01Title
Bryan · Apr '26
Claude Code · April 2026
Claude Code for Founders
"Claude Coding & Why Your Two-Person Company Is Worth More Than A 50-Person One"
PRESENTED BY
Bryan Altman
@altmbr
01 / 19
02About me
github.com/altmbr
About me · @altmbr
A terrible software engineer now shipping more than most.
Bryan Altman · @altmbr · SF
Bryan Altman · @altmbr · SF
947
contributions · last 12 months
2026
2025
2024
AprMayJunJulAugSepOctNovDecJanFebMar
Eight quiet months. Then something clicked in November '25.
Less
More
02 / 19
03Thesis
You are unbridled
The premise
In the past 5 months, the way to build software has been totally reinvented. The 'mid' engineer is out and you are in.
01
AI (not) slop is the new way to build. Hand-crafted code is out. Teams of 1 are running circles around much larger teams.
02
You can (and have to) build now. It's not so hard. There's really nothing you, as a curious person, can't build or learn.
03
Claude Code isn't just code. Run it in folders. Do research, build presentations, communicate in natural language.
03 / 19
04The stakes
$1B → $30B · 14 months
Anthropic ARR
The fastest revenue ramp we've ever seen.
Series G · Feb '26
$380B
Institutional offer
~$800B · turned down
Secondaries
> $1T
Flipped OpenAI in secondary demand!
AI companies · annualized revenue
Anthropic
OpenAI
xAI · Mistral · Z.ai
Claude Code ARR
$2.5B
Growth Jan–Feb
2×
% Enterprise spend
>50%
04 / 19
05The world has changed
Venn collapsed · solo teams winning
The collapse
PM / eng / design are now the same thing.
→ overlap is getting bigger ←
The receipts
As a result, small teams are thriving.
| Company | Team | Outcome |
|---|---|---|
| Base44 Maor Shlomo | Solo · 6 mo | $80M + earn-out |
| Wave AI Josh Mohrer | Solo | ~$4M ARR |
| Cal AI sold to MyFitnessPal Dec '25 | Teens | $40M ARR |
| Pieter Levels solo portfolio | Solo | ~$3M ARR |
| Medvi Gallagher brothers | 2 people | $401M → $1.8B |
Two people. 4.5× growth in a year. A 50-person company couldn't move fast enough to do this.
05 / 19
06The surface
Four pillars · one engine
Claude, the ecosystem
Code is the engine, Cowork is a wrapper, Design levers up output, Chat is your therapist.
Default
Claude Chat
Where you plan what to do this weekend. Not where this talk lives.
Jan 12, 2026
Claude Cowork
Claude Code for the rest of your work. Same engine, friendlier shell, no terminal. How your non-technical co-founder plugs in. Name is a C+, product is excellent.
Foundation
Claude Code
Terminal / IDE / desktop. Rebuilt April 15 around parallel sessions, same week Opus 4.7 dropped. Q1 ship list reads like a war-era factory poster.
April 17, 2026
Claude Design
Chat-to-design powered by Opus 4.7. Killer feature: handoff bundle drops into Claude Code with ONE instruction. Idea → prototype → production, inside one ecosystem.
06 / 19
07The stack · pt. I
Code is 30% of shipping
Just 3 tools · day 1
80% of what you need for building a production-ready v1 can be done with just 3 tools.
01
Source control
GitHub
Non-negotiable.
gh CLI + GitHub MCP from hour one. If you're not here, you're not on the board.02
Hosting · everything
Railway
Front-end / backend / workers / Postgres / Redis on one canvas. PR preview envs OOTB.
03
All else
Claude
Ships code and orchestrates across GitHub + Railway. The compositor.
07 / 19
08The stack · pt. II
Review · analytics · the rest
Two more tools · another 10%
With just two more tools get you to 90%.
04
Code review
Greptile · or CodeRabbit
Greptile — indexes codebase as a graph. 82% bug catch (own bench) / 45% (3rd-party). Cross-file + security regressions. More FPs than CodeRabbit but >> missed bugs.
CodeRabbit — widest adoption, free tier, in-IDE. ~44% catch, ~2 FPs. More precise, misses cross-file.
CodeRabbit — widest adoption, free tier, in-IDE. ~44% catch, ~2 FPs. More precise, misses cross-file.
05
Analytics
PostHog
Replaces Mixpanel + LaunchDarkly + Sentry + Hotjar. 1M events/mo free. MCP so Claude reads your metrics.
Session replay is what most of you are sleeping on — shortest path to fixing stuck onboarding.
