By Michael Solomon (and Claude)

I have never written a line of code in my life. I’ve spent well over a decade representing people who write code better than almost anyone on the planet, which is a completely different skill — roughly like being a talent agent for Olympic swimmers and using it to justify never learning to swim.

Then I installed Claude Code on my computer, and I would like to formally apologize to my calendar.

I now describe my current condition as having fallen into a C-hole (Claude Hole). For the uninitiated, that’s a play on a K-hole — the dissociative state where time stops behaving normally, reality gets slippery, and you emerge on the other side a little changed and unsure how long you were gone. The C-hole is exactly the same, except you come out the other side with a working app and a browser history that is 90% documentation.

What This Actually Looks Like

It looks like me, a non-technical person, opening my laptop to answer one email and closing it four hours later having shipped an internal tool and answered zero emails. I now routinely have three or four Claude Code sessions running in separate tabs at once, like a short-order cook who has forgotten he was only supposed to make one omelet.

This morning it was icebreakers. Every week we have a team call, and every week somebody (usually me) scrambles for a decent opening question in the ninety seconds before it starts. Not a crisis. Not even really a problem. Just a small, recurring, low-grade annoyance that I’d nobly accepted as the cost of doing business for roughly a decade.

So instead of accepting it for one more week, I built a thing. You pick a mood, hit generate, and it writes you a fresh icebreaker. It keeps a library of ones we haven’t used yet, so on meeting day you just grab one and mark it “used it.” It keeps a history so we never accidentally ask the team about their dream vacation twice in one quarter. Total build time: less than a cup of coffee. The problem it solved: ninety seconds a week. I regret nothing.

That’s the small one. The bigger ones have been genuinely useful. I’ve been building a sales intelligence system that watches roughly 500 of our past accounts for trigger events — new funding, relevant job postings, acquisitions, news — and delivers a daily digest to our team, with drafted outreach attached. I’ve been building a scout that crawls event sites and business journals for the kind of small, high-caliber rooms where our actual buyers are standing, scores each one against our ideal customer profiles, and drops the ranked list into a spreadsheet once a week without anyone asking it to.

The Real Unlock: Eleven Steps Become Two

Here’s the pattern I keep finding, and it’s the part I’d want any other operator to hear.

Almost every process at our company was, at some point, designed by a person doing it manually, blessed as “how we do it,” and then never spoken of again. You end up with an eleven-step process. A human does all eleven, heroically. Nine of them are copying something from one box into another box, or checking whether a thing happened, or reformatting something so a different system will stop complaining.

None of those nine steps require a human. They never did. They require a pulse and a tolerance for tedium. We just never had a cheap way to remove them, so we called it “the workflow” and gave it to whoever was newest.

Now the eleven-step process is a two-step process. A human does the two steps that actually require judgment — the decision, the relationship, the taste — and the machine does the nine that require only patience. That’s not a marginal improvement. That’s a different job.

The Side Effect Nobody Warns You About

Once you’ve built three of these, something breaks in your brain, and this is the actual C-hole.

When building was expensive, I had a natural filter. An idea had to be worth a real budget and a real engineer’s real weeks before I’d even say it out loud. Ninety-five percent of my ideas died silently, and that was healthy.

That filter is gone. It has left the building. Now every small friction I encounter during the day registers as an open ticket in my head. The intake form is clunky — I could fix that. Our meeting notes never get summarized properly — I could fix that. Onboarding a new client involves seven emails I write from scratch every time like an absolute caveman — I could definitely fix that.

I am not overwhelmed by work. I’m overwhelmed by possibility, which turns out to be a much more annoying sensation, because you can’t complain about it at parties. The bottleneck moved from “can this be built” to “should this be built, and by when, and instead of what, and is it actually eleven at night again.”

The Question I Know You’re Asking

I run a company that represents elite technologists. So: haven’t I just automated myself out of my own thesis? Isn’t this the part where I sheepishly admit the emperor has no clothes?

No. And I say that as someone who braced for a different answer.

Just in my handful of months doing this, it’s become abundantly clear that while I have magic at my fingertips, without expertise to build guardrails, security and general quality control, I would be in very big trouble. Having the 10x talent pool at my fingertips is what makes this process safe and scalable. I’m building things I never could have or should have before, and can only do so with reckless abandon because I have a smart human (AKA a 10xer) keeping an eye on what I am doing in ways that I don’t begin to understand.. 

If anything, this experience has made me a better (human) agent for the engineers we represent. I now understand, in my body rather than in theory, why the specificity in the scoping conversation matters to the degree that it does. I know what it feels like when a thing that seemed simple sprouts three unforeseen dependencies. I have a working vocabulary I didn’t have six months ago.

The ceiling didn’t disappear. I just finally got a good look at it from underneath.

If You Want to Fall In

My advice, such as it is: don’t start with your most important process. Start with the dumbest recurring annoyance you have — the icebreaker-level thing, the one so small you’d be embarrassed to put it in a budget. Build that first, use it for a week, and see how it feels.

Then set a timer, grab some water and buckle in, because I’m serious about the time distortion.

I’ll be over here, quietly re-examining every process in this business under the sudden, uncomfortable suspicion that it’s secretly an eleven-step process wearing a trenchcoat.