Claude Code: the AI tool revolutionizing Spotify and Microsoft

One Man, One Terminal, One Intuition

In the past, commutes to the office were often dedicated to leisure activities, such as reading a book or playing games on one's phone. However, at Spotify, some engineers have found a more productive way to occupy these moments. Gustav Söderström, co-CEO of Spotify, revealed during the fourth-quarter 2025 earnings presentation that engineers are now using Claude, an artificial intelligence tool, to perform development tasks during their morning commute. Thanks to the Slack app on their phones, they can ask Claude to fix bugs or add new features to the iOS app. Once the task is completed, a new version of the app is sent to their mobile devices, ready to be merged into production even before they arrive at the office.

This anecdote, reported by TechCrunch, illustrates the radical change in the developer profession, driven by the emergence of AI-powered coding tools, of which Claude Code is the leading representative. Gustav Söderström emphasized that since last December, Spotify's top developers have not written a single line of code manually. This approach has allowed Spotify to accelerate the pace of releasing new features. Since January, the Swedish group, which had already rolled out around fifty features in 2025, has further increased its pace, unveiling a "all time" version of Wrapped, an option to organize playlists into folders, and a tool for trimming podcast clips, among other innovations.

Spotify is not the only company to have adopted Claude Code. Microsoft, based in Redmond, has also been captivated by this tool. In December 2025, Microsoft opened access to Claude Code to several thousand of its engineers, project managers, and designers, even those without coding skills, to evaluate the tool in a real-world environment. The experience was so positive that Claude Code began to overshadow GitHub Copilot CLI, Microsoft's in-house tool. As a result, Microsoft decided to terminate all licenses for GitHub Copilot CLI on June 30.

It is rare for a week to go by without an article discussing a similar trajectory appearing in the tech press. This is a sign that in just a few months, Claude Code is profoundly reshaping the developer profession while establishing itself as one of the main revenue sources for Anthropic. But how did we get here?

The Opus 4.5 Shift

Behind the success of Claude Code is Boris Cherny, an engineer who joined Anthropic after working at Meta on projects like Instagram and Facebook. In September 2024, he joined Anthropic's Labs team, a group of five tasked with familiarizing themselves with the company's API. At that time, Anthropic had not yet decided to develop products, but if it were to do so, it would likely be around coding, as this would improve coding models and explore security issues, Cherny explained in an interview with Casey Newton from the Platformer newsletter.

At that time, Anthropic's flagship model, Claude Sonnet 3.5, had limited capabilities, and the available coding tools were limited to IDEs or IDE extensions, primarily used for autocompletion. Cherny and his team believed it was possible to create a product that fully leveraged the model's capabilities, but no one had yet designed the necessary interface. Instead of tackling this complex task, Cherny developed a prototype that operated in the terminal, a simple and cost-effective setup. Within a few days, he shared this prototype with his colleagues to see how they would use it. On the first day, one-fifth of the company's engineers adopted it, and by the fifth day, half were using it.

The turning point for Cherny came when he asked his program to identify the music he was listening to, an experience he filmed and which is now preserved in a museum. Claude wrote a few lines of code in AppleScript, a language Cherny did not know, to open his audio player. This unexpected solution revealed the potential of the tool. A conversation with Catherine Wu, who was working on how agents use computers and would later become the product manager for Claude Code, prompted Cherny to expand the capabilities of his prototype by giving it access to the file system.

"Suddenly, this agent became really interesting," Cherny recalled in an interview with Pragmatic Engineer. By launching the agent into their codebase, he began asking Claude questions, which explored the system, read files, and analyzed imports. The public release of Claude Code unfolded over four months, with a discreet research preview launched in February 2025, followed by general availability in May. Although the announcement was low-key, the tool quickly gained popularity in a landscape dominated by tools like Cursor and GitHub Copilot. By November 2025, Claude Code was already generating $1 billion in annualized revenue, reaching $2.5 billion three months later, nearly one-fifth of Anthropic's revenue.

OpenAI's Late Awakening

The rapid rise of Claude Code caught OpenAI, a leader in the field of artificial intelligence, off guard. Although OpenAI had been at the forefront of many innovations, the emergence of Claude Code revealed gaps in their product development strategy. To catch up, OpenAI had to react quickly, investing heavily in the development of new tools and strengthening its partnerships to remain competitive against the rise of Anthropic and its flagship product.

The Next Frontier, Anticipation

The rise of Claude Code is not just a matter of technology, but also of anticipation strategy. Companies adopting this tool must not only integrate its capabilities into their processes but also anticipate the changes it will bring in the long term. For developers, this means reevaluating their skills and roles in an environment where AI plays an increasingly central role. For companies, this involves rethinking their business models and innovation strategies to leverage the advantages offered by tools like Claude Code.