Blog - Building Software

The Homecoming

Claude Code is a product story as much as it is an AI story.

It marks a return to an era where raw productivity was an asset.

Somewhere along the way, we lost the magic of experiencing that raw power. We traded productivity for the "safety" of heavy IDEs, Jira tickets, and sprawling Confluence pages. While these modern tools claim to manage complexity, they actually just hide it; burying developers, product managers, and designers under layers of abstraction and bureaucracy.

The "Homecoming" is a return to the metal.

By bringing Claude directly into the Shell (TUI), the Claude Code team executed two massive paradigm shifts at once:

Moving beyond the Chatbot: Chat interface or whatever copilot is are living in the old "enterprise"; the chat window and the editor/application. You ask a question, get an answer, then manually figure out where it goes and how to apply it. It's neither a collaboration tool nor a productivity tool. Claude Code's focus is giving you maximum power and the ability to truly collaborate with a model.
Moving beyond the IDE: For 30 years, IDEs promised to make development easier by adding features. Syntax highlighting, Autocomplete, Integrated debugging, Git GUIs, Plugin ecosystems. Each feature added convenience and also added a layer between you and your code. Claude Code strips those layers back.

Why the Terminal Matters

There's a technical reason the terminal is the right primitive for AI-assisted productivity.

When Claude Code needs to find something in your codebase, it runs grep. When it needs to target a set of files, it uses glob patterns. When it needs to read a file, it reads the file. When it needs to run your tests, it runs the same command you would: npm test or pytest or whatever your stack uses.

There's no proprietary indexing system. No embeddings database that needs to "sync" with your repo. No plugin API that breaks when VS Code updates. Also, for any given session, you are allowed to transparently build the context you want .... in a file!!!

The shell is a universal interface. It works the same way whether a human is typing commands or an AI is executing them. This is why Unix pipes still work after 50 years - they're simple enough to compose infinitely.

And the Claude Code team took the terminal seriously as a platform. Thariq Shihipar, an engineer on the team, explained the architecture: "Most people's mental model of Claude Code is that 'it's just a TUI' but it should really be closer to 'a small game engine'. For each frame our pipeline constructs a scene graph with React then → layouts elements → rasterizes them to a 2d screen → diffs that against the previous screen → finally uses the diff to generate ANSI sequences to draw." They run on a ~16ms frame budget. This isn't a CLI wrapper with AI bolted on - it's a proper rendering engine that happens to output to your terminal.

Claude Code operates at the terminal layer. It sees what you see. It runs what you would run. If you see something you don't like, ctrl+c out of it - the ultimate escape hatch.

Product Decision: Bet on the past to win the future.

Building the Right Thing

Claude Code was not the first out of the gate.

Cursor launched in early 2024. GitHub Copilot has been in the market since 2021. Windsurf, Devin etc. all had head starts. By the time Claude Code shipped, the "AI coding assistant" category was already crowded.

You could call Claude Code a late bloomer.

But building a useful product focused on productivity is very different from building a feature-rich product. The team at Anthropic understood this. The trade-offs they made versus their competition are worth studying.

Choosing the Right Primitive

They bet on the command line when the industry heavyweights were betting on IDEs.

This was contrarian. The conventional wisdom said: developers live in IDEs, so AI tools should live there too. Cursor, Windsurf, and Copilot all followed this logic. Build where the users already are.

Claude Code said: the IDE is the problem, not the solution.

The terminal, source control, and the filesystem have survived every technology shift of the last 50 years. They work on every operating system, every cloud provider, every CI/CD system. They're the cockroach technologies - unkillable because they're simple.

By building on these foundations, Claude Code inherits their composability. You can pipe data into it (cat logs.txt | claude -p "summarize"), pipe its output to other tools (--output-format json | jq), wrap it in shell scripts with the -p flag for non-interactive execution, and integrate it into CI/CD pipelines without waiting for someone to build a plugin.

Respecting the Developer's Environment

Most AI coding tools are pushy. Copilot auto-suggests as you type - sometimes helpfully, often distractingly. Cursor's Composer opens panels and modifies files with enthusiasm. These tools optimize for showing you what they can do.

