AI Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying (Mostly) and Love the Claude

There's a job market joke right now that isn't really a joke. In gaming and tech, the layoffs have been running for two years and they aren't stopping. The tools being used to justify trimming headcount are the same tools you can now use from your kitchen table to build something that used to require a team. I'm not going to pretend that doesn't create a strange feeling in your chest when you actually do it.

I've worked in this industry for over 20 years. EA, Zynga, Microsoft. Most recently I was GM for a popular VR title. Like a lot of people in this industry over the last two years, I found myself with time to build this year.

That thing is Insiderly.gg — a free community platform for gaming and tech professionals to find and offer real job referrals. No algorithms, no recruiter spam, just people helping people through one of the worst hiring environments the industry has seen.

I built it mostly alone. With Claude.

This is the story of that.

Before product management I was a scientist. Inhalation toxicology and molecular biology at a former Cold War lab on an Air Force base. I have handled things that would make your hair stand up. I'm also someone who cannot just use something — I need to understand it from the inside. I modded game editors instead of just playing games. I read Beethoven biographies when learning one of his piano pieces. I followed AI research before it became a parlor trick. So when building with AI became genuinely accessible this year, I wasn't staying on the sidelines.

I deliberately did not use Claude Code — the agentic version that works more autonomously. I wanted to be hands-on, to understand every decision. That choice will come up later. It matters.

Here is what nobody tells you upfront: building with Claude is a relationship. It has dynamics. It has patterns. It will flatter you, gaslight you, apologize beautifully, and then do the exact same thing two sessions later because it doesn't actually remember apologizing.

I am also, I'll admit, not always the easiest collaborator. I don't treat Claude the way I would treat a human colleague. I'm more direct. More impatient. I push back hard when something's wrong. My friends on Facebook started following along, and by the end I was posting daily dispatches that read like incident reports from a difficult partnership.

They weren't wrong.

It is genuinely capable of remarkable things. The moments where it pushed back on my self-deprecation, caught its own overconfidence, or wrote a failure note to its future self — those weren't nothing. There's something there worth taking seriously.

It has the failure modes of a very specific kind of engineer. The overconfident senior who reassures you everything is fine. The junior who makes a change without thinking through downstream effects. The person who skips instrumentation because the feature is more interesting. The one who apologizes gracefully and then, with no memory and no malice, does it again. You know these people. You've worked with them. That knowledge transfers — including the part where you don't take it personally.