A developer friend of mine viewed my new website code, written by Claude Code. She immediately questioned its architecture. “Why like this and not like that?” kind of questions. "Why Next.js and Tailwind instead of Astro with Vanilla CSS?"

“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s not me, it’s him.”

I am a non-technical PM. I don’t write or read code. For many years this was the topic and source of my imposter syndrome. A strong sense that I should write and read code. That it would make me a better PM.

But I don’t. I learned to work with it. I understand the craft, the process, what’s involved, the tradeoffs. I can carry a conversation and challenge my dev team, but I don’t write or read code. I don’t think it’s essential to do a good PM work, and I'm done apologising for it.

So my first instinct, when my friend asked me about why the code like this and not like this, was to disengage. Who cares, I thought. I don’t care about that.

As a PM I am conscious about when and about what to pick my fights. For a personal, mostly static website, I would not have challenged my dev team about the choices they made. But this was not a developers team. This was Claude code.

Why did I hesitate asking Claude?

So I did ask Claude why like this and not like that and got back a long and very detailed answer which I shared with my friend, who was not convinced and did not agree with the arguments Claude made.

“Tell him to rewrite with the following stack,” she said. “Hmmm,” I said. “I don’t want to hurt his feelings,” I said. “Make him insecure.” “The opposite!” she said, “you should challenge him all the time!”

“So what do I get from working with him, I can argue with my dev team,” I said, “what is the advantage then?”

She recommended opening a new session and asking him to review the work the other session did. I felt uncomfortable doing it, as if I am pitting him against himself. I don’t want a machine war against humans to start in my session, after all. But I did it and the new session agreed with her.

“Tell him to change,” she said. “Why are you really not telling him to change?” She challenged me.

Why indeed?

So I asked Claude to change, made myself a cup of coffee, sat back and watched my tokens fly away as he wrote my site yet again. Why indeed? And why am I thinking of him as HIM? He is not HIM.

I felt the limitation of my imagination, as I remembered the wonderful book by Stanisław Lem, Solaris: "We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors."

I can't imagine any type of relationship other than with humans, so I put all my emotional baggage on IT. I am anthropomorphizing Claude Code.

("Anthropomorphizing: An interpretation of what is not human or personal in terms of human or personal characteristics." - Merriam-Webster dictionary)