Five learnings from Claude Code San Diego

I attended Claude Code San Diego on April 14, 2026. Here are 5 things I took away from the various presenters.

• Every presenter converged on the same pattern from different angles: iterating quickly towards product-market fit, leveraging strengths as a domain expert, and listening closely to what actually needs solving rather than getting caught up with the tooling.
• Learn to understand pain better than the builders do. That’s where the leverage is when combined with agentic tooling.
• The people winning right now are those who actively collapse the distance between “I understand this problem” and “I built the solution.” Sharpening these tools daily, even for a few hours, compounds quickly.
• Keep your orchestration agent lean and leverage subagents to optimize your context window. See my AGENTS.md @ 99a8c1b for my latest thinking and application on this.
• Sign up early to present at the next round of lightning talks.