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- [00:06]
Ryan Knudsen
Do you guys want to start out by introducing yourselves?
- [00:08]
Ben Cohen
Oh, why don't you go first, Joanna?
- [00:10]
Joanna Stern
I am Joanna Stern. I am the senior personal technology columnist at the Wall Street Journal.
- [00:14]
Ben Cohen
I am Ben Cohen. I am the Science of Success columnist for the Wall Street Journal.
- [00:20]
Ryan Knudsen
Ben and Joanna aren't just colleagues. They're also friends who frequently text back and forth.
- [00:26]
Ben Cohen
Well, I often send Joanna annoying text messages, and I started bothering her with texts about Claude code, asking if she had played around with it, and also asking like, when are you going to write about it?
- [00:42]
Ryan Knudsen
Claude code is a coding tool made by the AI company Anthropic. The tool allows users to create websites, apps, or anything that requires coding just by typing your vision into a chat box. It's a process known as vibe coding.
- [00:57]
Joanna Stern
It's coding with your vibes, right? You don't know how to code. You type it into your chatbot, describe the thing you want, and create the thing.
- [01:07]
Ryan Knudsen
Late last year, Claude code received a major update, and it worked so well. It started blowing people's minds in the tech world. And a few weeks ago, Ben started playing with it and texting Joanna about the stuff he was making.
- [01:21]
Joanna Stern
His first one was he was bragging about his new personal website that he made with Claude code.
- [01:26]
Ryan Knudsen
And he was like, hey, senior tech columnist, look at this website that I made. Aren't you proud of me?
- [01:31]
Joanna Stern
And I think my text back was like, that's really awesome. Welcome to 1995, Ben. Like, that's super cool.
- [01:37]
Ryan Knudsen
It looked old and crappy.
- [01:38]
Joanna Stern
No, actually, it looks really good. Everyone should go visit bzcohen.com Is that right?
- [01:42]
Ben Cohen
Absolutely.
- [01:47]
Ryan Knudsen
Ben and Joanna have both been spending a lot of time with Claude code, and they say it's a development that could have big implications for jobs across many different industries.
- [01:56]
Ben Cohen
It makes vibe coding even simpler for people who don't know anything about code, but also do know everything about code. I mean, that's the amazing thing about this product, is that people who have spent their lives as software developers and have risen to the top of their field as coders are now increasingly using Claude code for their code, in addition to people who don't know a lick of code, like Joanna and me.
- [02:24]
Ryan Knudsen
Welcome to the Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Ryan knudsen. It's Wednesday, February 4th. Coming up on the show, why everyone is freaking out about Claude code. Hey, it's Ryan. Thanks for being a listener to our show. If you're looking for more deeply reported stories like the ones we share every day, consider becoming a Subscriber to the Wall street journal, visit subscribe.WSJ.com thejournal to subscribe now. So I've been reading a lot about Claude code and I've been seeing a lot of people who follow AI saying that this could be the biggest thing to happen in AI since ChatGPT. Why are people making that comparison?
- [03:26]
Joanna Stern
Well, I think since we've had the ChatGPT moment, we've seen all of this progression in models. And so I think all these big leaps we've had with AI products, whether it be image generators or video generators, these have all been like small unlocks to things that computers can do for us, right? We're like, wow, holy crap, it made that image. And it looks so much better than the image it made last year. Right? And I think that's what this cloud code moment was for. Coding and vibe coding was, wow, this is getting so good that people that are in the tech world are using this fully to write their code.
- [04:10]
Ryan Knudsen
All right, tell me the story of how Claude Code was created.
- [04:13]
Ben Cohen
Okay, so the origin story of Claude Code goes back to September 2024, like the ancient days of AI, like 18 months ago with Boris Czerny, who is the father of Claude Code. He began tinkering with this coding tool as a project one day not long after he started at Anthropic.
- [04:33]
Ryan Knudsen
Czerny was just an engineer at Anthropic among the company's rank and file. He created Claude Code as a tool to help him with his own job. It only took him a couple days to build, and when he shared it internally in a company Wide Slack message, he had no idea how big of a deal it would become.
- [04:50]
Ben Cohen
It was celebrated with two raised hands, emojis in the company Wide Slack.
- [04:55]
Ryan Knudsen
But as his colleagues started using it, it became pretty clear it had a lot of potential.
