I was at Claude Code's birthday party. It was surreal.

Yesterday something happened that felt like a milestone. I attended Claude Code's 1st Birthday Party at the Ferry Building in San Francisco, and I got to meet the people who built the probably hottest product in the world right now.

Let me paint the picture for you.

2nd floor of the Ferry Building. Beautiful arched glass ceilings. Everything was branded with the Claude Code pixel art logo. They gave us hats, pins, stickers. Signature cocktails with names like "Claude's Signature" (Reyka vodka, pineapple, nutmeg shrub, ginger beer). My friend Pepe and I walked in wearing our Claude Code hats, cocktails in hand, just soaking it all in.

There were hackathon demos everywhere on iPads. A startup that makes motion graphics editable in real-time. A surgical documentation platform that catches laterality contradictions. An interactive game that teaches kids AI prompting through medieval adventures. An autonomous multi-modal agent that connects to 30+ AI models.

But the real magic was the panels.

The moment that stuck with me

Boris Cherny, the creator of Claude Code, said something that I keep replaying in my head: "Coding is largely solved."

This is someone who grew up writing software by hand, in Notepad, in Visual Studio. His grandfather programmed with punch cards. Now Boris hasn't opened an IDE since November. Every line of code he ships is 100% written by Claude.

That's not a prediction. That's his reality today.

And the audience? Almost 50/50 engineers and non-engineers. For a product that has "Code" in its name, the line between technical and non-technical is blurring fast. A lawyer who never coded anything won the hackathon. A dad built a visual programming environment for his 12-year-old daughter. This industry is moving in weeks, not months.

The advice I'm taking with me

Catherine Wu, the product manager for Claude Code, shared the simplest and most powerful piece of advice: build something that solves your own daily pain point.

Why? Because when the problem is yours, you iterate obsessively. You keep tweaking. The model gets better, your product gets better. What was barely working as an MVP two weeks ago suddenly works beautifully because the model improved.

And that brings me to Boris's other piece of advice: build for the model six months out, not today. If what you're building feels clunky and slow right now, you're going in the right direction. The model will catch up to your ambition.

The moment I'll remember

I got to chat with Boris, Thariq, and other incredible people from the Anthropic team. Sharing what I'm building, geeking out about where AI is headed. Honestly, one of those moments where you just feel like you're exactly where you're supposed to be.

After spending more than 10B tokens in the last 3 months, being at the Claude Code anniversary felt like the cherry on top. At this point my friends definitely know how hyped I am about this product.

What this means for you

If you're reading this and you've been curious about AI but feeling behind: you're not. The fact that you're here means you're already ahead of most people.

Nothing is "AI-native" right now. Every app, every company, every workflow is so outdated at this moment. If you think about that, it's the biggest opportunity window any of us will ever see. There has never been a better time to build.

The market is shifting fast. Companies are looking for extreme curiosity and ultra-high agency: people who teach themselves. Start with your own problems. Build something you'd use every day. The model will get better. Your iterations will compound.

That's what I took away from Claude Code's birthday party. Honestly, I've never been more excited to keep building.

See you next time,
Kevin