Claude Runtime Environment

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

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, assume it works, and it does — 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.

Yesterday I took the single-user app and made it multi-user. How? I added half a sentence in English. No compilation. No deployment. No testing. Half a sentence, and it worked. There is zero code involved. It isn't compiling into an assembly language or a programming language. It is executing plain English in the runtime engine that is Claude, by Claude interacting with the user directly.

And it is as useful, maybe more useful, than a lot of software where every edge case is carefully thought through and programmed. Certainly 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, exactly like a JIT compiler. 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 wasteful. Running an LLM as a runtime engine for what could be a simple form is absurd from a compute perspective. But compute only gets faster and cheaper — that's the one thing we know for certain. 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. The user is the debugger.

We are watching programming languages become a pointless intermediate representation. Expect to see proposals for ClaudeVM/OS-based phones with more English-script apps than any app store.