The vibes were indeed strong at Code with Claude, Anthropic's two-day London developer event that kicked off on May 19 - the same day as Google's I/O in Palo Alto. (Pure coincidence, not a flex, Anthropic staffers insisted, with a straight face.)
"Who here has shipped a pull request in the last week that was completely written by Claude?" Jeremy Hadfield, an Anthropic engineer, asked from the main stage. Almost half the packed room - many coding or prompting on laptops balanced on their knees - raised their hands. Pull requests, for the uninitiated, are fixes or updates submitted for review before going live. They're the bread and butter of software development, the chunks of code most developers spent 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 pressed. Nervous laughter. Most hands stayed up.
It's not news that LLM-powered tools like Anthropic's Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex have upended software development. Top tech companies now boast about how little code their developers write by hand. "Most software at Anthropic is now written by Claude," Hadfield said. "Claude has written most of the code in Claude Code." OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft make similar claims. Many others wish they could.
Even so, it's striking how normal this new paradigm already seems, and how fast it has set in. This was the second year Anthropic put on developer events (also running in San Francisco and Tokyo). Last year, the company had just released Claude 4. It could code, kind of. But with the latest string of updates - Claude 4.6 and 4.7, released in February and April - Claude Code is a tool 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 having humans clean up 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, head of Claude Code, said in the opening keynote. If all goes well, human developers shouldn't even see error messages. That will all be handled by Claude, which will test and tweak until everything runs as it should. As Ravi Trivedi, an Anthropic engineer, put it: "The key principle is getting out of Claude's way. We like to say: 'Let it cook.'"
Trivedi presented a new Claude Code feature, announced two weeks ago, called dreaming. Claude Code agents write notes to themselves, recording useful information about specific tasks. When another coding agent later works on the same code, it can use the notes to get up to speed faster and learn from previous errors. Dreaming is a system that reads through all these notes and consolidates the information, spotting patterns and common issues across tasks. In theory, it should help Claude Code learn about a particular code base and get better over time.
Code with Claude is aimed at developers. Alongside product showcases and workshops from Anthropic, there were how-tos from companies that reshaped their software development teams around Claude Code - including Spotify, Delivery Hero, Lovable, Base44, and Monday.com (three startups vibe-coding apps that help people vibe-code apps). There were no signs of unease. Everybody I met wanted in.
Yet outside the conference, 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 pushed by managers chasing productivity gains, when in practice the technology makes software development harder because of all the extra code developers must now review. "The only people I've heard saying that generated code is fine are those who don't read it," a user called pron posted on Hacker News last week. Others claim their coding abilities have fallen off as they hand more tasks to AI. Researchers have warned that AI tools can produce unsafe code, making software more vulnerable to attacks.
I sat down with Claude engineering lead Katelyn Lesse and product lead Angela Jiang and asked what they made of the concerns that a sudden flood of code generated (and shipped) without proper human oversight was kicking serious security and maintenance problems down the road. "All of the old software development best practices still apply. They've applied this entire time," said Lesse. "I think there are a lot of people and teams that may have lost sight of them in this moment."
Yet as Anthropic and others push for greater automation and tools like Claude Code improve, the temptation increases to offload more tasks, including oversight. Lesse told me some technical managers at Anthropic are exhausted by keeping up with all the code their teams now produce. "Part of things happening so much more quickly is just managing your time," she said. "I think that right now Claude is probably as good as a midlevel engineer at writing code," she added. You still need expert engineers to design a system and troubleshoot harder problems, she said, "But over time we want Claude to get better and better at all different types of engineering." Jiang agreed: "I think the absolute end state we're trying to get to is Claude basically being able to build itself."