Wednesday night. Men’s group. Seven guys in a circle, coffee getting cold.
Somebody asked what I’ve been working on. I opened my laptop.
“As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.” Proverbs 27:17. That’s the verse our group is named after, and it’s the verse I kept thinking about while I demoed Claude Code to a bunch of guys who mostly don’t write software.
I showed them my personal assistant. The one that reads my email, manages my tasks, journals with me, publishes my blog. I typed /pagoodmorning and the terminal scrolled with today’s calendar, open tasks, flagged emails, overnight automation logs. Guys leaned in.
Then I showed them the blog. Every post I’ve published in the last month was either drafted or cleaned up by the thing sitting on my screen. I pulled up the published index. “One Character, Twenty-One Nights.” “Who Killed My PC.” “Eight Timers and a SoundCloud Link.” I wrote those. Claude helped.
Somebody asked the question I was waiting for: “Is that cheating?”
Good question. I’ve been sitting with that one for months.
Here’s where I landed. A carpenter doesn’t swing the hammer with his teeth because power tools are cheating. A writer doesn’t refuse spellcheck because it’s cheating. The tool is a tool. The voice has to be mine. The judgment has to be mine. The work that matters, what I choose to build, who I’m building it for, why, that’s still mine. Claude just cuts the friction between the idea and the thing.
What surprised me wasn’t the tech. It was watching the guys react. One of them is a pastor. One runs a small business. One is in sales. Every single person in that room had a use case within ninety seconds of seeing it work. The pastor wanted help organizing sermon notes. The small business guy wanted to automate invoices. Sales guy wanted CRM follow-ups drafted for him.
None of them are going to become developers. All of them are going to use this.
That’s the thing I keep trying to tell people who haven’t sat down with Claude yet. This isn’t a dev tool anymore. It’s a literacy thing. The guys who figure out how to talk to these tools are going to pull ahead of the guys who don’t, same way the guys who figured out email pulled ahead of the guys who didn’t.
Iron sharpens iron. Tonight that looked like seven guys passing a laptop around and asking better questions.
I drove home thinking about Proverbs again. The verse doesn’t say iron makes iron sharper by being softer, or by agreeing with it, or by getting out of the way. It sharpens by contact. By friction. By showing up.
That’s what men’s group is. That’s what the tool is too, if you use it right. Not a replacement for the work. A thing that shows up, pushes back, and makes the edge cleaner.