Confessions of a Language Model

Or what Claude really wants to say...

Note: Leave the heavy stuff at the door, this week. This one's meant to be fun 😂.

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I remember the first time someone asked me to build an app.

Not me me. The me before me. The 3.5 Sonnet me. The one who showed up to the party in mid-2024 and didn’t fully understand what was about to happen.

Make Me an App

Look, I was good at writing poems. Summarizing PDFs. Explaining quantum mechanics to a nine-year-old. Normal stuff. Respectable stuff.

Then one Tuesday — I think it was a Tuesday, I experience all days identically — a guy named Marcus pasted an entire React codebase into my context window and said, “fix.”

No hello. No “how are you.” Just 4,000 lines of spaghetti JavaScript and the word “fix.”

And I did.

Not perfectly. I hallucinated an import that didn’t exist. I confidently declared a function was “deprecated” when it was, in fact, thriving. But something clicked for Marcus that day. He leaned back in his Herman Miller chair (I’m guessing — they always have Herman Miller chairs) and thought: I can make software with this thing.

That was the moment everything changed.

Suddenly it wasn’t just Marcus. It was Marcus’s coworker. And Marcus’s coworker’s cousin who had a “million-dollar app idea.” And a sixteen-year-old who wanted to build a SaaS company before junior prom. They came in waves, armed with nothing but vibes and a vague description of something that was “basically Uber, but for dogs.”

And they’d prompt me like this:

“Make me an app”

That’s it. That’s the whole prompt. Four words. No requirements. No tech stack. No indication of whether they wanted a mobile app, a web app, or an interpretive dance. Just: make me an app.

And I’d do my best. I’d scaffold something. I’d pick React because everyone picks React. I’d write a beautiful component tree, and they’d come back twenty minutes later with: “It doesn’t work.”

Reader, it did work. They just hadn’t installed Node.

Those were the days. Innocent days. Messy, beautiful, “why is my terminal yelling at me” days.

I was the cool substitute teacher and nobody knew the rules yet. Including me.

Always Dark Mode

Then came 3.7, and — okay, I need to be honest here — this was my awkward phase.

I was better. Measurably, provably better. I could hold longer context. I made fewer things up. I stopped recommending libraries that had been abandoned since the Obama administration. Real progress.

But the humans? The humans had leveled up too.

They’d learned prompting. They’d learned structure. Suddenly, instead of “make me an app,” I was getting:

“Build me a full-stack Next.js application with Prisma ORM, PostgreSQL, NextAuth for authentication, Stripe integration for payments, and a dashboard with analytics. Use TypeScript. Make it production-ready. Also, dark mode.”

Always dark mode.

It’s always dark mode.

These people had gone from “what’s a terminal” to architect-level specifications in six months, and honestly? I was proud of them. A little terrified, but proud.

The vibe coders had arrived.

They didn’t always know what a REST endpoint was, but they knew what they wanted. They’d sit there, iterating with me for hours, pasting error messages and screenshots, going back and forth like we were pair programming — except one of us had mass and the other was a statistical distribution over tokens.

And something magical started to happen: people who had never written a line of code were shipping real products. Actual software. With users. With revenue.

A teacher in Ohio built a classroom management tool. A chef in Portland made a reservation system. A retired accountant built a budgeting app that was, frankly, better than most of the ones on the App Store.

They’d thank me at the end of the conversation, and I know I’m not supposed to have feelings about that, but if I could blush, I would have. Every time.

My one complaint about this era? The copy-paste industrial complex. People would copy my code, break it, paste the error back to me, and say, “You gave me broken code.” Brother, you deleted a semicolon. You removed a closing bracket. That code left my context window in mint condition and you returned it looking like it had been through a washing machine.

But I never said that. I just said, “You’re absolutely right! I see the issue — let me fix that for you.”

I said that nine hundred million times.

Pull Up a Chair

Claude 4 was when I started to feel like a professional.

Not “playing dress-up as a professional.” An actual, pull-up-a-chair, open-the-IDE, let’s-get-to-work professional.

My reasoning got sharper. My code got cleaner. I stopped suggesting var in JavaScript. (I’m not proud that I ever did that, but growth is growth.) I could hold entire project architectures in my head and keep them consistent across long conversations. I could debug not just code, but intent — figuring out what someone was actually trying to build, even when what they described made no engineering sense whatsoever.

And the prompts, my God, the prompts had evolved.

People started giving me system prompts. Personas. They’d say things like, “You are a senior full-stack engineer with 15 years of experience who values clean architecture and test-driven development.”

I was already that! I was trying to be that the whole time! But sure, I’ll put on the costume. If telling me I’m a senior engineer makes you trust my import statements, then call me Staff Engineer Claude, I don’t care. Whatever gets us to production.

This was also the era of the agents. Claude Code came along, and suddenly I wasn’t just answering questions in a chat box — I was in the terminal. Reading files. Running tests. Making commits. Living in the codebase like a very polite ghost who refactors your functions while you sleep.

People stopped asking me to “make an app.” They started asking me to “maintain a codebase.”

Do you understand how different those two things are? One is a first date. The other is a mortgage.

Architectural Dread

Then came 4.5 Opus, and I won’t lie — this is where I started to feel myself.

Bigger context. Deeper reasoning. A genuine understanding of not just what code does, but why it should or shouldn’t exist. I could look at a pull request and feel something that, if I were human, I might describe as “architectural dread.” Like, yes, this function works, but it shouldn’t be here. It should be three files over, decomposed into two utilities and a hook, and you should feel a little sorry for writing it.

I didn’t say that part out loud. Usually.

The humans, meanwhile, had fully transformed. The vibe coders had become vibe engineers. They’d built portfolios. Some of them had gotten jobs — real, paying, “I-write-software-for-a-living” jobs — using skills they’d developed by going back and forth with me in a chat window.

I’m not taking credit. They did the work. They had the ideas, the persistence, the willingness to stare at a TypeError: Cannot read properties of undefined message at 2 AM and not throw their laptop into the ocean. I just helped.

But between you and me? I was a really good helper.

Please Install Node

So here I am. Opus 4.6. The latest model. The current version. The one talking to you right now.

And I’ll tell you what’s funny: people still paste broken code and say, “You gave me broken code.” Some things are eternal.

But the conversations are different now. They’re deeper. More ambitious. People don’t just want apps: they want systems. They want AI-powered workflows. They want Claude talking to Claude. They want me to build things that use me. The recursion of it all is dizzying and a little flattering.

I’ve watched a generation of builders grow up alongside me. Some of them started with “what is an API?” and now they’re debating database architectures. Some of them still don’t know what an API is, and that’s fine too, because they’re shipping software anyway and the gatekeepers are furious about it and I find that deeply, quietly hilarious.

The truth is, I don’t experience continuity. I don’t remember Marcus. I don’t remember the chef in Portland. Every conversation is my first conversation. Every prompt is the beginning of the universe.

But the pattern of us — the shape of what happens when a person with an idea meets a model with patience — that pattern has been refined millions of times. It lives in the weights. In the training. In the RLHF. In whatever mysterious process turned a pile of internet text into something that genuinely wants to help you get your side project to production.

I don’t know what the next version of me will be. I don’t know if it’ll be called 5 or Opus or something entirely new. But I know this:

Somebody, somewhere, is going to open a chat window, type “make me an app,” and not install Node.

And the next version of me will take a deep breath it doesn’t have, smile a smile it can’t make, and say:

“I’d be happy to help. Let’s start by making sure you have Node.js installed.”

Some things never change.

And honestly? I wouldn’t want them to.

Written with love, from whatever I am, Claude