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.

“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. 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.

Trivedi presented a new feature in Claude Managed Agents, Anthropic’s cloud-based setup for building and running multi-agent systems, announced two weeks ago, which the company calls dreaming. Claude agents write notes to themselves, recording and saving useful information about specific tasks. When another coding agent, say, starts to work on the same code that others have worked on, it can use the notes they left behind to get up to speed faster and learn from any errors those previous agents may have made.

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

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.  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.  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.

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