A staff engineer's journey with Claude Code

I'd like to share my journey with Claude (not code).

I fed Claude a copy of everything I've ever written on Hacker News. Then I asked it to generate an essay that sounds like me.

Out of five paragraphs I had to change one sentence. Everything else sounded exactly as I would have written it.

It was scary good.

I'm doing a project in a codebase I'm not familiar with in a language I don't really know, and Claude Code has been amazing at _explaining_ thing to me. "Who calls this function," "how is this generated," etc. etc.

I'm not comfortable using it to generate code for this project, but I can absolutely see using it to generate code for a project I'm familiar with in a language I know well.

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn co-founder, has gone whole hog on that idea and has a literal AI clone of himself, trained on all his writings, videos and audio interviews -- complete with AI-generated deep-fake visuals and cloned voice:

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/reidhoffman_can-talking-with-...

I've watched a handful of videos with this "digital twin", and I don't know how much post-processing has gone into them, but it is scary accurate. And this was a year+ ago.