The AI Daily Brief: Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis
Why Everyone Is Obsessed With Claude Code
09 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Today on the AI Daily Brief, why everyone is obsessed with cloud code right now. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI. All right, friends, quick announcements before we dive in. First of all, thank you to today's sponsors, KPMG, Super Intelligent, and Zencoder.
To get an ad-free version of the show, go to patreon.com slash ai-dailybrief, or you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts. And to learn more about sponsoring the show, send us a note at sponsors at ai-dailybrief.ai. Now, this was one of those days where it was more about the discussion going on in the space than about the news in the space.
And this whole Claude Code Opus 4.5 inflection point has been really brewing for a number of weeks now. Because of that, I ended up doing the whole show about that. We will be back with our normal headlines in domain format tomorrow.
And the last thing before we dive in, after having so many of you sign up to participate in this AIDB New Year, I have gone ahead and launched a free community for people who are participating in that and just for discussion of AI building in general. Now, additionally, this is imagined as primarily about the AIDB New Year's project, but we'll see if that changes.
I'm certainly thinking about it as a community that might go on longer, which is why I've called it AI Operators. If you sign up at aidbnewyear.com, there's a link to the community on the program page, and you can also find a link from the main website page, ai-dailybrief.ai. Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief.
Ever since Anthropic released Opus 4.5, there has been a sense that we've fundamentally shifted in terms of what AI coding is capable of. In point of fact, it's been actually a combination of model advances, as well as the tools and platforms through which we access them, like Cloud Code, that have contributed to the sense of something fundamental having shifted.
But boy, is there a sense that something fundamental has shifted. On January 4th, Simon Willison posted, It genuinely feels to me like GPT-5-2 and Opus 4.5 in November represent an inflection point, one of those moments where the models get incrementally better in a way that tips across an invisible capability line where suddenly a whole bunch of much harder coding problems open up.
OpenAI's Greg Brockman agreed. Reposting and sharing, it does feel like models have just cleared a threshold of utility in software engineering. AI builder and YouTuber Theo writes, It feels like we're actually in one of those everything-is-about-to-change moments.
And the din is loud enough that publications like Axios are picking up on it and writing stories even though there's no particular news that the conversation is based on. Now, to be fair, some called this early. From the moment that Opus 4.5 launched, Dan Shipper and every have been very much on the tip that this represented something different.
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Chapter 2: How has Claude Code changed the landscape of AI coding?
If you are skeptical of coding agents, try it on a domain that you are already an expert of. Build something complex from scratch where you can be the judge of the artifacts. In other words, as many pointed out, even Google engineers are blown away by Claude Code. So whatever is going on, it's clearly widespread.
In fact, when Alex Lieberman again posted on January 2nd that he wanted to start a community dedicated to Claude Code, more than 7,000 people signed up. So many, in fact, that he's now hiring a program and community manager to run that community. Now, one of the key themes is that Claude Code is actually misnamed.
Investor Nikunj Kothari wrote, Claude Code should be thought of as Claude Computer, because that's what we're getting a glimpse of. Alien intelligence that has human tools, browser, file system, terminal commands, and others, with generalized ability to do any task. Terminal UX is all that's stopping folks from utilizing this all the time.
But the GUI will come, either through Anthropic directly or someone packaging the agent SDK neatly. And indeed, one of the things that you see is that the people who are really getting the most out of cloud code are using it for everything. Alex Vanovic wrote, started using cloud code for managing my team, admin, program management, meetings, agendas, etc.
Basically, cloud is my chief of staff now. Marketing and crypto entrepreneur Amanda Cassatt wrote, I'm now coding air quotes all day with cloud code. If you haven't tried it, you don't understand. It literally takes over your computer and does everything for you. There was something wrong with the sound on my Mac, and I used Cloud Code to fix it rather than open settings.
