This Wall Street Journal article explores the growing excitement around Anthropic’s Claude AI, particularly its Claude Opus 4.5 model and Claude Code tool.
Key points:
The article describes how software engineers and even non-coders are experiencing a revelation—called getting “Claude-pilled”—after using Claude’s latest capabilities. Many developers spent their holiday breaks testing Claude Code, with some completing complex year-long projects in just a week.
The enthusiasm has spread beyond engineers, with people building their first software programs without coding knowledge. Users are applying it to diverse tasks like health-data analysis, expense reports, wedding photo recovery, and even monitoring tomato plants via webcam.
However, there’s a bittersweet element: some professionals feel both amazed and unsettled that AI can now replicate skills they’ve spent careers developing. One CEO who’s coded since middle school said Claude “one-shotted” his life’s work, leading him to cancel plans to hire new engineers.
While OpenAI has more total users globally, Anthropic holds a larger share of enterprise customers as of mid-2025. Claude’s web traffic more than doubled in December year-over-year.
The article positions Claude Code as many people’s first encounter with autonomous AI “agents” that can access files, browsers, and applications independently—offering a glimpse of AI’s future potential. The question now is how far this technology will extend beyond software engineering into other professions.
This captures both the thrill and the vertigo of our current AI moment. What strikes me most is the emotional complexity—engineers feeling that endorphin rush of productivity while simultaneously mourning the devaluation of hard-won expertise. The “Claude-pilled” phenomenon isn’t just about technological capability; it’s about a psychological threshold being crossed. When a CTO can compress a year’s work into a week, or non-coders can build functional software, we’re not just seeing productivity gains—we’re witnessing a fundamental shift in what human expertise means. The real question isn’t whether AI can replicate our skills, but what new forms of value humans will create when technical execution becomes nearly free. That transition will be uncomfortable, exhilarating, and inevitable.