Cat Wu leaves Anthropic, recalls Claude Code's early days

Cat Wu said Friday was her last day at Anthropic. Two years ago, when Claude Code was a small internal tool, she asked it to build an RL environment and steered it for tens of hours without manually writing a line of code. She said it worked, she was hooked, and she joined the team.

She wrote that when Claude Code first launched, most people approved every permission prompt by hand and mostly used Claude to answer questions and write tests. Today, she said, the default is trusting Claude's judgment to auto-approve, and Claude does large migrations and builds new products.

She thanked the team behind Claude Code, Cowork and Tag.