Just one more Claude Code session I said to myself. The context switching I had been doing for the last three hours was a harrowing, dehumanising experience but the efficiency benefits could not be ignored. There was just that one thing I said I was going to do earlier in the week that I had forgotten about, and so it was time to spin up just one more session to get the work started.

But I misjudged my own capacities. I felt an uncomfortable warmth at the back of my head which soon rose to a boil and suddenly my entire brain exploded into a million pieces, plastering itself against the walls in my bedroom, where I had been lying with my laptop.

You wouldn’t have known it from Slack, where I still appeared online, and was still communicating with colleagues via Claude’s Slack integration. I was even continuing to raise pull requests. But those pull requests never got merged, because my CLAUDE.md forbid Claude from merging PRs itself and historically I would only merge a PR if my brain was contained within my skull, and as I said above, it was now mostly outside of my skull, or more accurately, mixed up with fragments of my skull from the blast.

A larger and larger number of yellow dots started appearing against chat sessions in the Claude desktop app, but there was nobody there to check what Claude was asking because although my hands remained on the keyboard and the screen continued facing where my head had been, my head was no longer there because of that explosion I mentioned earlier.

Looking back on my life, it occurs to me that much of my time was spent combining context, compute, and basic input and output, to complete tasks, from choosing what to eat for breakfast to solving some complex coding conundrum. It was only once I started using Claude that I realised how mundane and fungible this capacity was. Humans have a habit of explaining the human brain by analogising to the most advanced technology of the time (which included clocks at one point) so I’m aware that I’m falling for that exact trap right now by analogising to an LLM but damn, it’s a strange feeling to think that I now have a huge hole where my head is supposed to be because I took that basic capacity and dialled it to eleven.

So yeah, I’m feeling a little down right now because I’m a guy without a head, right at the point when this AI stuff is expected to start making life a whole lot more enjoyable.