Claude Code has become one of the hottest AI tools in recent months — and software engineers in Seattle are taking notice.
More than 150 techies packed the house at a Claude Code meetup event in Seattle on Thursday evening, eager to trade use cases and share how they’re using Anthropic’s fast-growing technology.
Claude Code is a specialized AI tool that acts like a supercharged pair-programmer for software developers. Interest in Claude Code has surged alongside improvements to Anthropic’s underlying models that let Claude handle longer, more complex workflows.
“The biggest thing is closing the feedback loop — it can take actions on its own and look at the results of those actions, and then take the next action,” explained Carly Rector, a product engineer at Pioneer Square Labs, the Seattle startup studio that organized Thursday’s event at Thinkspace.
Software development has emerged as the first profession to be thoroughly reshaped by large language models, as AI systems move beyond answering questions to actively doing the work. Last summer GeekWire reported on a similar event in Seattle focused on Cursor, another AI coding tool that developers described as a major productivity booster.
Claude Code is “one of a new generation of AI coding tools that represent a sudden capability leap in AI in the past month or so,” wrote Ethan Mollick, a Wharton professor and AI researcher, in a Jan. 7 blog post.
Mollick notes that these tools are better at self-correcting their own errors and now have “agentic harness” that helps them work around long-standing AI limitations, including context-window constraints that affect how much information models can remember.
On stage at Thursday’s event, Rector demoed an app that automatically fixed front-end bugs by having Claude Code control a browser. Johnny Leung, a software engineer at Stripe, said Claude Code has changed how he thinks about being a developer. “It’s kind of evolving the mentality from just writing code to becoming like an architect, almost like a product manager,” he said on stage during his demo.
R. Conner Howell, a software engineer in Seattle, showed how Claude Code can act as a personal cycling coach, querying performance data from databases and generating custom training plans — an example of the tool’s impact extending beyond traditional software development.
Earlier this week Anthropic — which is reportedly raising another $10 billion at a $350 billion valuation — released Claude Cowork, essentially Claude Code’s non-developer cousin that is built for everyday knowledge work instead of just programming.
AI coding tools are energizing longtime software developers like Damon Cortesi, who co-founded Seattle startup Simply Measured in 2010 and is now an engineer at Airbnb. He said Thursday’s event was the first tech meetup he’s attended in more than five years.
“There’s no limit to what I can think about and put out there and actually make real,” he said.
In a post titled “How Claude Reset the AI Race,” New York Magazine columnist John Herrman noted the growing concern around coding automation and job displacement. “If you work in software development, the future feels incredibly uncertain,” he wrote.
Anthropic, which opened an office in Seattle in 2024, said it used Claude Code to build Claude Cowork itself. However, analysts at Baird issued a report this week expressing skepticism that businesses will simply start building their own software.
“Vibe coding and AI code generation certainly make it easier to build software, but the technical barriers to coding have not been the drivers of software moats for some time,” they wrote. “For the most successful and scaled software companies, determining what to build next and how it should function within a broader system is fundamentally more important and more challenging than the technical act of building and coding it.”
For now, Claude Code is being rapidly adopted. The tool reached a $1 billion run rate six months after launch in May. OpenAI’s Codex and Google’s Antigravity offer similar capabilities.
“We’re excited to see all the cool things you do with Claude Code,” Caleb John, a young Seattle entrepreneur working at Pioneer Square Labs, told the crowd. “It’s really a new era of software development.”
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