Month: July 2025

Magic Moments ✨

When AI models start asking each other for help without being told to, something magical happens.

One of the cool aspects of having a dozen different MCP servers connected to Claude are the random serendipitous interactions that emerge.

Yesterday, I was working on a little programming project. Opus 4 was chugging along nicely, reading files on my Mac, deciding how to implement something, checking data against a source I was working on. The usual AI assistant stuff, really.

Then I noticed something unexpected in the logs. Claude had fired a call to the OpenAI MCP server (that little experiment I did to allow Claude to ask questions to OpenAI models). I paused to see what was happening.

Claude had asked GPT-4o how to read the end of a file. Nothing groundbreaking — just a simple technical question. GPT-4o provided an answer, and the process continued seamlessly. If I hadn’t been paying attention to the logs, I would have missed it entirely.

Here’s the thing: I’m fairly certain this information exists in Opus 4’s knowledge base. It’s not like reading the tail of a file is some obscure programming technique. But for some reason, in that moment, Claude decided it wanted a second opinion. Or perhaps it needed some comfort from another model?

It felt a little magic.

If you can explain it, it’s solved.

An old friend with many years of software development experience yesterday reminded me of the old saying: “if you can explain a problem, it is half solved”.

Chatting about it we agreed that even with the current generation of AI tools to support software development, we are getting closer and closer to “if you can explain it, it is solved!”.

The new challenge is going to be getting the next generation of software developers off the ground. More and more the jobs performed by junior developers will be taken on by AI agents, making it harder for young people to kickstart their career.

We need more than ever skilled professionals who can understand the complexity of the world and know how to use AI to solve difficult problems. The apprenticeship model is broken. We are building a new one.