One of the makers of Claude Code tells a story that briefly stopped me. He had shipped a small piece of functionality, there was an edge case in it he had missed, and someone filed the bug. He meant to fix it that evening. But while his own Claude was working, a message came in: hold on, another Claude has already solved this.
He could not make sense of it. He had not spoken to anyone about this feature. So he asked a colleague how it was possible. The answer: that colleague had a routine running that picks up bug reports still unanswered after five hours, posts a fix for them, and merges the easy-to-verify cases itself.
Work that picks itself up
It is not a one-off. The same colleague had earlier set up a routine around a new voice feature: every ticket, every issue, every bug report about it gets picked up automatically, and his Claude proactively posts a fix and pings him the pull request. When that worked, he thought: so much other feedback comes in and just sits there. So he set up a routine for that too.
The maker says it almost in passing: Claude now tells me all the time that someone else has already solved it. There is always another person’s Claude working on it. And it goes beyond bugs. The routines watch every pull request. Responding to review comments, fixing a failing build, doing a rebase. Things you used to have to do yourself. He says: I have not done that in a long time.
The next leap
What sits underneath this he calls a new leap. A while ago the step was: I no longer write the source code, I talk to an agent and it writes it for me. Now the step is: I do not even talk to an agent anymore. I talk to a routine, and it prompts Claude for me.
I run a tiny version of this on this site. A worker fires on a schedule and puts my planned articles live, without me being at the keyboard. Nothing next to a routine that fixes bugs, but the idea is the same: work that carries on while I am not there.
What it does to work
The uncomfortable part and the good part sit close together here. If work can be done before you begin, the question becomes what your role still is. The answer is not less work, but different work. You are no longer the one typing the fix. You are the one deciding what is worth building, and judging whether the fix holds up.
That takes getting used to. But it is also a relief. The dull layer disappears, and what is left is the part where a human actually makes the difference.
Part 4 of a series on how the makers of Claude Code work with it themselves. Earlier: verification is not your unit test and I dropped Plan mode.