Claude Runtime Environment

I'm having a wild experience right now.

I built a Claude Cowork skill for fundraising. It's a script that helps founders navigate the fundraising process step by step. Hundreds of founders are now in a WhatsApp group giving me feedback on it. Demand is huge.

Here's the thing. When they give me feedback, I don't change any code. I don't update a spec and regenerate code. I change a few words of plain English in the skill script. I just assume it works. And it does. It works perfectly and nimbly for everyone.

I also know that if there is a problem, Claude will just ask the user how to fix it, and the user will fix it on the spot. The app is self-healing.

Think about how wild this is:

1. There is zero code involved.
2. It isn't even compiling into an assembly language or a programming language.
3. It is simply executing plain English in the runtime engine that is Claude, by Claude interacting with the user directly.

Yesterday I took the app that works for a single user and made it multi-user. How? I added half a sentence in English. No compilation. No deployment. No testing. Half a sentence.

And it is as useful, maybe more useful, than a lot of software where every edge case is carefully thought through and programmed. Certainly a lot more resilient and self-updating. If something breaks, Claude figures it out with the user in real time. No stack trace. No bug report. No sprint planning. Just a conversation.

It even writes Google Sheets Apps Script code on the fly when it needs to, just like a JIT compiler would. Need a formula? Need a macro? Claude writes the code at the moment it's needed, executes it, and moves on. Just in time.

Yes, it's super wasteful. Running an LLM as a runtime engine for what could be a simple form is absurd from a compute perspective. But it will only get faster and cheaper. That's the one thing we know for certain about compute.

So I don't see why we would even write code anymore in many cases. Or even compile to code. Claude is the runtime engine. Plain English is the programming language. And the user is the debugger.

We are watching programming languages become a pointless intermediate representation.

Expect to see soon proposals for ClaudeVM/OS-based phones with more English-script apps than any app store.