Anthropic’s Code with Claude showed off coding’s future—whether you like it or not

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.

Anthropic says its goal is to push automation as far as it will go. Instead of using AI to generate code and then having humans clean it up and fix the mistakes, it wants Claude to check and correct its own work. “The default isn’t ‘I’m going to prompt Claude’—the default is now ‘I’m going to have Claude prompt itself,’” Boris Cherny, who heads Claude Code, said in the opening keynote.

If all goes well, human developers shouldn’t even see the error messages when something doesn’t work. That will all be handled by Claude, which will test and tweak, test and tweak, until everything runs as it should. As Ravi Trivedi, an engineer at Anthropic, put it in another talk: “The key principle is getting out of Claude’s way. We like to say: ‘Let it cook.’”

Trivedi presented a new feature in Claude Code, announced two weeks ago, which Anthropic calls dreaming. Claude Code agents write notes to themselves, recording and saving useful information about specific tasks. When another coding agent later starts to work on the same code, it can use the notes to get up to speed faster and learn from any errors that previous agents may have made.

Dreaming is a system that Claude Code uses to read through all these notes and consolidate the information they contain, spotting patterns and common issues across different tasks. In theory, dreaming should help Claude Code learn about a particular code base and get better and better at working on it.

Success stories

Code with Claude is an event aimed at developers. As well as product showcases and hands-on workshops from Anthropic, there were how-tos from a range of companies that had reshaped their software development teams around Claude Code, including Spotify and Delivery Hero as well as Lovable, Base44, and Monday.com—three startups vibe-coding apps that help people vibe-code apps.

There were no signs of unease at Code with Claude. Everybody I met wanted in.

And yet outside the conference there have been a number of reports that many coders are starting to question this bright new future. Some gripe in online forums like Reddit and Hacker News that AI coding tools are being pushed by managers chasing productivity gains, when in practice the technology makes software development harder because of all the extra code developers now have to review. “The only people I've heard saying that generated code is fine are those who don’t read it,” a user called pron posted on Hacker News last week.

Others claim that their coding abilities have fallen off as they hand more tasks to AI. And researchers have warned that AI tools can produce unsafe code that will make software more vulnerable to attacks.

I sat down with Claude engineering lead Katelyn Lesse and Claude product lead Angela Jiang and asked them what they made of the concerns that a sudden flood of code generated (and shipped) without proper human oversight was kicking serious security and maintenance problems down the road.

“All of the old software development best practices still apply. They’ve applied this entire time,” said Lesse.

“I think there are a lot of people and teams that may have lost sight of them in this moment.”

And yet as Anthropic and others push for greater automation and tools like Claude Code improve, the temptation increases to offload more and more tasks, including oversight. Lesse told me that some of the technical managers at Anthropic are exhausted by keeping up with all the code their teams now produce. “Part of things happening so much more quickly is just managing your time,” she said.

“I think that right now Claude is probably as good as a midlevel engineer at writing code,” she added. You still need expert engineers to design a system and troubleshoot harder problems, she said, “But over time we want Claude to get better and better at all different types of engineering.”

Jiang agreed: “I think the absolute end state we’re trying to get to is Claude basically being able to build itself.”