Anthropic’s head of Claude Code on how the tool won over non-coders—and kickstarted a new era for software engineers

It’s been a good few weeks for Anthropic. The lab is reportedly planning a $10 billion fundraising that would value the company at $350 billion, its CEO caused headlines in Davos by criticizing the White House, and it’s also having a viral product launch that most AI labs can only dream of.

Claude Code, the company’s surprisingly popular hit, is a coding tool that has captured the attention of users far beyond the software engineers it was built for. First released in February 2024 as a developer assistant...