Claude Code, From the Misleading Name to Training Your Own Dragon
Claude Code can act as a personalised AI agent for any knowledge worker, learning your context over time, and going far beyond generating text.
Claude Code can act as a personalised AI agent for any knowledge worker, learning your context over time, and going far beyond generating text.
The worst thing about Claude Code? The name; it sounds like something only built for developers. If you've thought that too, you're missing out.
This morning I told Claude Code: "turn this Google Sheet into a dashboard for client A." It recognised the client, pulled the CSV from my Google Drive, applied our brand guidelines, and saved a finished dashboard in the right folder. Fifteen minutes and I just watched it happen!
As AI Innovation Lead, my work is strategy, decision-making, and shaping ideas. Not writing code. And yet I'm one of the heaviest Claude Code users at ThirdEye.
When I suggest Claude Code to people, the response is almost always: "But that's for developers, right?"
That's exactly why so many knowledge workers skip past it. I love how Simon Willison describes it; a general agent disguised as a developer tool. The coding ability is simply the muscle that lets it actually do things on a computer, and 'doing things on a computer' is much wider than 'writing code'. It means drafting a proposal in your voice, or cross-referencing your calendar against your priorities to surface what you've been avoiding.
Anthropic has recognised this themselves, renaming the SDK, launching Claude Cowork, and adding a Claude Code tab to the desktop app that requires no terminal or IDE. If you want to go beyond simple chats, now is the time.
Regular chat tools like ChatGPT or Claude.ai are wild dragons. Powerful, but they don't know you. Every session, you start from scratch. They offer words but won't act, then fly off.
Claude Code is the process of taming that dragon. You build it a den; an organised folder with text files that act as its map and rulebook. You teach it your voice and your context so it becomes your dragon. It knows that when you say "good morning", you mean "fetch me today's news".
It’s easier than you think:
Download a code editor. (VS Code is the common choice and it's free)
Install the Claude Code extension from the VS Code marketplace
Create a new empty folder somewhere on your computer. This is the den
Open the folder in VS Code
Open Claude Code in the side panel and start your "dragon training" in plain English
No coding knowledge needed. If you'd rather skip the code editor, lighter options exist: Projects inside Claude.ai adds memory and connects to Gmail, Slack, and Drive. Cowork lets Claude modify your local files with minimal setup. The Claude Code tab in the desktop app is a friendlier wrapper, still maturing but improving fast.
'Wait and see' is the wrong strategy. The intuition of working with AI accumulates over time, and the skill gap only gets harder to close. The Anthropic Academy is a great place to begin.
-- Ka Man Lok
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