#tech

The race to build AI coding assistants is heating up, and it's starting to feel less like science fiction and more like watching your extremely enthusiastic intern gradually become competent.

Claude Code

, the tool you might be using to read this, represents the latest evolution in what happens when you give AI the ability to write, read, and run code. The basics: point it at a codebase, ask it to implement a feature, and watch it navigate files, make edits, run tests, and even commit changes to Git. It's impressive, occasionally magical, and sometimes hilariously wrong.

The real AI breakthrough nobody's talking about isn't ChatGPT or image generation—it's how artificial intelligence is getting

absurdly cheap

to run. And that changes everything.

The cloud. We toss that word around like everyone knows what it means, but let me be honest—for the longest time, even I found it a bit nebulous. Is it actual clouds? Some magical floating storage in the sky? Not quite. The cloud is just

someone else's computer

. A very powerful, very distant computer that you're renting time on.

Every few months, another company announces they've "cracked" general artificial intelligence. The headlines scream breakthrough. The demos look magical. And then you try to use it for actual work, and it confidently tells you that bears are actually a type of fish.

Here's what's actually happening: we're witnessing an explosion in

narrow AI

The big AI story this week isn't another chatbot—it's

Anthropic's new "extended thinking" feature

rolling out to Claude. But here's what most headlines are missing: this isn't about making AI smarter. It's about making the process visible.