She also tweeted, Cloud Code is leaving everyone in the dust right now. If you haven't tried it, you need to now. You just speak in English like it's the Starship Enterprise. It takes over your computer and does everything for you. It's not like asking a chat model to help you code where it puts code in the weird little box.
It's not a co-pilot checking over your code or teaching you how to code, unless you want that. No copy and pasting between windows, no learning to code, no learning curve at all. Chicago Booth professor Alex Emes wrote, To those who are curious about the hoopla, Cloud Code is not just for code.
It's an AI agent that can essentially act like a combination of personal assistant and colleague that has access to your machine. Need your files organized? Need to create a better calendar app and organize your life? Need a sounding board for a presentation that's coming up? Need to organize your notes that are all over the place for that presentation? Cloud Code will do that.
Just write it out in plain text and make it happen. Alex also agreed that the word code in the name will slow adoption. Boris Cherny, who built clod code, also shared how he used it, and it gives you a sense of just how comprehensively the power users are putting this tool into practice. Boris writes, I run five clods in parallel in my terminal.
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Chapter 3: What are the implications of autonomous coding for developers?
Codex was not much better on this and ran into its own set of interestingly distinct bugs and algorithmic mistakes that I had to carefully work through. JF Puget, who does machine learning at NVIDIA, did a cloud code test and came to the conclusion, I am more and more convinced that its value is where you know the best.
The rest is vibe coding, which can be fine for personal projects, but definitely not fine for product development. Now, to be honest, I think this is in and of itself a temporary state and a temporary opinion.
I think a lot of the things that people think currently are barriers on pressing send on production software right now will just be blown over in the future with builders content to just try to fix the problems when they come up. Which is not to say that I get every use case that's being shared right now.
Entrepreneur David Siegel shared an admittedly extremely cool project called Claude Canvas, where he basically gave Claude code the capability of creating a generative UI based on the particular task at hand. Now, this was undeniably super cool and technically awesome.
However, the three examples that he gave of scheduling a call with his CTO, booking a flight and writing emails just did not resonate with me at all. Specifically, the user experience of doing those things in Cloud Code, as opposed to the highly optimized UXs that have been created for them, just doesn't make sense from where I'm sitting. Calendar scheduling is not some massive pain.
You just go into your Google Calendar, pull up your teammates' schedule with their email, and pick a time that works for you both.
For flights, by no stretch would I say that Flight Discovery UX is perfected, but seeing Claude Code re-approximate the seat layout of an airplane, rather than just using the version of that on, for example, the Delta app, just seems really not time-saving to me in any meaningful way.
What's interesting, though, is that it's very clear that David is not using Claude code in a one-off to one-off way. He's using it very comprehensively as a personal agent across a huge span of his work and interactions with the world of the internet.
And so what strikes me is that while it's possible that he's just one of those folks who's really excited about a new tool and is exploring all the different use cases, even though some of them won't make sense for that tool in the long run, it strikes me as perhaps more likely that David is in the midst of a transition to a post-UX world.
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Chapter 4: How are users integrating Claude Code into their workflows?
Another prediction, which is really more of a sensibility or a feeling which you can see in some of these posts, is that although this is amazing, there is something being lost too as the job of the software engineer changes. In another viral post, Duca writes, "'I'm not sure if other developers feel like this, but I feel kind of depressed.
Like everyone else, I've been using Claude Code for a while. It's not a recent thing. And it's incredible. I've never found coding more fun.'" The stuff you can do and the speed you can do it at now is absolutely insane. And I'm using it to ship a lot and solve customer problems faster. So all around, it's a win.
But at the same time, the skill I spent 10,000s of hours getting good at, programming, the thing I spent most of my life getting good at, is becoming a full commodity extremely quickly. As much fun as it is and as much as I like using the tools, there's something disheartening about the thing you spent most of your life getting good at now being mostly useless.
writes Pathak, everyone is going to feel this soon. Another line of predictions, as expressed by Lewis, everyone who tried Claude Code over the holidays and has been thinking deeply about this for seven days. All white-collar jobs are toast. It's over.
