Coding - me & Claude pt 7

Has Claude broken certain types of business models, or were the models always broken and only easier to exploit with Claude?

I needed a simple 'contact us' form and Claude recommended a free-tier, online form-builder service. The implementation was quick and easy. So far, so good.

After the initial implementation, I wanted to redirect to a custom 'thank you' page aligned to the design of the rest of the site. This feature was not available on the free-tier, but Claude had a solution.

Once I'd explained the situation, Claude quickly added an event listener to the submit button, prevented the event bubbling up, submitted the form and handled the redirection. Nothing revolutionary but effective.

Why is this different?

• Claude is single-mindedly focused on delivering the solution

  
  

• Claude isn't worried about the ethics of subverting someone else's business model - it just didn't occur because it wasn't included as a boundary condition

  
  

• A developer could have written that same workaround but now non-experts can do it with speed and confidence.

Without a human in the loop, this would have been accepted and merged into the tech stack.

Maybe the business model is broken. If a feature can be replicated with a few lines of code, it probably wasn’t strong pricing leverage to begin with.

Maybe the company needs to re-evaluate what forms part of a premium service: like spam filters, NLP and AI-powered triaging.

A lot of our profession is based on goodwill: building packages for reuse, open-source projects with collaborators, dev tools, bug bounty programmes.

It is a useful reminder that Claude is a tool despite it's chatty interface. And that we, in my opinion, need to stay in the loop.

#ClaudeCode