It’s easy to fall down the rabbit hole that is the hype surrounding Anthropic’s code agent Claude Code, a hype that really took off during the Christmas holidays and — at least in tech circles — is reminiscent of ChatGPT’s arrival three years ago. Claude Code, already being called both “the new ChatGPT” and “the end of SaaS,” and is considered by many to be the next big step in AI development and AI use.
If, like me, you spend a little too much time online, Claude Code has started to completely dominate your feeds lately. Of course, it “helps” that the algorithms give me “more of what I want,” but both LinkedIn and TikTok are overflowing with people talking about the excellence of Claude Code. AI influencers, ordinary developers, curious IT professionals, and, of course, a steady stream of obscure individuals who want to cash in on all the buzz.
People are vibe-coding everything from entire websites to small personal apps and finding new solutions for their workflows. Ethan Mollick, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, wrote about how he had Claude Code build an entire startup. In other circles, there’s talk of Gas Town, an orchestration solution that allows 20 to 30 agents to work in parallel. In San Francisco, it is said, people are letting “Claude swarms control their lives.”
