In a talk at AI Codecon, Anthropic's head of product for Claude Code, Cat Wu, revealed that the now-popular coding assistant began as a humble personal project. Creator Boris Cherny initially built a terminal widget to test Anthropic's APIs, capable of making only small edits. He shared the prototype in a notebook, and within weeks, adoption spread organically through the company.
"Over the course of weeks from when he first shared it, it went from just him using it to he would show up to the office and the neighboring labs engineers would be using it," Wu explained. "I was using it. And then I was noticing everyone on my team was using it. And within I want to say two months, pretty much the entire company was using it."
The grassroots success convinced Anthropic to share Claude Code with the world, turning an engineer's notebook experiment into a widely used tool.