- [04:59]
Ben Cohen
What he found interesting was that whenever he looked at the screens of like data scientists within Anthropic, so not like software developers or coders, they were using Claude code even when it wasn't actually all that easy to use. Like a primitive, clunky version of Claude code, they were getting value out of it. And then he starts looking around the office and he sees non technical people on the sales team using Claud code to analyze their calls and summarize meetings. And he thinks, oh, this is actually interesting. People who are not just pure coders are using this to their advantage too.
- [05:40]
Ryan Knudsen
Anthropic released Claude Code to the public early last year. But it wasn't until a major update last November that it started going viral.
- [05:48]
Ben Cohen
I think that timing is really important. It comes out right before everyone goes home for the holidays and is off. And I think that, like, part of the momentum and how this thing spread so quickly in Silicon Valley is that people who work inside these companies were just at home, and it was the holidays, and they were screwing around on their computers like they always do, and suddenly they had time and inclination to play and experiment with cloud code. I think a whole lot of them were, like, completely blown away by what they found.
- [06:14]
Brian Whitten
If you're not using cloud code in 2026, you're going to fall behind.
- [06:17]
Ryan Knudsen
Switching from cursor to Claude code today based on all the hype.
- [06:21]
Brian Whitten
This is wild. This is actually wild.
- [06:24]
Joanna Stern
Yeah, it definitely is a game changer, and I'm loving it so far.
- [06:28]
Ryan Knudsen
In early January, Ben started playing around with it too. And that's when he sent those text messages to Joanna. And as they were chatting, they got an idea for a way to really put Claude co to the test.
- [06:40]
Joanna Stern
And so we were kind of sending screenshots back and forth, and we were kind of like, we should. We should probably just do a story on this together. And then as I looked at our chat, I was like, we should just make this the story. We should Vibe code this conversation about Vibe coding and see if we can make the website an interactive column and put it on the wall streetjournal.com Joanna.
- [07:01]
Ryan Knudsen
And Ben wanted to see if the two of them, two writers with almost no coding experience, could create an interactive article on the Wall Street Journal's website just by using Claude code. They wanted the webpage to include screenshots of their chat messages with buttons that would allow readers to toggle into. So the conversation might initially look like messages on an iPhone, but click a button and the chat box would now look like AOL Instant messenger from the 1990s. And to make this, all Joanna had to do was describe her idea to Claude code.
- [07:35]
Joanna Stern
I just put in this prompt to Claude code. I'll read you part, he said. I'm writing an article for the Wall Street Journal with my colleague Ben Cohen. The idea is that Ben and I go back and forth in the story to debate the merits of Vibe coding. The whole story is done with little chats back and forth, looking like imessage chats with our photos. Please design a webpage for this article.
- [07:55]
Ryan Knudsen
And then what happened next? It did that.
- [07:57]
Joanna Stern
Basically, it did that. It designed a Wall Street Journal page, what it thought it should look like. It took some liberties with our Logo and everything. But everything that sort of came beyond the top header was honestly 50% of the way there of what we actually published.
- [08:16]
Ryan Knudsen
Ben and Joanna wrote all the words in the article and the chat messages between them, but Claude wrote all the code and it did it really, really fast.
- [08:26]
Ben Cohen
And I think my reaction was like, oh, my God, not only are we doing this, I can't believe it did this already. I mean, this was like two minutes after we were talking about this. And then eventually we brought in some actual humans who know how to write code at the Wall Street Journal to.
- [08:40]
Joanna Stern
To fix our code. So when we sent this to some of our in house folks, Brian Whitten, who's one of our computational journalists, Audrey Valbuena, one of our designers, they had some notes.
- [08:51]
Ben Cohen
They weren't as impressed as we were.
- [08:56]
Ryan Knudsen
Coming up, we talk to one of those humans who knows how to write code and contemplate what this all means for people's jobs.
- [09:08]
Radio Announcer
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- [09:14]
Ryan Knudsen
Trying to find some real.
- [09:15]
Brian Whitten
And all the noise you always do.
- [09:18]
Radio Announcer
The artist, you know, the story. You don't see Golden Globes nominee Jeremy Allen White as Bruce Springsteen. Critics are saying it's a career defining performance.
- [09:28]
Ben Cohen
Let's burn this place down, Johnny.
