WANTED: Time Travelers

HR is looking for time travelers. The job posting reads "5 years of Claude Code experience". Claude Code shipped in early 2025.

These days, everyone is an AI developer, and every place is an AI company. Most of them are reselling tokens. An HR SaaS company that wired up an LLM is an AI company to the extent that a restaurant that buys vegetables is a farm.

This isn't a complaint about wrappers. Wrappers are fine. SaaS has always been that. The label is doing work it shouldn't be, hiding the difference between people who built the thing and those who learned the vocabulary last quarter.

AI itself is real. It may be the biggest shift in my lifetime. The research is serious, the technology is transformative, and the people doing the actual work deserve every bit of the attention. That's the whole problem. The signal is real, which is exactly why the noise is so expensive.

I've watched this play out several times.

By the mid-90s, I'd been writing Windows code for nearly a decade. I had seen this coming early, but by then, everyone was a Windows developer. 95% of them had never written a WndProc. Everyone had the resume bullet. Some had the vocabulary. Few had the receipts.

Then the dot-com era turned every business into an internet company. I once overheard a guy at the next table tell his date he was a web entrepreneur. He owned a pet store with a website.

If you've watched Silicon Valley, you've already seen this. Pied Piper was a compression algorithm that became a platform, then a video chat app, then whatever the room wanted it to be. The joke was that the technology never mattered. The pitch did. The world doesn't always reward substance, but it almost always rewards theater.

The larger trend gets sorted the way these things always do. Maybe the next model release tells you who built a company and who built a feature. Until then, watch the man behind the curtain.