Claude Code: the viral AI coding app making a splash in tech

ChatGPT may be the best-known artificial intelligence chatbot on the market, but lately, the latest iteration of AI startup Anthropic’s coding bot, Claude Code, is entering the spotlight. Simplifying the process of writing code, the tool hints at a more democratized digital era. For engineers, feelings about this progress in the AI industry are complicated.

What can you do with Claude Code?

Claude Code is an AI coding tool that can generate code based on a prompt, allowing people with little to no coding experience build their own websites, programs and apps, in a trend known as vibecoding. Unlike other widely used chatbots, Claude Code can “operate autonomously, with broad access to user files, a web browser and other applications,” said The Wall Street Journal. While technologists have “predicted a coming era of AI ‘agents’ capable of doing just about anything for humans,” progress has been slow. Using Claude Code was the “first time many users interacted with this kind of AI,” offering an “inkling of what may be in store.”

Though it debuted last May, the bot’s popularity “truly exploded late last month,” said The Atlantic. A recent update “improved the tool’s capabilities,” and with a “surplus of free time over winter break, seemingly everyone in tech was using Claude Code.” Engineers and noncoders alike found a bevy of uses for the app. One user created a “custom viewer for his MRI scan,” while another had it “analyze their DNA.” Life optimizers have used Claude Code to “collate information from disparate sources — email inboxes, text messages, calendars, to-do lists — into personalized daily briefs.” Despite being an AI coding tool, the “bot can do all sorts of computer work,” including “book theater tickets, process shopping returns, order DoorDash.”

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With the app going viral and “so many noncoders trying it out,” Boris Cherny, the head of Claude Code, and his team decided to launch a variant of the app called Cowork, the Journal reported. Instead of the “command line” interface that the core app uses, Cowork displays a more “friendly, graphical user interface,” the Journal said. The team “built the product in about 10 days — using Claude Code.”

What does its popularity mean for the future of AI?

Some engineers who tinkered with the bot described a “feeling of awe followed by sadness at the realization that the program could easily replicate expertise they had built up over an entire career,” said the Journal. “It’s amazing, and it’s also scary,” said Andrew Duca, the chief executive of a cryptocurrency tax platform, to the Journal. “I spent my whole life developing this skill, and it’s literally one-shotted by Claude Code.”

Not every user is “so sanguine” about the app’s potential, The Atlantic said. At times, it “lacks the prowess of an excellent software engineer,” and it “sometimes gets stuck on more complicated programming tasks,” and occasionally “trips up on simple tasks.” Regardless, Claude Code is a “win for the AI world” as the “luster of ChatGPT has worn off,” and Silicon Valley has been “pumping out slop.” No matter your opinion on the technology, the bot is “evidence that the AI revolution is real.” In fact, Claude Code could become an “inflection point for AI progress.”

If you work in software development, the “future feels incredibly uncertain,” said Intelligencer. Optimists in the industry are arguing that the “sector is about to experience the Jevons paradox,” a phenomenon in which a “dramatic reduction in cost of using a resource” can lead to “far greater demand for the resource.” Still, after years of “tech-industry layoffs” and CEOs “signaling to shareholders that they expect AI to provide lots of new efficiencies,” others are “understandably slipping into despair.”