- [09:31]
Radio Announcer
Springsteen, Deliver Me From Nowhere now streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney Radio 13.
- [09:44]
Ryan Knudsen
Brian Whitten is a computational journalist at the Wall Street Journal.
- [09:47]
Brian Whitten
Sometimes I like to call it journalism at scale. I'll build a lot of tools for reporters, investigative tools, reporting tools, things to help them analyze stuff that we can put together. And sometimes they'll build interactive things for readers to click on, which is nice because then I could show my parents something and be like, I built that and they'll understand what I do.
- [10:08]
Ryan Knudsen
Brian is one of the people Joanna and Ben showed their code to. What did you think when Joanna and Ben brought you this code and this little project they've been working on? What was your reaction?
- [10:20]
Brian Whitten
I guess first I was just like super impressed and glad to see more people messing around with this kind of stuff because these coding agents kind of turn everybody into a developer, which is exciting for me because that means you can be doing more things. And all of the responsibility doesn't necessarily fall down to one person when it comes to building tools or building things.
- [10:43]
Ryan Knudsen
But as Brian dug into the code, he saw that not everything was perfect.
- [10:47]
Brian Whitten
At first, I saw a lot of outdated practices in the code looking like it'd been coded. In the late 90s, there were significant Problems with accessibility. You couldn't really use the keyboard to do things. If you were using a screen reader, you'd have no idea what was going on. The styles needed updating. It would have clashed with stuff on the page. It did stuff that would have kind of made the rest of the page look like a mess if we'd left it in there. Oh, and there was a bug. There were a few bugs.
- [11:18]
Ryan Knudsen
So if you were to give it a percentage of just going from cloth, like, was it 100% done, 90% done, how would you give it a grade?
- [11:31]
Brian Whitten
Say 80%? It was pretty close.
- [11:33]
Ryan Knudsen
80% sounds like a lot.
- [11:35]
Brian Whitten
Yeah.
- [11:36]
Ryan Knudsen
Here's our colleague Ben again.
- [11:38]
Ben Cohen
This is also like a really instructive example. Like, code might get you 90% of the way there, but for that 10%, humans are not just valuable, but kind of essential. Right. Like, this whole thing doesn't happen without that last 10%.
- [11:53]
Ryan Knudsen
Still, the process was a lot more efficient.
- [11:56]
Joanna Stern
I have built many of these types of projects here over my years at the Wall Street Journal, working with our development team, working with our great graphics and design team. And projects like this can take weeks if it's a really big project where you've got a lot of deep reporting and you need it to look really perfect. This, as we were saying, took seconds and two days to get from start of idea to finish.
- [12:17]
Ryan Knudsen
I asked Brian, the computational journalist, if Claude code made him worried about his job.
- [12:22]
Brian Whitten
Not really. As someone who uses Claude code all day, every day, I feel safe because I. Maybe I'm being short sighted, but it seems like the more I use these things and the more I build with them, there's a limit to how satisfying the result is without a person seriously directing it and adjusting what it's producing. There's a lot of technical know how when it comes to knowing what to tell it to do.
- [12:55]
Ryan Knudsen
Brian thinks it will have an impact on jobs, but it's unclear exactly what that impact will be.
- [13:01]
Brian Whitten
It's lowering the bar for coding projects. It allows us to be more ambitious. And so if you think of a company that has maybe one or two engineers and they want to do an ambitious project before this, you'd need to scale up, staff up 5, 10, 20 people working on it. But with coding agents, you can get to that level with only one or two people. So I think the optimistic case is you'll have maybe companies with lower headcount, with fewer engineers working for them, but more companies with engineers building things because they can do it with these coding agents.
- [13:37]
Ryan Knudsen
This is how Boris Czerny at Anthropic is using the tool he created and something to dramatically increase his productivity.
- [13:45]
Ben Cohen
A year ago, 10% of his code was coming from cloud code. Six months ago, 50% of his code was coming from cloud code. Now, over the past two months, he has not written a single line of code by hand himself. 100% of his code is coming from Claude code.
- [13:59]
Ryan Knudsen
Not only that, Czerny now starts his day by spinning up multiple CLAUDE coding agents at once, effectively creating a small team of robot developers. He calls this multi clotting.
