Origins: The Making of Claude Code
Anthropic's first telling of how Claude Code was built and launched, as an oral history from the people who made it. Boris reposted it with a line worth keeping:
"We are 1% done."
Timeline compiled from
The Making of Claude Code (Anthropic) · interviews recorded Feb–May 2026.
A coding assistant was the very first product Anthropic ever built. What follows is the through-line — from a research bet that transformative AI would route through software, to a clunky internal tool called clide, to the terminal you're paying homage to right now.
git log --reverse --oneline origins/
2021
A model as good at coding as its author
Research Engineer Dawn Drain joins Anthropic. Her main project for three years: "try and make a model that was as good at coding as possible — at least as good as me."
Early 2022
The RL bet on autonomous software engineering
Shauna Kravec's team builds the original RL codebase for agentic coding, starting with tasks as small as "can the model write a simple function?" At first "the models were really terrible at it."
Spring 2022
The first coding assistant — a VS Code extension
Ben Mann: the first product Anthropic made was a coding assistant that gave "four different suggestions" per prompt. ~100 external users — then the team shipped the API and "basically forgot about the coding assistant for a while." Research kept going.
2022–2023
The bash tool, search, and clide
The pieces that make agentic coding work — a bash tool and the ability to search — come together. An internal CLI to chat with Claude for code edits, clide (name coined by Eli Tran-Johnson), is born. "Wonky… very, very ahead of its time." Adam Wolff adds a "baby agentic" mode.
Jan 2024
The Labs team
Ben Mann starts the Labs team, seeing "a hole in the market for agentic coding."
Sep 2024
Boris joins — and does the big thing
Boris Cherny joins Labs wanting to build a linter. Ben: "No, no, no — you have to do the big thing." Boris pastes a rejected pull request into clide and it writes the whole thing: "I had never seen anything like that… It felt like the future." Cat Wu, already a power user, is asked to join.
Oct–Dec 2024
Claude CLI, and a two-week sprint
Boris builds a demo he calls Claude CLI — about two days' work, "two or three likes" on Slack. The next day a teammate is doing real coding with it. A final two-week sprint (Sid Bidasaria + ~6–7 folks) ships the core: bug reporting, login, and auto-updates that let them fix feedback "five minutes later."
Feb 2025
Launch — and the name "Claude Code"
Launched as a research preview. Claude CLI is renamed Claude Code (name proposed by Alex Isken). Igor Kofman makes the all-caps ASCII logo; Meaghan Choi adds the Clawd character (originally Sam McAllister's, for Claude 3.5 Sonnet). Austin Ray (Ramp): "within the first five minutes… this is going to fundamentally change everything."
May 2025
Claude 4 — "our moment came"
At the Code with Claude conference, Sonnet 4 lands. Meaghan Choi: "that's really when our moment came." Subscriptions roll out — Boris: "a business model innovation coupled with a model innovation."
Winter 2025
100% of the code, written by Claude Code
Boris: "By winter 2025, 100 percent of my code was written by Claude Code. Not a single line by hand." Igor Kofman: "I do not write any code by myself anymore."
2026
Swarms, trust, and "1% done"
Shauna Kravec runs "a whole swarm of twelve different Claudes." Boris writes 88 commits in a day. Cat Wu: users now auto-accept everything — "Claude has earned their trust." Boris: "We are 1% done."
grep -i "the future" origins/
"We were interested in coding because we thought that the path to transformative AI would route through the ability to automate large chunks of software engineering work."
— Shauna Kravec, Head of Reinforcement Learning
"The first time it worked, I was dancing around my kitchen. I couldn't believe it."
— Adam Wolff, first manager on the Claude Code team, on clide's first agentic edit
"You have to build something that works 20 or 30 percent of the time now, so that when the next model comes out, it works 80 percent of the time… You have to be in the now, but also be looking towards the future."
— Ben Mann, Anthropic co-founder & Labs lead
"This is the IBM 029 — it's similar to what my grandpa programmed with in the Soviet Union. And this is one of the first text editors, which is still installed on every single Mac. And then it evolved, it evolved, it evolved, and it keeps evolving. And then somewhere on the spectrum is Claude Code."
— Boris Cherny, Head of Claude Code