Written with LLM assistance.
The interview format is genuine; the prose is lightly tidied from voice notes.
I had lunch with a pal yesterday, and we got onto the subject of why so much technical material is either accurate-but-impenetrable or polished-but-slightly-wrong. It’s a gap I think about a lot, partly because I make videos that try to land in the middle of it and don’t always succeed. The conversation stuck with me on the drive home.
This morning, whilst walking the dog, I tried something a bit silly: I asked Claude (dictating to the mobile app1) to interview me about it. Voice-to-text on one end, an LLM playing journalist on the other, and a black lab setting the pace. What follows is that conversation, lightly tidied – paraphrased in places, verbatim in others. The LLM is the interviewer; I’m the subject.
Written with LLM assistance.
Details at end.
Recently, I’ve been having what can only be described as a very meta relationship with AI1. I’m using Claude Code to help maintain Compiler Explorer, and in a delightful twist of recursive irony, one of the features I’m working on with Claude Code is… a Claude-powered assembly explanation tool. So Claude is helping me build Claude systems that use Claude to improve Claude prompts for Claude explanations. If that made your head spin, or made you worry, you’re not alone.
The idea was simple enough: many people can compile their code and see the resulting assembly, but understanding what that assembly actually does is often where the learning journey stalls. So I’ve been experimenting with an “Explain with Claude” pane that would take your source code, the compiled assembly, and compilation options, then ask Claude to provide a beginner-friendly explanation of what’s happening.
Written with LLM assistance.
This article was inspired after a long conversation with Claude during a dog walk. These are my ideas; but I did use AI to bounce ideas back and forth and help summarise a half-hour chat into a digestible form. I figured I should be up front about that, like I was in my last post.
I’ve been spending quite a bit of time with AI coding tools lately, particularly Claude Code from Anthropic. This has got me thinking about how AI is being perceived in the programming world – specifically the concerns many have about AI displacing entry-level programming jobs.
Written with LLM assistance.
The following code was written by Claude AI. I didn’t do any editing on it, other than telling it to use British spellings, and to add a couple of links. After a few hours of working getting the AI to do all the work I wanted I gave it this prompt:
A real challenge for you: can you write a blog entry now, in the 202504 directory. Make it
Status: Draftso I can take a look at it. Try and fit my tone, but note that “this blog post was written by Claude”. I will subsequently add a human-written prolog and epilog. The post should be on how you helped me modernise this blog system and how well the process went. Pick an appropriate name and title
And this is what it produced:
Matt Godbolt is a C++ developer living in Chicago. He works for Hudson River Trading on super fun but secret things. He is one half of the Two's Complement podcast. Follow him on Mastodon or Bluesky.