Claude Code is having a moment. Anthropic’s agentic coding tool has gone viral over the past few weeks, with engineers and non-engineers alike discovering what it feels like to hand real work over to an AI and watch it execute autonomously. The popular tech podcast Hard Fork has already had two segments on it in the last two weeks. In the first, hosts Kevin Roose and Casey Newton share their Claude Code projects. And in the second, they highlight some from their listeners. (Alas, my Severance fan project did not make the cut.)
I’ve been using Cursor and Claude Code to build and rebuild this site for over a year now, so when I read this piece and see coders describing their experience with it, I understand the feeling.
Bradley Olson (gift link), writing for the Wall Street Journal:
Some 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.
“It’s amazing, and it’s also scary,” said Andrew Duca, chief executive of Awaken Tax, a cryptocurrency tax platform. Duca has been coding since he was in middle school. “I spent my whole life developing this skill, and it’s literally one-shotted by Claude Code.”
Duca decided not to hire the engineers he’d been planning to bring on. He thinks Claude makes him five times more productive.
The productivity numbers throughout the piece are striking:
Malte Ubl is chief technology officer at Vercel, which helps develop and host websites and apps for users of Claude Code and other such tools. He said he used the tool to finish a complex project in a week that would’ve taken him about a year without AI. Ubl spent 10 hours a day on his vacation building new software and said each run gave him an endorphin rush akin to playing a Vegas slot machine.
But what caught my attention is what people are using it for beyond code—analyzing MRI data, recovering wedding photos from corrupted drives, monitoring tomato plants with a webcam. Olson again:
Unlike most app- or web-bound chatbots now in wide use, it can operate autonomously, with broad access to user files, a web browser and other applications. While technologists have predicted a coming era of AI “agents” capable of doing just about anything for humans, that future has been slow to develop. Using Claude Code was the first time many users interacted with this kind of AI, offering an inkling of what may be in store.
Anthropic took notice of course and launched a beta of Cowork last week.
Instead of the MS-DOS-like “command line” interface that the core app has, Cowork displays a more friendly, graphical user interface. They built the product in about 10 days—using Claude Code.
The closing question is the right one:
“The bigger story here is going to be when this goes beyond software engineering,” said David Hsu, chief executive of Retool, a business-AI startup. Software engineers make up a tiny fraction of the U.S. labor force. “How far does it go?”
Replace “software engineering” with “design” and you have the question I’m exploring this week.