Although to be fair to Lewis, he was being a little tongue-in-cheek and making fun of the Twitter hype hosts that love big pronouncements like all white-collar jobs are toast. That's certainly part of the sensibility that is floating around out there right now.
Maybe more discreetly, outside of all jobs being toast, there's certainly a sense that the way work happens and the way that business happens is going to look quite different. Damien Player writes, things I'm bearish on in 2026 because of quad code. One, massive teams. Opus 4.5 can now do the work of five people for $200 a month. Headcount is a liability now. Two, manual workflows.
If a human touches the same task twice, it should be automated, no exceptions. Three, agency services not tied to ROI. No one's paying 3K a month for email when AI can write, test, and optimize the entire funnel. The companies that figure this out first will run circles around everyone else. The ones that don't will die off.
Another big theme in the predictions, which I completely agree with, we'll call mainstreaming. Riley Brown writes, you thought 2025 was the vibe coding boom? Three months from now, all platforms, not just X, will be talking about it. Lovable and Replit have no moat. The space is wide open.
And I think Riley is dead on when he notes that this is still so contained to the people who were already either A, coding, or B, deeply involved in AI in some way. And it is not going to take long for the wide world of normies to realize that they have been given godlike creation powers unlike anything they've ever experienced before. Hamal Hussain gave an example.
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Chapter 5: What new possibilities does Claude Code offer for app development?
Can you specify goals? Can you provide context? Can you divide up tasks? Can you give feedback? These are teachable skills. Also, UIs need to support management. Now, he points out that this is going to get an assist likely from UI when he writes, a big question for the coming year is whether the major AI labs can rethink the experience to be more suited towards delegation on other tasks.
I think the answer will be if they don't, there will be other interfaces that do that. Now, beyond the enterprise world, there are also a lot of thoughts about what new possibilities open up with application development. Balaji Srinivasan writes about a golden age of local and decentralized apps.
He writes, the reason we will have this golden age is that cloud code allows you to quickly clone any moderately complex cloud-based app into a decent local one that runs on only your files. Apps of moderate complexity without strong global network effects are suddenly easy to clone. The clone won't be perfect right away, but it'll be pretty good.
And if the cloning dev sticks with it, it'll get better. This gets to that idea of personal software, which is a big theme for our predictions next year. Likewise, the apps are going to look different. Dan Shipper talked a little bit more about what the idea of agent-native apps really means.
He writes that with traditional software architecture, you write code that defines what happens and the computer executes your instructions. With agent-native architecture, you define outcomes in natural language. The agent figures out how to achieve them using tools. In an agent-native world, features are prompts, not code. All of this, he says, enables emergent capability in your app.
It can do things you didn't plan for. This, he says, allows you to discover latent demand from your users that inform your roadmap. Dan points out, by the way, that this is fairly similar to how Boris Cherny actually builds features into Cloud Code.
And contrary to the prediction that Cloud Code and these new models are just going to destroy all jobs, there are many who are extremely excited about the entrepreneurial possibilities that these tools and models are going to unlock. Greg Eisenberg writes, I regret to inform you the amount of opportunity to build software startups and mobile apps with Cloud Code, etc.
is mind-bending at the moment. In another tweet, he writes, "...the $1.3 trillion App Store doesn't die, it's going to explode. Cloud Code makes it so that anyone can ship an app, which means the App Store fills up 10,000 times faster than before. Most are AI junk, but a few are surprisingly good and personal instead of universal. Apple will get stricter and add more filters.
How else are they going to deal with the flood of apps and making it easier for people to find them? At the same time, the types of apps will change over the next 24 months. People will start building very specific apps for very specific situations." An example he gives is an app that tells me if my snoring last night was bad enough to wake my partner instead of a generic sleep tracker.
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