One of the runaway bits from Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! is a 90-second skit featuring Paul Rudd sitting businesslike at a PC workstation floating in a futuristic space, directing the computer by conversational, spoken commands to resume iterative work on a long-form creative project.

The skit first aired in the early 2010s, and so part of the humor comes from the perceived impossibility of directing a computer this way. It’s something of a parody of how “computer programming” or otherwise making stuff with computers has long been depicted across countless films and TV shows, and which my friends and I have spent much of our professional lives rolling our eyes at.

And here we are in 2025 and this is what working with a computer feels like to me now—at least with certain kinds of creative projects, especially code-intensive ones. I’m not quite at speaking out loud yet, but I absolutely do get comfortable with my coffee, type out a greeting to Claude Code, and start describing in plain, written English—sometimes with sketched-out illustrations or ASCII-art mockups—what I want to accomplish that session. This work quickly drills down into “4d3d3d3”-type implementation details that would be inscrutable to any observer. On a productive day, the machine and I bat some design concepts and code changes back and forth for several hours, and end with some co-authored Git commits.

And that’s why sometimes when I get into a disagreement with Claude on some matter, I’ll clear my throat and mutter “Nude Tayne” out loud, leaning in and pronouncing it very emphatically.