Author: Johan Westö, Novia University of Applied Sciences, Intelligent Systems Institute
Introduction
I had the pleasure of visiting Claude Code for Developers in Helsinki. It was an interesting opportunity to discuss, share thoughts, and listen to interesting presentations on how others use Claude Code in companies.
The scheduled presentations focused on how people share agent [skills], essentially task descriptions, within companies, and what benefits they see. Skills are folders of instructions, scripts, and resources that Claude loads dynamically to improve performance on specialized tasks.
I was a bit surprised to hear that some have started replacing other forms of documentation, like wikis, with skill files instead. The benefit being that these actually keep up to date as agents continuously use them, and people are forced to update them if they want to get help from an agent.
Another interesting use case was that people have started documenting tacit knowledge in skills. Tacit knowledge is the kind of expertise that usually exists only in someone’s head. The benefit is that my co-workers do not need to ask for my input as often, since their agents can answer the most common questions through their skills. Together, these two benefits enable companies to have each person handle a more diverse set of tasks and also complete them faster.
I also took the opportunity to discuss with others and went home with the following two takeaways:
1. Productivity increases by 20-40 percent
Others share my own opinion that the published productivity gains of 20-40 percent in recent studies from using AI agents for software development are an understatement. The general feel is more like productivity is nearly doubled for people who have learned to use agents well. This does not yet account for the fact that agents make things possible that you would not have been able to do on your own or that would have been unthinkable on an organizational level a couple of years ago. These are things that are not easily measured by metrics but likely explain why people tend to continue using coding agents despite the fact that reported gains are sometimes very small.
2. Claude Code is not just for programming
It appears that people are starting to use Claude Code’s general knowledge, ability to create files, use generic MCP or CLI tools, and the ability to fetch information for many non-coding tasks (people’s creativity being the only limit). The most typical non-coding example among Claude Code users (programmers or not) appears to be ditching PowerPoint to have Claude create HTML-based slide decks directly (an example is enclosed as a PDF). The benefit for non-coding tasks will likely grow as we transition to [agent-native applications], such as our recent [ANCHOR] release for working with engineering data.
Example found here:
[Claude Helsinki · Example HTML Presentation]
Johan Westö, Novia University of Applied Sciences, Intelligent Systems Institute