Blank Metal, an AI-native engineering firm founded in 2025 with a team of 30, says Claude Code powers around 90% of the work it does across internal projects and client builds, and that it has trained more than 700 people in Claude Code and Cowork, about 710 as of June 1. A lead processor built in Claude Cowork now handles a full day's lead volume in a couple of hours, saving at least a couple of hours a day across four people.
Elli Rader, Chief Revenue Officer, says: "Repetitive tasks that used to require someone’s full attention can run in the background, which frees people up for higher-leverage work."
With anywhere from 3 to 10 leads coming in daily, the manual process meant days of research, scoring, and data entry. Scheduling took at least an hour a day of manually cross-referencing a locked-down Microsoft calendar against Google Calendar, and proposals and statements of work were a multi-hour drafting process.
The first pass of the lead processor took about 20 minutes to build, and the team is on its third version, roughly an hour of total development time. When a new lead comes in, it scores a fit rating, creates the deal in HubSpot, pulls contact info, and posts a summary to Slack, drawing on all of the firm's plugins and custom-built skills. Scheduling is now a single prompt that puts holds on everyone's calendars and returns a bulleted list of availability to paste into an email; once the client chooses a time, Claude finalizes it, invites the client, adds a Zoom line, and deletes the other holds. Rader built it as a project in Cowork, after Claude suggested turning the original task into a project when it began giving errors. Proposal and SOW generation is now a structured first draft in minutes.
Claude Cowork is the primary tool for client-facing deliverables, internal workflows and daily tasks, Claude Code is where the engineers work, and the API is deployed for client implementations. Connectors to Salesforce, Slack, and M365 let Claude operate inside actual business workflows, skills package solutions to be shared across the organisation, including brand voice and visual guidelines, and Excel and PowerPoint add-ins meet people inside the tools they already use.
Training is scaled with Lectern, a real-time live training companion built internally to run Claude Code and Cowork sessions: the presenter controls a shared session, and participants either follow along in real time or navigate the material at their own pace. The team tests Claude updates on its internal platform, Shippy, which is powered by Claude.