I have nearly 20 years of experience in technology, and have been writing toy scripts or baby automations for most of my career. I started out in a managed services help desk and took that route many folks take across and around the different IT disciplines.
I mostly spend my days administering SaaS tools, and one of my largest frustrations has always been that I didn’t know enough to really build a good plugin or add-on for whatever tool I was struggling with, and I’d find a limited set of good documentation or open source examples to help me out. With my limited time (full time job) and attendant challenges (ADHD & autism + all the fun trauma that comes from that along with being Black, fat and queer), I struggled to ever start anything out of fear of failure or I’d begin a course and get bored because I wasn’t doing anything that captured my imagination & motivation.
Tools like Claude Code, Cursor, and even the Claude app have absolutely changed the game for me. I’m learning more than ever, because even the shitty code that these tools can write is an opportunity for debugging and exploration, but I have something tangible to iterate on. Additionally, I’ve found that Claude is really good at giving me lessons and learning based on an idea I have, and then I have targeted learning I can go do using source docs and tutorials that are immediately relevant to what I’m doing instead of being faced with choice paralysis. Being able to build broken stuff in seconds that I want to get working (a present problem is so much more satisfying than a future one) and having a tool that knows more than I do about code most of the time but never gets bored of my silly questions or weird metaphors has been so helpful in helping me build my own tools. Now I think about building my own stuff first before I think about buying something!
ADHD here, and Claude code has been a game changer for me as well. I don’t get sidetracked going lost in documentation loops, suffer decision paralysis, or forget what I’m currently doing or what I need to do next. It’s almost like I’m body doubling with Claude code.
I mostly spend my days administering SaaS tools, and one of my largest frustrations has always been that I didn’t know enough to really build a good plugin or add-on for whatever tool I was struggling with, and I’d find a limited set of good documentation or open source examples to help me out. With my limited time (full time job) and attendant challenges (ADHD & autism + all the fun trauma that comes from that along with being Black, fat and queer), I struggled to ever start anything out of fear of failure or I’d begin a course and get bored because I wasn’t doing anything that captured my imagination & motivation.
Tools like Claude Code, Cursor, and even the Claude app have absolutely changed the game for me. I’m learning more than ever, because even the shitty code that these tools can write is an opportunity for debugging and exploration, but I have something tangible to iterate on. Additionally, I’ve found that Claude is really good at giving me lessons and learning based on an idea I have, and then I have targeted learning I can go do using source docs and tutorials that are immediately relevant to what I’m doing instead of being faced with choice paralysis. Being able to build broken stuff in seconds that I want to get working (a present problem is so much more satisfying than a future one) and having a tool that knows more than I do about code most of the time but never gets bored of my silly questions or weird metaphors has been so helpful in helping me build my own tools. Now I think about building my own stuff first before I think about buying something!