Over the holidays, Alex Lieberman had an idea: What if he could create Spotify “Wrapped” for his text messages? Without writing a single line of code, Lieberman, a co-founder of the media outlet Morning Brew, created “iMessage Wrapped”—a web app that analyzed statistical trends across nearly 1 million of his texts. One chart that he showed me compared his use of lol, haha, 😂, and lmao—he’s an lol guy. Another listed people he had ghosted.
Lieberman did all of this using Claude Code, an AI tool made by the start-up Anthropic, he told me. In recent weeks, the tech world has gone wild over the bot. One executive used it to create a custom viewer for his MRI scan, while another had it analyze their DNA. The life optimizers have deployed Claude Code to collate information from disparate sources—email inboxes, text messages, calendars, to-do lists—into personalized daily briefs. Though Claude Code is technically an AI coding tool (hence its name), the bot can do all sorts of computer work: book theater tickets, process shopping returns, order DoorDash. People are using it to manage their personal finances, and to grow plants: With the right equipment, the bot can monitor soil moisture, leaf temperature, CO2, and more.
Some of these use cases likely require some preexisting technical know-how. (You can’t just fire up Claude Code and expect it to grow you a tomato plant.) I don’t have any professional programming experience myself, but as soon as I installed Claude Code last week, I was obsessed. Within minutes, I had created a new personal website without writing a single line of code. Later, I hooked the bot up to my email, where it summarized my unread emails, and sent messages on my behalf. For years, Silicon Valley has been promising (and critics have been fearing) powerful AI agents capable of automating many aspects of white-collar work. The progress has been underwhelming—until now.
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This is “bigger” than the ChatGPT moment, Lieberman wrote to me. “But Pandora’s Box hasn’t been opened for the rest of the world yet.” Claude Code has seemingly yet to take off outside Silicon Valley: Unlike ChatGPT, Claude Code can be somewhat intimidating to set up, and the cheapest version costs $20 a month. When Anthropic first released the bot in early 2025, the company explicitly positioned it as a tool for programmers. Over time, others in Silicon Valley—product managers, salespeople, designers—started using Claude Code, too, including for noncoding tasks. “That was hugely surprising,” Boris Cherny, the Anthropic employee who created the tool, told me.
The bot’s popularity truly exploded late last month. A recent model update improved the tool’s capabilities, and with a surplus of free time over winter break, seemingly everyone in tech was using Claude Code. “You spent your holidays with your family?” wrote one tech-policy expert. “That’s nice I spent my holidays with Claude Code.” (On Monday, Anthropic released a new version of the product called “Cowork” that’s designed for people who aren’t developers, but for now it’s only a research preview and is much more expensive.)
I can see why the tech world is so excited. Over the past few days, I’ve spun up at least a dozen projects using the bot—including a custom news feed that serves me articles based on my past reading preferences. The first night I installed it, I stayed up late playing with the tools, sleeping only after maxing out my allowed usage for the second time that evening. (Anthropic limits usage.) The next morning, I maxed it out again. When I told a friend to try it out, he was skeptical. “It sounds just like ChatGPT,” he told me. The next day he texted with a gushing update: “It just DOES stuff,” he said. “ChatGPT is like if a mechanic just gave you advice about your car. Claude Code is like if the mechanic actually fixed it.”
Part of what works so well about Claude Code is that it makes it easy to connect all sorts of apps. Sara Du, the founder of the AI start-up Ando, told me that she is using it to help with a variety of life tasks, like managing her texts with real-estate agents. Because the bot is hooked up to her iMessages, she can ask it to find all of the Zillow links she’s sent over the past month and compile a table of listings. “It gives me a lot of dopamine,” Du said. Andrew Hall, a Stanford political scientist, had Claude Code analyze the raw data of an old paper of his studying mail-in voting. In roughly an hour, the bot replicated his findings and wrote a full research paper complete with charts and a lit review. (After a UCLA Ph.D. student performed an audit of the bot’s paper, he and Hall offered a “subjective conclusion”: Claude Code made only a few minor errors, the kind that a human might make.) “It certainly was not perfect, but it was very, very good,” Hall told me. AI is not yet a substitute for an actual political-science researcher, but he does think the bot’s abilities raise major questions for academia. “Claude Code and its ilk are coming for the study of politics like a freight train,” he posted on X.
Not everyone is so sanguine. The bot lacks the prowess of an excellent software engineer: It sometimes gets stuck on more complicated programming tasks—and occasionally trips up on simple tasks. As the writer Kelsey Piper has put it, 99 percent of the time, using Claude Code feels like having a tireless magical genius on hand, and 1 percent of the time, it feels like yelling at a puppy for peeing on your couch.
Regardless, Claude Code is a win for the AI world. The luster of ChatGPT has worn off, and Silicon Valley has been pumping out slop: Last fall, OpenAI debuted a social network for AI-generated video, which seems destined to pummel the internet with deepfakes, and Elon Musk’s Grok recently flooded X with nonconsensual AI-generated porn. But Claude Code feels materially different in the way it presents obvious, immediate real-world utility—even if it also has the potential to be used to objectionable ends. (Last fall, Anthropic discovered that Chinese state-sponsored hackers had used Claude Code to conduct a sophisticated cyberespionage scheme.) Whatever your feelings on the technology, the bot is evidence that the AI revolution is real.
In fact, Claude Code could turn out to be an inflection point for AI progress. A crucial step on the path to artificial general intelligence, or AGI, is thought to be “recursive self-improvement”: AI models that can keep making themselves better. So far, this has been largely elusive. Cherny, the Claude Code creator, claims that might be changing. In terms of “recursive self-improvement, we’re starting to see early signs of this,” he said. “Claude is starting to come up with its own ideas and it’s proposing what to build.” A year ago, Cherny estimates that Claude Code wrote 10 percent of his code. “Nowadays, it writes 100 percent.”
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If Claude Code ends up being as powerful as its biggest supporters are promising, it will be equally disruptive. So far, AI has yet to lead to widespread job losses. That could soon change. Annika Lewis, the executive director of a crypto foundation who described herself as “fairly nontechnical,” recently used the bot to build a custom tool that scans her fridge and suggests recipes in order to minimize grocery-store runs. Next she wants to hook it up to Instacart so it can order her groceries. In fact, Lewis thinks the bot could help with all kinds of work, she told me. She has two young kids, and had been considering hiring someone to help out with household administrative work such as finding birthday-party venues, registering the kids for extracurricular activities, and booking dental appointments. Now that she has Claude Code, she hopes to automate much of that instead.
