Why Anthropic is pulling ahead: they bet on code as the universal interface
I had a moment of clarity recently that I can’t stop thinking about.
I was building a presentation using Claude Code. Not Gamma, or Genspark or Beautiful ai. Not any tool purpose-built for decks. Just Claude, writing code directly.
The output was better. Significantly better.
And it made me think:
why would a general-purpose AI outperform tools that were specifically designed for this one job?
and here I think is the answer..
Every application we use is essentially a constrained interface sitting on top of code. The app decides what you can and can’t do. It gives you dropdowns, templates, drag-and-drop.
It feels easier, but it’s actually limiting. You’re operating within someone else’s decisions about what’s possible.
When you go straight to code, those constraints disappear. Code is the foundation of everything digital. If you can manipulate code directly, you have access to the full range of what’s possible, not just what a product team decided to expose through a UI.
This is Anthropic’s big bet. And I don’t think they stumbled into it.
While others were racing to build dedicated AI apps for writing, design, research, and presentations, Anthropic doubled down on making AI exceptional at code.
Claude Code isn’t just a developer tool. It’s becoming the universal creation engine.
Think about the implications. Instead of building 50 different AI-powered apps, each with their own interface and limitations, you build one AI that’s extraordinary at code and let it create anything.
Decks, designs, data analysis, automations. The output isn’t constrained by what an app allows. It’s constrained only by what code can do, which is essentially everything.
This is the compounding advantage. Every improvement Anthropic makes to code generation simultaneously improves Claude’s ability to do everything else. That’s a fundamentally different scaling curve than building and maintaining dozens of separate products.
For those of us building AI companies, there’s a real lesson here. The most powerful interface might not be an interface at all.
It might just be code.
h/t Kang-Chi Ho for helping me refine this thought