Claude Code needs a new name

I am a heavy consumer of AI applications because of my job building websites. Recently, one of my favorite AI applications for coding has started to gain broader appeal, Anthropic’s Claude Code. Case in point is tech journalist Shakeel Hashim’s article below. Check it out! It’s a good read as to why people who don’t write software for a living are excited.

Claude Code is about so much more than coding

A Different Way of Working with AI

Most people are aware of how a chatbot like ChatGPT or Claude.ai is used. You go onto the website/app, type or speak something, get a response, and either go do something with that information or ask follow ups. More recently, chatbots got the ability to use tools like search engines or email connectors, which made them more helpful, but the way you use them is still fundamentally the same. You have to be the one executing whatever guidance you get.

Claude Code changes that paradigm. Instead of you doing all the executive work on a website, Claude Code is an agent that does things for you on your computer. The real secret sauce is that Claude Code is optimized for using Anthropic’s Claude models to write and run code. And since code is how we specify things for computers to do, you can think of Claude Code as basically a way to control anything you could do on your computer in natural language. When Claude Code was first released, the ability for it to reliably do things was limited, but with the release of Anthropic’s latest premium model, Opus 4.5, it finally seems like it can be useful to people who aren’t comfortable working directly with code themselves.

What Claude Code looks like in its Visual Studio extension form.

N.B. Claude Code is not the only product in this category. OpenAI has Codex and Google has the Gemini CLI, but Claude Code is the most widely adopted.

Non-technical People Can Do Things

So what can non-technical (here defined as people who have never written code before) do with Claude Code? Here are some things I have seen discussed.

1. Data gathering and analysis

Matt Yglesias is a political blogger who has recently begun using Claude Code

2. Download YouTube videos

3. Take a set of discovery call transcripts into a sales lead tracking spreadsheet

4. Suggest files on your computer to delete to save disk space

5. Reproduce scientific papers

6. Create a personal website

7. Make html-based presentations

8. Extract themes from your notes and write a summary

9. Make a Raspberry Pi doggy cam

There are infinite possibilities. The only limit seems to be on making information accessible to Claude and people’s imaginations. Given you don’t directly need to write code anymore, maybe a better name for Claude Code would be Claude Computer.

How to Use Claude Code

Claude Code is simple to start with but has a high skill ceiling. I will offer some recommendations based on how experienced you are with coding.

No coding background:

• The Learning Journey AI module on using Claude Code for Financial Analyses with Excel goes through installing Claude Code and using it for a simple Excel runway analysis under different hiring scenarios. There is no charge for this, but please reach out to nwagner@learningjourneyai.com if you want more!

• Join a Claude Code meetup or host one. Either a big Claude community one or a local university chapter (e.g. UMD’s).

• If you prefer live training, I run Claude Code workshops in DC or online. The next one is waitlisted, but I am planning more.

For more advanced use:

• The Official Claude Code documentation is focused on people with software engineering expertise but has a wealth of information

• If you want to run multiple Claude Code sessions at the same time, I recommend using an application purposely built for that, Conductor

• Consider expanding Claude Code’s capabilities with skills and MCP servers