Talking Claude Code at a Silicon Valley Alumni Gathering: What Matters Is How It Changes Work

At today’s Silicon Valley alumni “Ask a Question” AI meet-up, what I wanted to talk about wasn’t how cool Claude Code is, but how it actually re-slices real work.

Author: Koutian Wu; GitHub: ktwu01

I’ve organized this sharing into a Claude Code Demo, the core of which was laying open for alumni the scenarios of how I usually use Claude Code to write code, organize knowledge, invoke skills, and do browser Computer Use.

The interesting part is that it wasn’t carefully polished over several days beforehand. I spent 15 minutes on the spot, while the first speaker Senior Colleague Luo Youzhi was sharing Claude Code theory, to prepare the scenarios and demo content I would present later.

That’s very Claude Code.

At the start I directly admitted one thing: I’m still stacking several vibe coding stacks at once, Cursor’s student quota plus the Gemini CLI and the like often aren’t even enough to burn through. I wrote a more detailed IDE comparison about this before, covering the personalities of Cursor, Kiro, and Antigravity; you can browse through it in this vibe coding IDE brief.

In the sharing I covered five scenarios I genuinely use in daily life. The first was Claude Code in the terminal, going from reading the repo to running tests, git commit, then tossing out a PR with gh pr create. The second was folding repetitive processes into Claude Code Skills, so labels like buffett-check, hedge-review, and redteam can be pulled up with one click, and aligning the team’s messaging gets much easier.

The remaining scenes spread out toward the business side: internal knowledge retrieval at TaciteAI, browser-extension Computer Use (e.g., that repetitive clicking on LinkedIn), and the path in the KW-PORTFOLIO repo from YAML positions plus skills to outputting an HTML dashboard. Each scenario tried to explain clearly what problem it solves, not just show off a single feature.

The takeaway people came away with was actually unanimous: Claude Code really does push efficiency up. Not the kind of efficiency improvement that looks beautiful in a PPT, but the very concrete efficiency you watch live as it reads files, changes things, generates pages, and organizes content.

But alum Zhao Xin made a good point too: capitalists won’t let everyone go play after efficiency improves; they’ll take 100% efficiency gains and turn them into 140% more workload.

I think that judgment is quite real, and quite jarring.

Frankly, this sharing wasn’t a tutorial, nor a full product roadshow; it was simply laying “how I usually get work done with Claude” on the table. If you’re also hopping between multiple IDEs and multiple CLIs hunting for quota, first read that IDE comparison above, then open this demo, and maybe it’ll save you a few rounds of “explaining to others what I’m doing.”

Demo link here: Claude Code Demo.