Anthropic’s Code with Claude showed off coding’s future—whether you like it or not
Why this matters: a development in AI with implications for how people work, create, and decide.
The vibes were strong at Code with Claude, Anthropic’s two-day event for software developers in London that kicked off on May 19, the same day as Google’s I/O in Palo Alto. (A coincidence, not a flex, Anthropic staffers assured me.) “Who here has shipped a pull request in the last week that was completely written by Claude?” Jeremy Hadfield, an engineer at Anthropic, asked from the main stage. Almost half the people in the packed room—many sitting with laptops on their knees, coding or prompting as they watched the talks—raised their hands. Pull requests are fixes or updates to existing software that are submitted for review before they go live. They are the bread and butter of software development, the chunks of code that most professional developers spend their lives writing—or did until now. “Who here has shipped a pull request that was completely written by Claude where they did not read the code at all?” Hadfield asked next. Nervous laughter. Most of the hands stayed up. It’s not news that LLM-powered tools like Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex have upended the way software gets made. Top tech companies now like to boast of how little code their developers write by hand. (“Most software at Anthropic is now written by Claude,” Hadfield said. “Claude has written most of the code in Claude Code.”) OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft make similar claims. Many others wish they could. Even so, it is striking how normal this new paradigm already seems, and how fast it has set in. This was the second year that Anthropic has put on developer events, which also run in San Francisco and Tokyo. This time last year, the company had just released Claude 4. It could code, kind of. But with Anthropic’s latest string of updates—especially Claude 4.6 and then 4.7, released in February and April—Claude Code is a tool that more and more developers seem happy to hand their work off to. Let Claude cook.ANTHROPIC (GRAPHIC) / WILL DOUGLAS HEAVEN (PHOTO) Anthropic says its goal is