The "Whoa" Moment
I had a moment this week that stopped me cold. I was staring at my terminal window, sipping coffee, with my hands completely off the keyboard. On the screen, lines of code were deleting themselves, rewriting themselves, and saving themselves.
I wasn't typing. I wasn't copy-pasting from a chatbot window. I was just... watching.
I had given a command—"Refactor the navigation bar to be mobile-responsive and commit the changes"—and the machine was just doing it.
For the last two weeks, I have been living with a new breed of AI. These aren't the "Chatbots" we've grown used to. These are Agents. And the difference changes everything.
The Two Flavors of Agency
Anthropic quietly released two tools recently that signal the end of the "Advisor" era and the beginning of the "Doer" era.
Claude Code: This lives in your terminal. It is for developers (or brave tinkerers). It doesn't just suggest code; it reads your file structure, edits the files, runs terminal commands, and manages your Git repository. It is a Junior Engineer that types at 1,000 words per minute.
Cowork: This runs in a desktop sandbox. It is for everyone else. It can open files, browse the web, create spreadsheets, and organize documents. It is an Executive Assistant with infinite patience.
My Claude Code Experience: The 3-Hour Redesign
I decided to throw Claude Code into the deep end: Redesigning this very website (johncderrick.com).
The site was stuck in 2016. In the old world, updating it meant days of wrestling with CSS grids, debugging mobile layouts, and fighting with syntax.
I pointed Claude Code at my repository and started chatting. "Analyze the index.html file. Modernize the hero section with a full-width image and a clean sans-serif font."
It didn't give me a code block to copy. It just said:
Identifying hero section...
Downloading assets...
Editing styles.css...
Done. Check the preview.
The friction of "Context Switching"—moving between the chat window and the code editor—was gone. The AI was the editor. It felt less like coding and more like directing construction.
My Cowork Experience: The Research Assistant
If Claude Code is the engineer, Cowork is the Operations Manager.
I used it to help compile the research for my new eBook, The Small Business CTO's Guide to AI. I dropped a mess of PDF reports, raw notes, and spreadsheets into its sandbox.
I asked it: "Read these files, extract the statistics regarding small business AI adoption, and format them into a comparison table."
Watching it work is fascinating. You see a little "Todo List" appear on the screen.
Reading report_2025.pdf...
Extracting data...
Creating stats_summary.csv...
It didn't hallucinate a summary. It literally opened the files, found the numbers, and built a new file for me. It turned a 2-hour "drudgery" task into a 5-minute review task.
The Bigger Picture
We are crossing a threshold. Generative AI (2023-2025) was about Creation. It helped us write, draw, and think. Agentic AI (2026+) is about Action. It helps us do.
This isn't just "automation." Automation is dumb; it follows a script. This is Agency. It is software that can look at a goal ("Fix the website," "Organize the files") and figure out the steps to get there.
Getting Started
If you are technical, go download Claude Code immediately. Get over the Git hurdle; it's worth it. If you live in documents and spreadsheets, look for the Cowork feature in the Claude desktop app.
The Protocol: The workforce just doubled. You can either compete with the agents, or you can learn to manage them. I suggest the latter.
