Ben Cohen

I am Ben Cohen.

I am the Science of Success Columnist for The Wall Street Journal.

Well, I often send Joanna annoying text messages about technology, and I started bothering her with texts about Claude Code, asking if she had played around with it and also asking, like, when are you going to write about it?

It makes vibe coding even simpler for people who don't know anything about code, but also do know everything about code.

I mean, that's the amazing thing about this product is that

People who have spent their lives as software developers and have risen to the top of their field as coders are now increasingly using cloud code for their code, in addition to people who don't know a lick of code like Joanna and me.

Okay, so the origin story of Cloud Code goes back to September 2024, like the ancient days of AI, like 18 months ago, with Boris Cherny, who is the father of Cloud Code.

He began tinkering with this coding tool as a side project one day not long after he started at Anthropic.

What he found interesting was that whenever he looked at the screens of like data scientists within Anthropic, so not like software developers or coders, they were using cloud code, even when it wasn't actually all that easy to use, like a primitive, clunky version of cloud code.

They were getting value out of it.

And then he starts looking around the office and he sees non-technical people on the sales team.

using cloud code to analyze their calls and summarize meetings.

And he thinks, oh, this is actually interesting.

People who are not just pure coders are using this to their advantage too.

I think that timing is really important.

It comes out right before everyone goes home for the holidays and is off.

And I think that like part of the momentum and how this thing spread so quickly in Silicon Valley is that people who work inside these companies were just at home and it was the holidays and they were screwing around on their computers like they always do.

And suddenly they had time and inclination to play and experiment with Cloud Code.

I think a whole lot of them were like completely blown away by what they found.

And I think my reaction was like, oh my God, not only are we doing this, I can't believe it did this already.