I went into Claude Code expecting the usual AI coding a**istant pitch. Faster boilerplate, fewer dead ends, and a lot of promises about how it could speed up the parts of development that feel repetitive. That use case is there, and I’m not pretending otherwise. What surprised me was that the workflow I liked most had very little to do with asking it to write code for me. The real value showed up when I used it to make sense of everything around the code instead.