{"id":516682,"date":"2026-01-15T00:26:12","date_gmt":"2026-01-15T00:26:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/516682\/"},"modified":"2026-01-15T00:26:12","modified_gmt":"2026-01-15T00:26:12","slug":"move-over-chatgpt-the-atlantic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/516682\/","title":{"rendered":"Move Over, ChatGPT – The Atlantic"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over the holidays, Alex Lieberman had an idea: What if he could create Spotify \u201cWrapped\u201d for his text messages? Without writing a single line of code, Lieberman, a co-founder of the media outlet Morning Brew, created \u201ciMessage Wrapped\u201d\u2014a web app that analyzed statistical trends across nearly 1 million of his texts. One chart that he showed me compared his use of lol, haha, \ud83d\ude02, and lmao\u2014he\u2019s an lol guy. Another listed people he had ghosted.<\/p>\n

Lieberman did all of this using Claude Code, an AI tool made by the start-up Anthropic, he told me. In recent weeks, the tech world has gone wild over the bot. One executive used it to create a custom viewer for his MRI<\/a> scan, while another had it analyze their DNA<\/a>. The life optimizers have deployed Claude Code to collate information from disparate sources\u2014email inboxes, text messages, calendars, to-do lists\u2014into personalized daily brief<\/a>s<\/a>. Though Claude Code is technically an AI coding tool (hence its name), the bot can do all sorts of computer work: book theater tickets<\/a>, process shopping returns<\/a>, order<\/a> DoorDash<\/a>. People are using it to manage their personal finances<\/a>, and to grow plants<\/a>: With the right equipment, the bot can monitor soil moisture, leaf temperature, CO2, and more.<\/p>\n

Some of these use cases likely require some preexisting technical know-how. (You can\u2019t just fire up Claude Code and expect it to grow you a tomato plant<\/a>.) I don\u2019t have any professional programming experience myself, but as soon as I installed Claude Code last week, I was obsessed. Within minutes, I had created a new personal website without writing a single line of code. Later, I hooked the bot up to my email, where it summarized my unread emails, and sent messages on my behalf. For years, Silicon Valley has been promising (and critics have be<\/a>en fearing<\/a>) powerful AI agents capable of automating many aspects of white-collar work. The progress has been underwhelming\u2014until now.<\/p>\n

Read: Was Sam Altman right about the job market?<\/a><\/p>\n

This is \u201cbigger\u201d than the ChatGPT moment, Lieberman wrote to me. \u201cBut Pandora\u2019s Box hasn\u2019t been opened for the rest of the world yet.\u201d Claude Code has seemingly yet to take off outside Silicon Valley: Unlike ChatGPT, Claude Code can be somewhat intimidating to set up, and the cheapest version costs $20 a month. When Anthropic first released<\/a> the bot in early 2025, the company explicitly positioned it as a tool for programmers. Over time, others in Silicon Valley\u2014product managers, salespeople, designers\u2014started using Claude Code, too, including for noncoding tasks<\/a>. \u201cThat was hugely surprising,\u201d Boris Cherny, the Anthropic employee who created the tool, told me.<\/p>\n

The bot\u2019s popularity truly exploded late last month. A recent model update improved the tool\u2019s capabilities, and with a surplus of free time over winter break, seemingly everyone in tech was using Claude Code. \u201cYou spent your holidays with your family?\u201d wrote<\/a> one tech-policy expert. \u201cThat\u2019s nice I spent my holidays with Claude Code.\u201d (On Monday, Anthropic released a new version of the product called \u201cCowork\u201d that\u2019s designed for people who aren\u2019t developers, but for now it\u2019s only a research preview and is much more expensive.)<\/p>\n

