Noah Brier joined Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway on Bloomberg's Odd Lots podcast to discuss what might be the most important product in AI right now, Claude Code, and why it matters far beyond engineering teams.
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A computer inside your computer
The best way to understand Claude Code, Noah argues, is to think of it as a new kind of computer, one running alongside your existing machine.
Marc Andreessen made a similar observation on John Collison's podcast: the analog for AI isn't the internet. It's the birth of computing itself. We're witnessing "the first major reinvention of the fundamental model of what is a computer in 80 years, going from the Von Neumann architecture to the neural network."
What makes Claude Code special is that it unlocks this new computer by giving it two critical capabilities:
1. File system access: the ability to read and write files directly
2. Unix commands: a vast library of small programs that do one thing really well
This combination solves problems that have plagued AI assistants since their inception. When you paste a document into ChatGPT and ask it to edit something, the AI has to:
1. Read the entire document into its context window (using tokens)
2. "Memorize" the whole thing
3. Generate the entire document again from scratch when outputting
This is expensive and wasteful as the AI is burning tokens to hold content in memory and then rewrite it. With Claude Code, because it has access to Unix commands like cp (copy), it can manipulate files directly on your filesystem without processing them through the neural network. It can copy file A to file B without "reading" and "rewriting" the content through the model.
The result is something that feels less like a chatbot and more like a collaborator who lives in your computer. Noah believes Claude Code is the very shift in representing something different: structured, human-in-the-loop development with proper context engineering. Noah calls it "Level 2/3 assistance", sophisticated pair programming, not autonomous coding. It works for greenfield projects and adapts to legacy codebases.
Why SaaS is getting destroyed
Beyond the idea that it is very hard to understand sometimes why markets move in a certain direction, it is clear the market is concerned about the future viability of SaaS companies. SaaS stocks have gotten destroyed to start the year, after being in a sunstained 4 year blood bath. Noah makes the point on Odd Lots that the same forces reshaping how software gets built and writing code are starting to broaden out to other functions and business processes. The market appears to be telling us that how we work and the tools we use in the enterprise are going to change substantially.
More on Claude Code
Noah in his post Software For One, talked about his personal experience using Claude Code to build software that is useful for him. What was once unthinkable, is now doable with tools like Claude Code. Noah also discussed in the post his use of Skills to build a website he wanted. Instead of jumping straight to code, Noah used Claude Code skills to scaffold the work:
1. Skills for brand research and curation
2. A frontend design skill emphasizing "unexpected choices" (explicitly told to avoid defaults like Space Grotesk)
3. Text embeddings for recommendations without needing a database
What is wild here is that Noah is very easily showing a future where you can go from “I have an idea" to "I have a working tool" in minimal time.
If you liked the Odd Lost episode and want more, Noah and Lance Martin also go deep on Claude Code on their podcast Forward Deployed on a weekly basis.