“What do two newspaper columnists do on a Saturday night?
We talk to AI and tell it to make weird apps. Then we brag about our creations.
Ben Cohen: I just redid my personal website from scratch in 20 minutes without writing a single line of code.
Joanna Stern: Wow, 1995 is super jealous of your personal website. Why does every vibe coder act like rebuilding a website is the equivalent of discovering fire?
Cohen: Fine. I also made my daughter a reading game in 10 seconds! You learn to spell the names of the characters in "Frozen."
Stern: Let it go, man. You're proving my point: everyone's making websites for themselves and janky games for their kids with Claude Code. At least I made Expenser, an app to do my expenses.
Cohen: I wonder if we should just write a column together.
Stern: I wonder if we can vibe code the article page?
(You can see that article page in all its glory on the WSJ's website and app.)
For the record, our bosses here at The Wall Street Journal pay us to write words, not lines of code. Which is a good thing, because we have absolutely no programming skills. But together, we managed to "vibe code" an entire article.
And by "we," we mean our new intern, Claude Code.
This is a breakout moment for Anthropic's coding tool, which has spread far beyond the tech nerds of Silicon Valley to normies everywhere. Not since OpenAI released ChatGPT in 2022 have so many people become so obsessed with an artificial-intelligence product.
Claude translates any idea you type into code. It can quickly build real, working apps you've always wished for -- tools to manage your finances, analyze your DNA, mix and match your outfits, even keep your plants alive. Vibe-coding apps aren't new, but Claude Code has proven to be a leap ahead in capabilities and smarts.
The results are wondrous and unsettling: People without a lick of coding experience are building things that once required trained software developers.
People like us.
Cohen: I just made a tool that can search through all my previous columns and find patterns in the writing.
Stern: Oh, that's cool. What did you find out?
Cohen: That I have used the word "peculiar" in 34 columns. (And now 35.)
Stern: That is peculiar. I just ran my "Toothpaste Blaster" benchmark. And Claude did amazingly well.
Cohen: You ran your what?
Stern: It's how I compare vibe-coding apps. I make a game for an 8-year-old who refuses to clean the sink. I built it in Cursor last year. The prompt is simple: Make a game with a sink with toothpaste and allow the player to clean it with a sponge and water. Using Claude was easier than Cursor. Although Claude's first sink faucet bore a strong resemblance to . . . male genitalia.
Cohen: OK, now that is peculiar.
There are a few ways to use Claude Code. The easiest is to download Anthropic's Claude desktop app for Mac or Windows and click the Code tab. Advanced users run it directly in their computer's terminal [A].
You start by creating a folder on your computer's desktop. This will be the home for Claude's files and code. Then you type a prompt into the app's chat box: Make me a WSJ-style article webpage with iMessage-like text chats. Claude might ask a few questions about what you want before it gets to work, showing the code it's writing in real-time. When it's done, you open that folder, click the webpage file and your app opens in a browser. Want to make tweaks? Just tell Claude: Make the gray background a little grayer.
You need at least the $20-a-month Pro plan to access Claude Code. That buys a certain amount of computing power, with usage limits that reset every five hours. At first, it seems like plenty. Then it's not. When you're in a groove, the last thing you want to see is: "You've hit your limit." You might even be tempted to splurge on the Max version of Claude Code for $100 or more a month.
For non-coders who want a friendlier interface, Anthropic just added a variation called Claude Cowork. It comes with pre-written prompts for common tasks -- and it doesn't look like Sandra Bullock's screen in "The Net."
Stern: Wow, wow, wow. I just had Claude Cowork clean up and organize all my book documents and my desktop. Nerve-wracking but amazing.
Cohen: I'm jealous. I'm rate-limited till midnight.
Stern: This is where cool people would call you "Claude-pilled."
Cohen: Yes, I'm basically Boris Cherny.
Stern: Who?
Boris Cherny is the head of Claude Code. When we weren't using his product, we called the Anthropic engineer to find out how he invented it.
One day in September 2024, Cherny began tinkering on a coding tool as a side project. A few days later, he shared it with his colleagues. When it was released to the public in early 2025, Cherny was using it for about 10% of his code. After a few months, he was relying on it for closer to 50%. These days, he says 100% of his code comes from the machine he built.
"I have not written a line of code by hand in two months," he said. "A year ago, that would have sounded crazy."
Now he spends his days managing a fleet of robot coders: Cherny typically has 10 different Claudes doing whatever he tells them to do.
"We call this multi-Clauding," he said. "I wake up, have some idea, open my phone, go to the Code tab and start a few agents."
Before long, Anthropic's data scientists and even non-technical people on the company's sales team found themselves multi-Clauding. The product got better as the underlying AI models got smarter, most recently with Anthropic's Opus 4.5 release late last year. It got prettier, too, when Claude Code built a cleaner user interface for . . . Claude Code.
"In the next year," Cherny said, "coding is going to start to get even more democratized."
We felt that democratization firsthand while creating this article. Claude instantly spat out work that once required designers, developers and a string of meetings. Having collaborated on interactive projects at the Journal, we know this process can take weeks.
This time, we had a working prototype within five minutes -- and Claude never once got sick of our many requests. As we kept going, we fixed bugs, added new features like the screenshot gallery and even figured out a way to flow Google Docs text into the design.
Then we did one thing that Claude couldn't: We called our human colleagues.
To make sure our code wouldn't crash the Journal's site and app, we enlisted computational journalist Brian Whitton. To make sure the look wouldn't burn your eyes, we brought in one of our designers, Audrey Valbuena.
They quickly pointed out all the subtle flaws that we would have never seen.
So it's not perfect, but it's already pretty good. And this is the worst it will ever be.
Before Claude's work was picked apart by our colleagues, we asked Cherny what we should take away from our coding adventures.
"This is a skill and it takes time to learn, so don't expect that you're going to be good at it in the beginning," he said. (Noted!) "Ultimately, it's something that lets people be much more creative," he went on. "It makes this thing that was locked up to this very small group of people accessible to everyone."” [B]
A. A computer terminal is a text-based interface (CLI) for typing commands to control a computer or server, acting as a window into the operating system's core functions, historically physical devices but now mostly software (terminal emulators) used for tasks like file management, software installation, and running scripts, offering power users direct access to behind-the-scenes operations.
How it Works
Input: You type commands (like ls to list files or cd to change directory) into the terminal window.
Shell: These commands are interpreted by a shell (like Bash or PowerShell).
Execution: The shell executes the command, running programs or manipulating files.
Output: The results or responses are displayed as text back in the terminal.
Types of Terminals
Hardware Terminals: Early devices with keyboards and screens/printers connected to mainframes.
Terminal Emulators: Software applications (e.g., Windows Terminal, macOS Terminal, iTerm) that mimic hardware terminals on modern computers.
Why Use It?
Efficiency: Faster for complex tasks than graphical interfaces.
Automation: Run scripts to automate repetitive jobs.
System Access: Manage servers, install software, configure networks.
Power: Access features not available in graphical user interfaces (GUIs).
B. EXCHANGE --- This Story Put the Buzzy AI Coding Tool Claude to the Test --- Anthropic's product has spread far beyond Silicon Valley to normies everywhere -- including two WSJ columnists with no programming skills. Stern, Joanna; Cohen, Ben. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 24 Jan 2026: B2.
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