Claude Code chose interrupt-driven as the default.

You invoke it when you need it. You tell it what to do. It asks permission before modifying files. It shows you exactly what changes it proposes before applying them. Then it gets out of the way.

This is a product philosophy, not a technical limitation. The team decided that developer attention and consent are sacred. Your codebase is yours - the AI is a guest. Although their commit messages are rather obnoxious.

Respect for the Community

The Claude Code team ships weekly. The changelog shows features, fixes, and performance improvements landing every 7-10 days. When users reported sluggishness on large repos, fixes shipped within weeks. When users wanted hooks, they built hooks. When users asked for plugins, Boris announced them on X before the official release.

Each improvement is incremental. But they compound. After three months, you're dramatically more productive and you can't pinpoint when the inflection happened.

The team is unusually accessible. Boris Cherny, the creator, shares his workflow publicly - how he runs 10-15 concurrent sessions, why he uses Opus 4.5 for everything. His stance: "There is no one correct way to use Claude Code: we intentionally build it in a way that you can use it, customize it, and hack it however you like." Thariq Shihipar writes technical deep-dives, hosts Office Hours, open-sources examples.

This is "developer-first" as an operating rhythm, not a marketing phrase.

The Elegant Crudeness of How It Actually Works

Here's something most Claude Code users don't realize: the way it "understands" your codebase is surprisingly straightforward.

When you ask Claude Code to make a change, it typically:

Searches your codebase for relevant patterns (function names, file references, error messages)
Reads the files it found
Reasons about what changes are needed
Edits or writes the files

That's it.

This sounds primitive. And in some ways, it is. The algorithm is "leaky" - it sometimes greps for the wrong thing, misses relevant context, or loses track of changes across files.

But there's a reason this approach works:

Grep is fast and battle-tested. It's been optimized for 50 years. It works on any text, in any language, with any encoding. It doesn't need to "index" your repo first.

The model is good enough to compensate. Claude can reason about partial context, ask for more information if needed, and course-correct when something doesn't work.

Failures are visible. When Claude Code greps for the wrong pattern, you can see it happening. You can interrupt and redirect. Compare this to IDE-based tools where the AI operates through an opaque indexing layer - when those fail, you have no idea why.

Most AI products hide their limitations behind polished UIs. Claude Code's limitations are transparent, which means they're debuggable. You're not fighting a black box.

What This Means Beyond Developers

The "homecoming" metaphor applies differently depending on your role.

For developers: You get direct control back. No waiting for IDE plugins to support your use case. No fighting with AI features that "helpfully" modify things you didn't ask to change. The tool operates at the same level you do.

For product managers: The gap between "describe what I want" and "see it working" collapses. You can sit with Claude Code, articulate a feature, watch it get implemented, and iterate in real-time. The sprint planning → implementation → review cycle compresses into a conversation.

For designers: You can describe visual changes in natural language and see them applied immediately. "Make the button larger, add more padding, change the color to match the header" - then iterate until it's right. No more waiting for a developer to "get to it."

For leaders: The leverage equation has changed. A small team with the right tools and clear intent now outperforms a large team mired in process. This isn't about replacing people - it's about removing the coordination overhead that made large teams necessary in the first place.

The Product Lesson

Claude Code's success is not primarily about having the best model. Anthropic's models are excellent, but that's table stakes - OpenAI and Google have strong models too.

The lesson is about product craft:

They chose the right primitive. Terminal over IDE. This was contrarian and correct.
They respected the user's environment. Interrupt-driven, permission-based, transparent about what it's doing.
They shipped incrementally. No "big bang" launches. Steady compounding improvements.
They engaged the community authentically. Responsive dev rel, openness to feedback, willingness to explain their thinking.
They kept the architecture simple. Grep → Read → Reason → Edit. Crude but debuggable.

This is what good product building looks like. Not feature checklists. Not racing to ship first. Not hiding complexity behind polish.

Building the right thing, the right way, for the right user.

The late bloomer won because they understood something the first movers missed: The new world looks very similar to the old world - so back to the future it is.

Claude Code's product philosophy is to make you superhuman again.

Sources & further reading:

Vibe Coding: Claude Code Edition