Goodnight, Claude (en Inglés) - Santini, Fabio

I loved the nights at the keyboard, the light in the room changing without my noticing. But behind all those nights there was one thing that really kept me awake: the moment an idea takes shape in your head, becomes a system, solves a problem. That almost magical sensation of a machine that a few minutes earlier could do nothing at all, starting to do exactly what you had imagined.

That is what, my whole life, I have called writing software.

Forty years of craft inside a single gesture.

In February 2025 that gesture changed.

Claude Code arrived.

Most people saw a new tool. I saw something else: the first real discontinuity in how software gets built since the craft has existed. For the first time it was not the language changing. Not the IDE. Not the framework. It was the ritual.

The idea came to me in the air, on the way to Cairo, reading a thriller bought at the gate: how do you know whether what a machine is telling you is true? Everything I built in the months that followed came out of that question.

In the days that followed, in a cabin on a boat on the Nile, I was spending my evenings orchestrating software agents while the world went past the window. And on the flight home I understood that I was living through something nobody was yet describing for what it actually was - and I wanted to tell you about it.

So I decided to open up my workshop.>Inside you will find real projects, built one day at a time. The conversations are real. The mistakes are real. The changes of mind are real. The nights spent arguing with a sub-agent are real. The messages from CTOs, the sudden insights, the ideas that looked brilliant and did not survive the morning: all of it is still here. Because a revolution can only be understood while you are crossing it, not once it has already become a keynote.

Maybe you write code. Maybe you run a team, or decide a company's strategy. Or maybe you simply have the feeling that something is changing and you want to understand what.

This book is my invitation into that workshop. Not to learn a tool, but to watch, from the inside, the moment the gesture by which we build software changes.

It all started with a novel bought at the gate: the fourteenth in the Agent Zero saga.

And when the idea born on that plane became a system that actually worked, I noticed a detail: the number of lines of code I had written to build it, with my own fingers, was zero.

For forty years I would have called that a failure.

Today I know it was the day I built the most. And the day I understood that the craft, deep down, had never been writing code.

Every evening, before turning off the monitor, I write two words to a machine. Always the same two. Everything is in them: a ritual, an instruction, and a craft that has changed shape.

Goodnight, Claude.

I love developing software.I love creating.The gesture has changed.>"It should be read by everyone who makes decisions in a company, to understand the speed of the transformation under way and not discover it after the fact. And by every parent who wants to understand how to accompany their children in their choices for the future.">"Great transformations do not necessarily reward those who know the most. They reward those who keep learning.">"The absence of triumphalism combined with an ambition that does not apologise for itself. A book written by someone who directs, not by someone who sells."Umberto Pardi, General Manager, Expert.ai