Kyriakides drops Clay for Claude Code, Clay replies
Eric Nowoslawski asked publicly what it would take to win him back, and pointed at Clay's audiences and CLI.
Michael Kyriakides (@mkprospectology) says his team stopped paying for Clay six to seven months ago and now builds all of its outbound campaigns in Claude Code. He recorded one build live and says it produced 54 personalised emails in 3 minutes 45 seconds, with a walkthrough of every step so others can copy it.
That is the claim, and it is one team's claim about its own workflow. There is no reply rate, no meeting count and no send volume attached to the 54 emails, so what is being measured is build speed and cost, not performance in the inbox.
Clay answered in public
Eric Nowoslawski (@enowoslawski) replied directly, asking what it would take to get him back. His argument was that the gap Kyriakides is coding around has already closed. With the CLI, Nowoslawski said, everything can run through Claude Code, and finding contacts plus checking that they have open roles is covered inside audiences. He added that many of the things on Kyriakides' list come at no extra cost in audiences.
So the two sides are not arguing about whether a model can write the emails. Both are running Claude Code. The disagreement is about who supplies the layer underneath, the contact records and the enrichment and signals like open roles, and what that layer should cost when the orchestration is free.
For people sending
If you are weighing the same switch, the question to answer is not whether Claude Code can build a sequence in under four minutes. It is where your contact data and your trigger checks come from once you cancel the tool, and whether the per-record cost of rebuilding that yourself beats the subscription you are cutting. Kyriakides has been off Clay for six to seven months, which is a long enough run to mean something, but he has published a speed number and not a cost breakdown or an output number.
The other thing in the exchange worth clocking is that a vendor is now defending its position against a code-first workflow in public, on the same terms, rather than arguing that the workflow does not work. The CLI reference means the vendor expects you to be driving it from Claude Code anyway. That reframes the decision as a line item rather than a philosophy. Price the data, not the agent.
We stopped paying for Clay 6-7 months ago
Would there be anything I could show you to win you back?
Know what is landing before you burn another domain
One email a day. Under three minutes. What the operators found out yesterday.