Understanding is the new bottleneck

Another example. I was migrating my personal website from one framework to another, and Claude wrote a script that did it. But it was very hard to review: I wasn't familiar with the new framework, and all I could say was “I guess that looks about right.”

So I asked Claude to make me a video game — a command center where I do the port myself, step by step, watching the visible effects and the file tree evolve. It produced a UI where I click buttons to run the port step by step, with my old site and new site running side by side.

In this command center I watched the new site come to life incrementally. That left me with a similar understanding to doing it by hand — but much faster, because the whole experience was laid out for me.