Claude Code’s Meteoric Rise: Unveiling the Story of Irresistible Success

There was a time when the commute to the office was spent daydreaming out the window, finishing a chapter started the night before, or playing Candy Crush. At Spotify, some engineers found a better use for these long minutes, as Gustav Söderström, co-CEO of the Swedish group, celebrated during the presentation of the fourth quarter 2025 results to investors: putting Claude to work. “During his morning commute, a Spotify engineer can ask Claude, via Slack on his phone, to fix a bug or add a new feature to the iOS app,” explained the executive, who also serves as CTO and CPO. “And when Claude completes the task, the engineer receives a new version of the app, sent via Slack to his mobile, which he can merge into production even before reaching his office.”

As reported by the specialized media TechCrunch, this scenario, which will give palpitations to anyone keen on maintaining a work-life balance, illustrates the ongoing shift in the developer profession over the past several months, following the emergence of AI-powered coding tools. And, especially, its main representative: Claude Code. “Our top developers haven’t written a single line of code since last December,” the executive confirms. And judging by the release pace, the approach seems to be paying off: since January, the Swedish group, which had already deployed about fifty features in 2025, has further accelerated its pace, unveiling an all time version of Wrapped, an option to organize playlists into folders or a tool for clipping podcast excerpts. But also a good dozen other features.

Spotify is not the only company to have developed a severe dependency on the tool designed by Anthropic. At Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, the situation has even become embarrassing. In December 2025, the group opened access to Claude Code to several thousand of its engineers, as well as project managers and designers with no coding skills, to evaluate the tool in a real engineering environment. The trial proved so successful, according to The Verge, that Claude Code ended up overshadowing GitHub Copilot CLI, the in-house tool that Microsoft was trying to impose on its teams. On June 30, the tech giant plans to terminate all licenses distributed six months earlier.

Hardly a week goes by without an article discussing a similar trajectory appearing in the specialized press. This is a sign that in just a few months, Claude Code is deeply reshaping the developer profession, while establishing itself as one of Anthropic’s main sources of revenue. But how did we get here?

A Man, a Terminal, an Insight

Behind the success of Claude Code stands a name: Boris Cherny. This engineer, who previously worked at Meta on Instagram and Facebook, joined Anthropic’s Labs unit in September 2024, which would later be known for innovations like Skills or the Claude desktop app. His role in this five-person team was initially undefined: he began by familiarizing himself with the company’s API. “At first, Anthropic wasn’t really sure if it wanted to develop products, but if it did, it would definitely be around coding, because that helps us design better coding models and study security issues,” he told journalist Casey Newton, author of the Platformer newsletter.

At the time, the capabilities of Anthropic’s flagship model, Claude Sonnet 3.5, were still limited and “the coding tools available were all IDEs or IDE extensions,” limited to autocompletion tasks, he recalls. In essence: the developer writes one line of code, and the model predicts the next. “We felt it was possible to design a product that could leverage the model’s capabilities, but no one had yet built the interface to do it,” he continues. Instead of tackling this daunting task, he tinkered with a prototype that ran in the terminal, the most economical setup. “I put it together in a few days and put it in the hands of my colleagues, just out of curiosity, to see if they would use it and how.” From the first day, a fifth of the company’s engineers adopted it. By the fifth day, half.

The day he realized the potential of the tool, his “eureka moment,” Boris Cherny experienced it by asking his program to identify the music he was listening to. A scene he even captured on video, “a funny historical artifact” that he has since donated to a museum. “I asked Claude what music I was listening to, and it wrote a few lines of code to open my audio player. It wrote this code in AppleScript, a language I don’t know, and it wouldn’t have occurred to me to write code to answer this question. It just did it, and I thought: that’s surprising. It solved the problem in a way I wouldn’t have used.”

A conversation with Catherine Wu, who was then conducting research on computer use by agents and would later become head of product for Claude Code, prompted him to greatly expand the capabilities of his prototype by giving it access to the file system. 

Suddenly, this agent became really interesting. I launched it into our codebase and started asking it questions. Claude began to explore the system, read files, look at imports, then read the files defined in these imports, he recalls to Pragmatic Engineer.

The public rollout spanned four months. A research preview was quietly deployed in February 2025, alongside the launch of Claude Sonnet 3.7. General availability in May went almost unnoticed: the announcement was only a paragraph in the post dedicated to the launch of Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4. The tool nevertheless quickly made a splash, in a landscape previously dominated by tools like Cursor or GitHub Copilot. “Almost immediately, it caught on,” the engineer told WIRED. By November 2025, Claude Code had already surpassed a billion dollars in annualized revenue. Three months later, it generated 2.5 billion, nearly a fifth of the company’s revenue.

