Anthropic's Claude Code is an agentic AI coding tool that provides a natural language interface and agentic execution model for planning and implementing complex, multi-step workflows. Released less than a year ago, it has already been widely adopted by developers inside and outside Thoughtworks, leading us to place it in Trial. Console-based coding agents such as OpenAI's Codex CLI, Google's Gemini CLI and the open-source OpenCode have been released, while IDE-based assistants like Cursor, Windsurf and GitHub Copilot now include agent modes. Even so, Claude Code remains a favorite. We see teams using it not only to write and modify code but also as a general-purpose AI agent for managing specifications, stories, configuration, infrastructure and documentation.
Agentic coding shifts the developer's focus from writing code to specifying intent and delegating implementation. While this can accelerate development cycles, it can also lead to complacency with AI-generated code, which in turn may result in code that is harder to maintain and evolve — for both humans and AI agents. It’s therefore essential for teams to rigorously manage how Claude Code works, using techniques such as context engineering, curated shared instructions and potentially teams of coding agents.
