Unexpected item in bagging area

Halftone collage of a row of supermarket self-checkouts, with a Claude starburst glowing on the screens

This weekend, I wanted to do a little bit of work on one of my pet projects, apoll.app.

I wanted to get Claude to refresh the design, and lay the groundwork for some new features. It was a Saturday and I had the whole day ahead of me.

But I realised that I had run out of milk for cereal. Nothing can happen before cereal.

I figured I would start Claude on the task anyway, while I succumbed to my hunger. I stood up from my desk, headed out into the real world and walked to the supermarket, a short distance away.

While I was out, Claude sent a message to my phone with a request for clarification.

“Do you want the URL to be /new/question or /new/qa?”

I opened my phone, responded to the request with a tap, and carried on with my shopping. As I approached the queue for the self-checkouts, it buzzed again:

“Which of these styles suits your preference? Swiss/modernist, minimal/tech, functional…“ 1

It follows

Isn’t this all just a bit… weird?

With a £20 subscription, I have a sidekick, available 24x7. It wants to help with everything.

Stepping away from your computer used to mean terminating all work in-flight. You could always kick off a long build and walk away. A build could never tap you on the shoulder in the checkout queue.

But now, your sidekick can follow you around – in the supermarket, on the train, or even at the pub.

Now, admittedly, I choose to install the Claude app, I choose to enable notifications and I choose to respond to them. But that dopamine hit of completing a task is somewhat difficult to resist.

I’m not sure yet if having a persistent sidekick is a gift for human productivity, or if it’s just another leash. Jevons paradox seems to be happening not in a factory in the 1800s, but in my pocket. The easier the work becomes, the more of it I willingly end up doing.

Meanwhile, as Claude was churning away at the next task, I was having to balance a bottle of milk, a newspaper and several other items on those miniature self-checkout scales. Not sure Claude can handle that task, yet.

  1. I chose the ‘Swiss/modernist’ style, by the way. Very nice. ↩