- [14:10]
Joanna Stern
It's the idea that you can have these agents doing various tasks for you at the same time, like you would have a team. He has a sort of good system that works across all of the devices. And he told us he launches it, he's like, fix this issue or make this new feature. And so these agents, these CLAUDE codes, are just working on that while he's getting ready for work and while he's commuting to work, he's constantly managing his.
- [14:34]
Ryan Knudsen
Multi Claude team, his little team of agents.
- [14:37]
Ben Cohen
Yeah, there's something crazy and also profound about this, which is that he is no longer a coder. He is a manager of, like, this fleet of robot coders that are working on his behalf.
- [14:50]
Ryan Knudsen
But like in the past, he wouldn't be managing a team of robots, he'd be managing a team of junior coders. So doesn't this mean that this could take out, like, a whole layer of entry level jobs for people?
- [15:02]
Joanna Stern
This is the biggest question. This is the biggest question. Right now. All others in the AI industry are wondering the same exact thing.
- [15:11]
Ryan Knudsen
So what's your sense of how disruptive this particular version of the technology is going to be in the workplace? Like, do you think people are going to lose their jobs as this starts to become more widely used?
- [15:22]
Joanna Stern
People are losing their jobs. First of all, we need to accept that there are certain industries where people are already losing their jobs.
- [15:30]
Ben Cohen
It's clear that, like, there are certain professions and occupations where people are going to be able to take advantage of this. And the implications of that are, like, very uncertain right now. Like what the productivity implications are, what the workforce displacement implications are like. I don't think we really know what they're going to be yet. What we do know is that, like, there are fields where this is coming, if it's not already here.
- [15:56]
Ryan Knudsen
Here's Anthropic CEO Dario Amadei talking at a recent Wall Street Journal event.
- [16:01]
Dario Amodei
There are whole jobs, whole careers that we built, built for decades, that that may not be present. I think we can deal with it, I think we can adjust to it, but I don't think there's an awareness at all of what is coming here.
- [16:17]
Ben Cohen
And the magnitude of it and the thing that is both thrilling and deeply terrifying. As Joanna has written many times over the past few years, this is the worst and dumbest that these AI models are ever going to be, right? Like what we are playing with now is only going to get better in the days and weeks and especially months and years to come.
- [16:40]
Ryan Knudsen
In the last few days, Anthropic added new features to Claude code, including a tool that can review legal contracts and perform other industry specific functions. It's also released tools for finance and customer service. Then on Monday, OpenAI updated similar tools. In response, investors started dumping shares of companies they worried could be most vulnerable to disruption.
- [17:04]
Joanna Stern
And how much did investors lose? Some $300 billion in value.
- [17:08]
Radio Announcer
Software names getting hit again today after.
- [17:09]
Ben Cohen
The sell off yesterday.
- [17:10]
Radio Announcer
Amid these fears of AI disrupting the.
- [17:13]
Joanna Stern
Industry, Piper Sandler downgraded a few stocks. They are Adobe, freshworks, Vertex, and that.
- [17:19]
Ryan Knudsen
Really the concern is that this could be an existential crisis for some companies. Why pay for software solutions when you can now build your own far more easily using something like CLAUDE code in one or five or ten years? Looking back on the development of AI, how big of a moment would you say the release of CLAUDE code will be thought to be?
- [17:42]
Joanna Stern
I think it goes to one of the quotes that we had from Boris Czerny, which is this is a major democratizing moment in coding and in AI development. And this will have been the moment that some company, whether It's Google or OpenAI saw as crap. We gotta make that thing right now because everyone's gonna wanna make a new app or a new tool that's gonna better themselves. And so that is that moment right now.
- [18:08]
Ben Cohen
Also, OpenAI had a ChatGPT moment. Google really had like the Gemini 3 nano banana moment a few months ago. This is that moment for Anthropic. Like this is like the breakout moment for one of the top frontier labs that you know at this time next year might very well be one of the most valuable companies in the world.
- [18:38]
Ryan Knudsen
That's all for today. Wednesday, February 4th. The Journal is a co production of Spotify and the Wall Street Journal. Additional reporting in this episode by Ben Dummett, Xavier Martinez, Bradley Olson and Alexander Osipovich. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.
- [18:58]
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- [19:09]
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- [19:24]
Brian Whitten
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- [19:25]
Ryan Knudsen
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