Awe Followed by Sadness

What it actually feels like to work at the frontier

There’s a quote in a recent Wall Street Journal piece that I haven’t been able to shake.

Users of Claude’s Cowork feature described “a feeling of awe followed by sadness at the realization that the program could easily replicate expertise they had built up over an entire career.”

Awe followed by sadness. That’s not a product review. That’s an emotional arc.

The slot machine

The same article profiles Malte Ubl, chief technology officer at Vercel. He used Claude Code to complete a complex project in one week that would have taken him about a year without AI.

Read that again. One week versus one year.

Ubl spent ten hours a day on his vacation building software. He described each successful run as giving him “an endorphin rush akin to playing a Vegas slot machine.”

There’s something slightly manic in that image. The CTO of a major tech company, on holiday, pulling the lever over and over, chasing the rush of watching something work that shouldn’t work yet.

This is the capability overhang we’ve been talking about on the show — but felt from the inside. Not as a statistic about productivity gains, but as an experience. The discovery that the tools already do more than you assumed they could. The compulsion to keep pushing, keep testing, keep finding out where the ceiling actually is.

The sadness part

But then there’s the other half of that emotional arc. The sadness.

I’ve heard versions of this from people across different fields. Developers who watched Claude produce in minutes what used to take them days. Writers who saw it nail a tone they’d spent years developing. Analysts who fed it data and received back insights they would have been proud to present as their own.

The awe is real. But so is the disorientation.

What does it mean to have a skill if a tool can replicate it? What does expertise become when the years of accumulated knowledge can be approximated by something that learned it differently, faster, without the struggle that made it feel earned?

These aren’t abstract questions. They’re what people are actually feeling, right now, as they discover what Claude can do.

The part nobody talks about

Here’s what I notice doesn’t get discussed much: how lonely this discovery can be.

If you’re deep in the Claude ecosystem — building with it, thinking about it, pushing its limits — you’re probably surrounded by people doing the same thing. The awe is shared. The excitement feeds on itself.

But most people aren’t there yet. Most of the people you know — friends, colleagues, family — are still in the “it’s a chatbot, right?” stage. Or the “I tried it once and it hallucinated” stage. Or the “I don’t trust it” stage.

Which means the transformation you’re experiencing doesn’t have a lot of witnesses.

You’re one week versus one year. And the people around you are still measuring in the old units.

That gap is its own kind of sadness. Not grief for a skill made obsolete, but the isolation of seeing something others can’t see yet.

What I’m not saying

I’m not saying the sadness should stop us. The Vercel CTO didn’t stop. He kept pulling the lever, kept chasing the rush, shipped the project in a week.

And I don’t think the awe and sadness are in opposition. They’re both true at once. You can be genuinely amazed by what these tools can do and genuinely unsettled by what that means.

What I’m pushing back against is the expectation that we should feel only one thing.

The hype cycle wants pure enthusiasm. The backlash wants pure skepticism. Neither makes room for the actual emotional texture of living through this — which is complicated, contradictory, and worth taking seriously.

Why this matters for About Claude

This show exists because I think there’s a gap between the headlines and the lived reality.

The headlines give you capability announcements, benchmark scores, funding rounds. The lived reality is a CTO on vacation, chasing the slot machine high. It’s a professional watching their expertise get replicated and not knowing what to feel.

I want to make space for that. Not to dwell in it, but to acknowledge it.

Because if we’re going to navigate this well — as individuals, as a workforce, as a society — we need to start with what’s actually happening. Not the press releases. Not the panic. The real experience of working alongside AI that’s getting better faster than we expected.

Awe followed by sadness. Both true. Worth sitting with.

The Wall Street Journal piece that prompted this essay: Anthropic’s Claude Code