033 AI for Operators

You Should Try Claude Code (Today), 3 new AI Strategy roles, 10 links

February 11, 2026

Hi there,

Welcome back to AI for Operators. Here’s what we’ve got for you this week:

  • The Essay: You Should Try Claude Code - Today
  • The Jobs: 3 AI strategy roles
  • The Links: 10 curated reads
  • The Events: 2 upcoming

You Should Try Claude Code - Today

By Tom Guthrie

I've interviewed several operators who have sworn by the capabilities of Claude Code to create a "second brain" or "personal knowledge management" system. So, trying it out has been on my to do list for a while now.

Somehow, though, it never made it to the top of that list. Like (probably) many of you, I was skeptical about needing a 'second brain'. I was a bit intimidated by the seemingly technical setup. And I was busy. So, I put it off. Until last week.

After reading a few hundred posts about its revolutionary capabilities, I tracked down Jasmine Sun's piece Claude Code for Dummies and decided to commit an afternoon to testing it out. Within 20 minutes, I was up and running in the terminal.

By minute 30, I was pretty sure that this was going to change everything about how I worked and how the world worked.

By that weekend, I (with Claude) had built a fully functioning web app for a local government use case that my dad had been talking to me about. At the same time, Claude built my company's board deck to 90%+ done, gave me great advice about a tricky personnel situation, and built custom scripts to automate two tasks. All fo ra few dollars of credits.

Since then, I've been documenting all of my work and trying to automate as much as possible. Some of it takes a bit of back and forth, including asking Claude to explain what it means, but I haven't hit a single technical roadblock yet and the output is as good as all but the very best colleagues I've had, at least on the tasks that I've worked on.

It's not hard. It's not that expensive. It's already changing everything. If you've been waiting for a push to check it out, here's your push. If your company doesn't allow it, try it out on your personal computer. Don't delay.

Some AI strategy and implementation roles that caught our eye:

  • San Francisco County, CA
  • Comp: $176,000 - $220,000
  • Seattle, WA
  • Comp: $207,500 - $290,500
  • San Francisco Bay Area
  • Comp: $180,000 - $250,000

Practical

  • Minions: Stripe’s one-shot, end-to-end coding agents — Stripe's internal coding agents now autonomously write complete pull requests that account for over 1,000 weekly merges, offering a detailed look at how a major tech company is operationalizing AI to handle end-to-end development work at scale.
  • How does ClawdBot/MoltBot work? A free video course for non-technical product people — Tal Raviv breaks down the technical mechanics behind Anthropic's new computer-use agents in a free video course designed specifically for product managers who need to understand what's happening under the hood without getting lost in the weeds. Perfect for operators evaluating autonomous agents who want to speak credibly with their engineering teams about feasibility and limitations.
  • Compound Engineering: Make Every Unit of Work Compound Into the Next — Every's guide to structuring tasks that build momentum for future features and fixes.
  • The Complete Guide to Building Skills for Claude — Anthropic's new guide walks through their framework for creating reusable "skills" (structured prompts with examples) that can dramatically improve Claude's consistency on specific business tasks. A practical read if you're tired of copy-pasting the same instructions into ChatGPT and want to build more reliable AI workflows.

Perspectives

  • The Anthropic Hive Mind — Steve Yegge makes a compelling case that Claude's multi-model architecture creates something uniquely powerful: different specialized models working together means you get both speed and intelligence depending on your task. For operators evaluating AI tools, this "hive mind" approach explains why Claude often feels more capable than its spec sheet suggests—you're actually tapping into an ensemble of models optimized for different use cases.
  • Claude Code vs. Claude Cowork — Confused about the differences between Claude Code and Cowork? Here's a quick guide.

News

  • Chrome WebMCP launching soon — An agent-first experience is coming to Chrome, making it even easier for AI to access internet content.
  • Claude Opus 4.6 — Anthropic just released Claude Opus 4.6, which shows significant improvements in agentic tasks like coding, computer use, and tool use—capabilities that matter if you're building AI workflows into your operations. The benchmarks show wide margins over competitors, making this a solid option for teams looking to automate complex, multi-step business processes.
  • Operate AI coworkers on a single enterprise platform — OpenAI's new Frontier platform lets businesses deploy and manage multiple AI agents from a unified dashboard, making it easier to orchestrate AI coworkers across different workflows without juggling separate tools. If you're scaling beyond one-off AI experiments, this centralized approach could dramatically simplify governance, monitoring, and integration across your operations.
  • The Politics of AI — A fascinating NBER working paper explores how AI systems trained on human-generated data inevitably absorb and reflect political biases, with significant implications for operators deploying AI in decision-making processes. Understanding these embedded political dimensions is crucial for building fair, transparent AI systems that align with your organization's values.
  • When to buy and when to DIY — A practical workshop with Clarinet co-founder Diane Sadowski-Joseph on when to build interanl tools with AI and when it's better to buy off the shelf — Feb 26, 3pm ET
  • How AI Agents Actually Get Work Done — How do agentic workflows actually operate in practice? This workshop will show you. — March 26, 1pm ET

Thanks for reading,
Tom Guthrie