I can see why the tech world is so excited. Over the past few days, I\u2019ve spun up at least a dozen projects using the bot\u2014including a custom news feed that serves me articles based on my past reading preferences. The first night I installed it, I stayed up late playing with the tools, sleeping only after maxing out my allowed usage for the second time that evening. (Anthropic limits usage.) The next morning, I maxed it out again. When I told a friend to try it out, he was skeptical. \u201cIt sounds just like ChatGPT,\u201d he told me. The next day he texted with a gushing update: \u201cIt just DOES stuff,\u201d he said. \u201cChatGPT is like if a mechanic just gave you advice about your car. Claude Code is like if the mechanic actually fixed it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Part of what works so well about Claude Code is that it makes it easy to connect all sorts of apps. Sara Du, the founder of the AI start-up Ando, told me that she is using it to help with a variety of life tasks, like managing her texts with real-estate agents. Because the bot is hooked up to her iMessages, she can ask it<\/a> to find all of the Zillow links she\u2019s sent over the past month and compile a table of listings. \u201cIt gives me a lot of dopamine,\u201d Du said. Andrew Hall, a Stanford political scientist, had Claude Code analyze the raw data of an old paper<\/a> of his studying mail-in voting. In roughly an hour, the bot replicated<\/a> his findings and wrote a full research paper complete with charts and a lit review. (After a UCLA Ph.D. student performed an a<\/a>udit<\/a> of the bot\u2019s paper, he and Hall offered a \u201csubjective conclusion\u201d: Claude Code made only a few minor errors, the kind that a human might make.) \u201cIt certainly was not perfect, but it was very, very good,\u201d Hall told me. AI is not yet a substitute for an actual political-science researcher, but he does think the bot\u2019s abilities raise major questions for academia. \u201cClaude Code and its ilk are coming for the study of politics like a freight train,\u201d he posted<\/a> on X.<\/p>\n

Not everyone is so<\/a> sanguine<\/a>. The bot lacks the prowess<\/a> of an excellent software engineer: It sometimes gets stuck on more complicated programming tasks\u2014and occasionally trips up on simple tasks. As the writer Kelsey Piper has put it<\/a>, 99 percent of the time, using Claude Code feels like having a tireless magical genius on hand, and 1 percent of the time, it feels like yelling at a puppy for peeing on your couch<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Regardless, Claude Code is a win for the AI world. The luster of ChatGPT has worn off, and Silicon Valley has been pumping out slop: Last fall, OpenAI debuted a social network for AI-generated video<\/a>, which seems destined to pummel the internet with deepfakes, and Elon Musk\u2019s Grok recently flooded X<\/a> with nonconsensual AI-generated porn. But Claude Code feels materially different in the way it presents obvious, immediate real-world utility\u2014even if it also has the potential to be used to objectionable ends. (Last fall, Anthropic discovered<\/a> that Chinese state-sponsored hackers had used Claude Code to conduct a sophisticated cyberespionage scheme.) Whatever your feelings on the technology, the bot is evidence that the AI revolution is real.<\/p>\n

In fact, Claude Code could turn out to be an inflection point for AI progress. A crucial step on the path to artificial general intelligence, or AGI, is thought to be \u201crecursive self-improvement<\/a>\u201d: AI models that can keep making themselves better. So far, this has been largely elusive. Cherny, the Claude Code creator, claims that might be changing. In terms of \u201crecursive self-improvement, we\u2019re starting to see early signs of this,\u201d he said. \u201cClaude is starting to come up with its own ideas and it\u2019s proposing what to build.\u201d A year ago, Cherny estimates that Claude Code wrote 10 percent of his code. \u201cNowadays, it writes 100 percent.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read: Things get strange when AI starts training itself<\/a><\/p>\n

If Claude Code ends up being as powerful as its biggest supporters are promising, it will be equally disruptive. So far, AI has yet to lead<\/a> to widespread job losses. That could soon change. Annika Lewis, the executive director of a crypto foundation who described herself as \u201cfairly nontechnical,\u201d recently used the bot to build a custom tool that scans her fridge and suggests recipes in order to minimize grocery-store runs. Next she wants to hook it up to Instacart so it can order her groceries. In fact, Lewis thinks the bot could help with all kinds of work, she told me. She has two young kids, and had been considering hiring someone to help out with household administrative work such as finding birthday-party venues, registering the kids for extracurricular activities, and booking dental appointments. Now that she has Claude Code, she hopes to automate much of that instead.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Over the holidays, Alex Lieberman had an idea: What if he could create Spotify \u201cWrapped\u201d for his text…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":516683,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[691,738,158,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-516682","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-technology","11":"tag-united-states","12":"tag-unitedstates","13":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115896280351890834","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/516682","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=516682"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/516682\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/516683"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=516682"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=516682"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=516682"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}