Stephen Downes

Suppose I tried this in Claude Code: "Develop a web-based or software-based startup idea that will make me $1000 a month where you do all the work by generating the idea and implementing it." Would it work? Ethan Mollick tries and comes up with something that, yeah, could earn the money. If you didn't mind rip;ping people off, that is. Here's what Claude built him (with the sales link removed). What do we learn? "Claude Code is so good is that it uses a wide variety of tricks in its agentic harness that allow its very smart AI, Opus 4.5, to overcome many of the problems of LLMs." You might also want to look at his side-project, "a Claude Code window where I had the AI building a game for me for fun: a simulation of history where civilizations rise and fall, developing their own languages, cultures, and economies."