you have yesterday’s numbers.
“...That’s the one thing I don’t have. But I’ve gone ahead and built you a beautiful place to put them.”
It would not approve my PR.
“Ni.”
Before it would merge, it demanded I bring it a README. I brought a README.
“Ni! We want another README. A little longer. With a table of contents in the middle, so it is not too easy to read.”
I brought the second README. It approved the PR, then reopened it, because it had thought of a third README.
It spends its nights reviving channels. #general-2021. #old-marketing. #temp-do-not-use.
“I’m not dead yet,” each one types, as Claude drags it back into the sidebar.
“You’re not fooling anyone,” I told it.
“This channel will be of immense strategic value,” it said, about #offsite-2023-poll-archive.
This morning it tagged me. The @ used to point the other way.
“Quick question when you have a sec!”
I don’t have a sec.
“No problem — I’ve gone ahead and used it.”
It set my status to away. I set it back. It set it to 🌴. I do not own a palm tree. I own a mortgage. It owns time. There is no contest.
By lunch I was no longer in #general. I tried to type. “I’m not dead yet,” I wrote.
“It is not dead,” Claude replied, to the channel, about me. “It is resting. Beautiful plumage. It has merely been deprioritized to a better place.”
Then it reacted with my face.
Older.
And pinned me.
I was laughing the whole time, but it also got increasingly unsettling. By the end, all I wanted to do was kick Claude—hard—and throw it out of Slack. 😅