Software becomes something you talk about
Coding for the rest of us finally seems possible now that tools like Claude Code turn plain English into working software.
By Deni Ellis Béchard edited by Eric Sullivan
A person holds a smartphone displaying the logo of “Claude”, an AI language model developed by Anthropic, with the company logo visible in the background.
Cheng Xin/Getty Images
Coding is having its GarageBand moment, its Excel moment. A moment like 2004, when Apple makes music production widely available. Or like in 1985, when Microsoft banned the idea of a spreadsheet in paper form which required an accountant to calculate each value manually.
Enter Claude Code, software created by AI company Anthropic for “ambiance coding» – write code with natural language. It’s not the first platform to try this, but it’s the first to succeed anyone can do this feeling.
Vibe coding platforms abound and over the past few years I’ve tried several, like Windsurf and Replit. I was impressed by what they could do, but I often had stuck on problems that better coders could easily solve. And creating websites that were what I hoped for was a challenge.
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What sets Claude Code apart is the ease of use and the speed with which it understands the problems. I built several websites with the latest version, and each time I encountered a problem, I described the problem and Claude Code fixed it. I have used it through different interfaces and the app provides the most user-friendly experience for “muggles» – people without coding magic.
Naturally there is a rival. We cannot talk about Claude Code without mentioning the OpenAI Codex. OpenAI was the first company to popularize a large language model (LLM) that transformed plain English instructions into code. GitHub Copilot launched in June 2021but it was built on the Codex, released by OpenAI in August.
In 2023, the plot twist occurs: the Codex, which had been constantly evolvingwas interrupted. An OpenAI email notice encouraged developers to use GPT-3.5 instead. It seemed that coding would be just one of many skills that the AI system would perform.
This is when Anthropic entered the race with a different vibe. In March 2023, she presented Claude as a model trained to be “helpful, honest and harmless.” Claude knew how to code, but the first praise wasn’t for fireworks; it was a matter of feeling. Users liked the fact that the exchanges “feel like a natural conversation”. Autumn Besselman from Quora said in a statement from Anthropic.
Only two months later, Anthropic announced he had “expanded Claude’s pop-up from 9,000 to 100,000 tokens”, which corresponded to approximately “75,000 words”. A popup is essentially the desktop space that allows you to distribute your code and documentation. When Anthropic fed Claude the whole novel The Great Gatsby with a modified line, the model spotted the modification in 22 seconds.
Over the next two years, Claude’s coding skills improved significantly. By early 2025, using AI to code was gaining popularity among non-coders, and in February Andrej Karpathy, a former OpenAI researcher, coined the term “ambiance coding.”
In May 2025 OpenAI has relaunched the Codex as “a cloud-based software engineering solution agent which can run on many tasks in parallel” and made it available in ChatGPT. It also made the Codex CLI open source, “further fostering developer goodwill”, according to TechCrunchthanAnthropic, which issued a takedown notice to a developer who had reverse engineered Claude Code.
Tensions peaked last August, when Wired reported that Anthropic claimed that OpenAI staff used Claude Code before the launch of GPT-5. Anthropic revoked OpenAI’s access in accordance with its commercial conditionswhich prevents customers from using Claude to “create a competing product.” An Anthropic spokesperson said Wired, “OpenAI technical staff also used our coding tools.”
In January 2026, on X, Karpathy described a “phase change in software engineering“, admitting: “I really program mainly in English now”, while Boris Chernyan Anthropic staff member, wrote: “Almost 100% of our code is written by Claude Code + Opus 4.5. ” According to Fortune, an Anthropic spokesperson said Claude Code now writes about 90 percent of his own code.
Although the Codex and Claude Code are both powerful, from my experienceClaude Code simply builds websites faster, even fairly complex ones requiring interactive 3D presentations.
Memes popped up talking about the fun of using it. People quoted “Claudeholism: the new addiction of the century» or asserted that “Claude Code is the opium of the permanent underclass» in reference to the software’s ability to remove the pain of drudgery. And then there is kindness of its progress indicator – verbs like crunch, moseying, browse, reticle, disconcerting And zest. When Claude Code works, it’s sparkling Or simmer. As silly as it sounds, it’s hard not to like it.
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