The Shift to Opus 4.5

Boris Cherny readily admits to WIRED: the first public versions of Claude Code were far from perfect, and the models powering them struggled to deliver the expected performance. The turning point, according to him, came with the release of Claude Opus 4.5, just days before Thanksgiving. A new model, presented as “intelligent and efficient,” particularly for development tasks, proved indeed capable of handling longer missions, unsupervised, with much higher reliability. “Before Opus 4.5, you kind of had to take apart the Lego and move forward step by step. Now, you just say: ‘Here’s the magic castle. Build it.’ And it’s done,” summarized a consulting firm executive in The Verge. “We went from ‘I have to sit and watch it, hold its hand and check everything’ to ‘it’s going to get there by default,'” added a developer.

Every moment not spent locked in on Claude Code feels very high opportunity cost all of a sudden

— Beff (e/acc) (@beffjezos) January 4, 2026

Data from Arena (formerly Chatbot Arena), a platform striving to objectively assess the performance of models across all categories and on targeted tasks based on user votes, supports the testimonials gathered by The Verge. Since December 2025, when BDM began sharing its dedicated ranking for coding and development, it’s simple: Anthropic has never left the top position. It has been occupied successively by versions 4.5, 4.6, and 4.7 of Claude Opus, in “standard” or “thinking” mode.

Even better: Anthropic has placed far more models in the top 10 than its competitors, and by a comfortable margin. Between December 2025 and June 2026, its LLMs appear 31 times. For comparison, OpenAI’s models only appear twelve times during the period, reaching the second-place at best in February 2026, while Google’s own technologies make it to the top 11 times, with a fourth-place for best ranking.

OpenAI’s Delayed Response

OpenAI realized the impact of the trend with a bit of a delay. In an excellent article, WIRED reports that Thibault Sottiaux, who now leads the Core Product & Platform teams of the Californian company, set up a unit as early as March 2025 to deliver a competing assistant within weeks, which would become Codex. Concurrently, Sam Altman considered acquiring Windsurf for 3 billion dollars, hoping to inherit an already established team and client base. The deal remained in limbo for several months: Microsoft, a long-time partner of OpenAI, demanded access to Windsurf’s intellectual property, according to the The Wall Street Journal.

When Codex finally arrived in April 2025, the gap was already challenging to bridge. And it only continued to widen. By the end of January 2026, OpenAI’s assistant had just surpassed one billion dollars in ARR, compared to the 2.5 billion claimed by Claude Code from Anthropic at the same time. “Being first to market is very valuable. We experienced this with ChatGPT,” Sam Altman admitted to WIRED. However, the delay in launch doesn’t explain everything. If Claude Code can boast of being a leader in its segment, it’s also the result of Anthropic’s structural choices: a clear targeting of businesses, a bet on agentive AI, and a sustained release pace, even though, on this point, its main competitor is not lagging behind. In recent weeks alone, Claude Code has been enriched with features like routines, a Channels function, or an auto mode. Probably because its development team itself benefits from an assistant that’s up to the task, as Boris Cherny revealed to Platformer: “It’s been over six months since Claude Code was coded 100% by Claude Code.”

However, success has its downsides: Claude Code consumes resources and is costly. In June, Catherine Wu told Le Monde that the average user was now spending more than twenty hours a week on the tool, equivalent to just over a part-time job. Such intense use has saturated Anthropic’s infrastructure, resulting in repeated complaints on forums and social media. Some pointed out limits reached by mid-morning, others slowdowns during peak hours, or tokens being used up too quickly. As a result, to meet demand, the company signed an agreement in May with SpaceX that gives it access to the full capabilities of the Colossus 1 data center in Memphis, about 300 megawatts and 220,000 Nvidia GPUs. A deal valued at 1.25 billion dollars per month, according to Les Échos, which adds to other partnerships forged with Google or Amazon, and has already allowed the company to double the quotas of five-hour sessions on Claude Code for paying subscribers, remove limits during peak hours, and raise those of the API.

Saying ‘hey’ cost me 22% of my usage limits

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Jordan Park

Jordan Park writes in-depth reviews and editorial opinion pieces for Touch Reviews. With a background in UI/UX design, Jordan offers a unique perspective on device usability and user experience across smartphones, tablets, and mobile software.