Anthropic’s Claude Code has been gaining popularity among programmers since its launch last February. When I first wrote about the tool back in May, it was little known among non-programmers.
That started to change over the holidays. Word began to spread that — despite its name — Claude Code wasn’t just for code. It’s a general-purpose agent that can help users with a wide range of tasks.
Claude Code is “marketed as a tool for computer programmers, so I wasn’t using it because I’m not a computer programmer,” wrote the liberal Substack author Matt Yglesias on December 26. “But some friends urged me to fire up the command line and use it.”
“In a sense, everything you can do on a computer is a question of writing code,” Yglesias added. “So I downloaded the entire General Social Survey file, and put it in a directory with a Claude Code project. Then if I ask Claude a question about the GSS data, Claude writes up the R scripts it needs to interrogate the data set and answer the question.”
Last week, Anthropic itself capitalized on this trend with the release of Anthropic Cowork, a variant of Claude Code designed for use by non-programmers.
Claude Code is a text-based tool that runs in a command-line environment (for example, the Terminal app on a Mac). The command line is a familiar environment for programmers, but many normal users find it confusing and even intimidating.
Cowork is a Mac app that superficially looks like a normal chatbot. Indeed, it looks so much like a normal chatbot that you might be wondering why it’s a separate product at all. If Anthropic wanted to bring Claude Code’s powerful capabilities to a general audience, why not just add those features to the regular Claude chatbot?
What ultimately differentiates Claude Code from conventional web-based chatbots isn’t any specific feature or capability. It’s a different philosophy about risk and responsibility.