Session replay is what most of you are sleeping on — shortest path to fixing stuck onboarding.
+ the rest · wire with Claude in <10 min each
Auth Clerk / Supabase
Email Resend / Loops
Payments Stripe
Queues Inngest / Trigger
Errors Sentry
AI obs PostHog LLM
DNS Cloudflare
E2E Playwright
08 / 19
09Context rot
1M tokens ≠ smarter at hour three
The biggest Claude Code problem nobody names
Don't be stupid. Manage your context, or Claude will be dumb for you.
Managing what's in its head is the highest-ROI skill after "write a good prompt." Here's the cheat sheet:
| When you're here… | Do this |
|---|---|
| Related follow-up, same working set | Keep going |
| Brand new task | /clear — start fresh |
| Went down the wrong path, same task | /rewind (or double-tap Esc) |
| Same task, window heavy | /compact (lossy summary) |
| Captured something worth keeping | Write to CLAUDE.md before /clear |
09 / 19
10Foundational 4 skills
Install today
Four compounding habits · install today
The four most important skills.
-
01CLAUDE.md ImproverAuto-updates CLAUDE.md after each feature. Bug patterns, conventions, gotchas codified. Single highest-compounding habit in this talk. Nothing else close.
-
02Code SimplifierThe plugin nobody installs and everybody needs. Collapses duplication, kills premature abstractions. Saves hundreds of lines per feature.
-
03Skill CreatorBuild your own in 20–30 min. The meta-unlock. Every time you explain the same process twice, turn it into a skill. Your 10th skill compounds with your 1st.
-
04SuperpowersAnthropic's process skills kit — brainstorming, TDD, systematic debugging, subagent-driven-dev, git-worktrees. Closest thing to hiring a staff eng to sit behind you.
10 / 19
11The lifecycle · flywheel
Nine stages · one loop
A good process is the alpha · it compounds
Each turn accelerates the next. The 9 steps along the path to scalable feature shipping with Claude Code.
00
Spec · Chat · PRD skill →
/docs01
Plan ·
/plan, read-only first02
Build · Put Claude to work!
03
Simplify · Step nobody does -> code simplifer plugin
04
Test · Unit testing + Chrome extension for QA
05
Update CLAUDE.md · use the skill
06
PR · Push and fix issues Greptile + Railway flag
07
Merge · To main
08
Review · PostHog + user feedback
11 / 19
12Non-obvious · 01 / 04
Folders, not repos
Non-obvious #01 · the realization
Open Claude in any folder,
not just a repo.
Things that are not code
Health · accounting · coaching · colleague feedback · account management · reading notes · your dog's vet records.
The move
Store folder as a private GitHub repo → access from Claude Mobile anywhere. Same agentic engine, every domain of your life.
12 / 19
13Non-obvious · 02 / 04
Crons compound
Scheduled Tasks · Q1 2026
Wire a recurring agent once, earn value every week forever.
$ claude cron list
MON 06:00 competitive-research.skill # net-new funding / launches
MON 06:15 market-intel.skill # 3 categories I'm tracking
MON 08:00 metrics-review.skill # PostHog → plain-English digest
DAILY 07:30 inbox-triage.skill # only surface replies I must write
FRI 17:00 anthropic-ship-list.skill # what shipped this week in Code
# build once → compounds · runs while you are skiing
13 / 19
14Non-obvious · 03 / 04
Research is the killer use
Non-obvious #03 · the killer use
Research is the killer use of Claude.
The workflow
Custom Research skill → minimal prompt → deep-depth output. Walk into meetings knowing the landscape better than the person who built the thing.
If you're still Googling 15 minutes before a call, you are the bottleneck.
Limit case
Paul Conyngham used ChatGPT + AlphaFold to design a personalized mRNA cancer vaccine for his Staffie, Rosie.
~75%
tumor shrinkage in three months
14 / 19
15Non-obvious · 04 / 04
Desk is a 2019 artifact
Shipping latency → zero
Mobile + voice are incredible ways to ship. Sit at your desk and Wispr to your agents, or improve your app between sets at the gym.
Claude Code · from your phone
A
Ship without a laptop
Open Claude Code on mobile. Changes run in the cloud. Pushes to GitHub from anywhere.
You're in an Uber, a PR is opening.
You're on a chairlift, work is shipping.
You're on a chairlift, work is shipping.
Voice · 3–5× faster than typing
B
Desktop + mobile. Learns your vocabulary, your people's names.
I now sit at home whispering to my agents. Faintly absurd. Also the fastest I've ever moved.