CLAUDE IS MY CO-FOUNDER

By launching the vibe-coding trend, Anthropic has made it easy for startups to write simple code and even create complex products. As the company hits $9 billion in revenue, rivals like OpenAl are scrambling to catch up.

- by BEN SHERRY

FOUNDER MODE Dario Amodei and six others left OpenAl in 2020 to start their own AI lab, Anthropic.

Investor updates used to be the bane of Aakash Shah's month. Now, he says, it's "just an afternoon with coffee." Shah founded allergy tech startup Wyndly in 2020, and would spend hours weaving together data from disconnected sources. As a self-proclaimed "hobby coder," Shah, the company's CEO, found himself trying to program his own analysis system, to no avail. Then, earlier this year, Shah's lead engineer gave him a tip: download Claude Code, a new AI-powered software engineering tool from San Francisco-based startup Anthropic, and just ask it to conduct the analysis he needed.

Within minutes of typing his first prompt, Shah was fixing problems that had previously taken him hours, and messaging with the tool as if it were a human analyst. Stunned, he recalls thinking that Claude "fundamentally is doing something that was effectively impossible to do before."

Shah isn't alone. Over the past year, many entrepreneurs have tapped Claude, Anthropic's AI model, to write code and launch features, in effect using the AI assistant as a technical co-founder. As Claude has become ever more sophisticated, so have the tasks it can handle—spawning a whole new way of developing software known as vibe coding, a term coined by renowned AI scientist and OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy. It's what happens when you describe what you want the AI to build in plain language and watch it write the code for you—no programming knowledge required.