I was listening to a talk by Anthropic folks on Claude Code https://youtu.be/6eBSHbLKuN0?t=1549.
In the talk speaker was asked why they built Claude code as CLI tool instead of IDE. They gave two reasons:
- Claude Code is built by Anthropic and at Anthropic people use broad range of IDEs. Some people use VSCode, some use Zed, or vim or emacs. It was hard to build something that works for everyone. Terminal is the common denominator.
- Second thing is that an Anthropic we believe we see up close how fast models are getting better. There is a good chance that by the end of the year people are not using IDEs anymore. We want to get ready for this future and we want to avoid over investing in UIs and other layers on top. The way models are progressing it may not be useful work pretty soon.
I think the second point is important here. Anthropic is taking a different view point – OpenAI is acquiring Windsurf for $ 3 billion. Microsoft has invested so much on GitHub Copilot over the last few years.
I personally think UIs are important. if you want to win enterprise adoption. Majority of the enterprise developers will need GUI based tools.
Discover more from Shekhar Gulati
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
