The AI race moves fast, but frontier labs move faster. Google DeepMind, OpenAI, and Anthropic all made big news on Tuesday, with Anthropic doing so twice.
Anthropic redesigned Claude Code on the desktop, now tailoring the interface to better accommodate running parallel agents and tasks. The changes include a new sidebar for managing multiple sessions, a drag-and-drop rearranging feature, and an integrated terminal and file editor.
The sidebar surfaces all active and recent sessions, letting developers easily navigate across repositories, filter by status, project, or environment, and group related sessions together. When a session's associated pull request merges or closes, it automatically drops off the sidebar, keeping the view focused on what's still in progress.
As Claude Code cements its position as the leading agentic coding environment, seamless window management has become a necessity for developers juggling increasingly complex, multi-threaded workloads. It's a shift Anthropic elevated in its blog post:
"For many developers, the shape of agentic work has changed. You're not typing one prompt and waiting… The new app is built for how agentic coding actually feels now: many things in flight, and you in the orchestrator seat."
Other elements of the redesign focus on bringing more to users within the app, including:
- View modes: Verbose, Normal and Summary options allow users to decide how much they want to see of the actual process, with the option to just see results.
- Keyboard shortcuts: New shortcuts make it easier to get things done, and users can press [⌘ + / ] or [Ctrl + /] to see the full list
- Speed: The app was rebuilt for reliability and speed, according to Anthropic
- Parity with CLI Plugins: The desktop app now fully supports CLI plugins and SSH connections to remote machines for a more familiar experience, including Mac
The DeepView CEO, Faris Kojok, tested all the features and found the new UI/UX more refined and easier to navigate. In particular, he found View Modes to be helpful.
“Being able to switch the transcript mode from Verbose to Normal to Summary allows me to get just the high-level response and then dive deeper with Verbose if necessary,” said Kojok.
Anthropic also released Claude Code Routines in research preview, which allows users to automate a session by configuring it once and then running it on a schedule, via an API call or an event trigger. The week before, Anthropic released Claude Managed Agents and an Advisor tool.
Our Deeper View
Anthropic’s slew of releases focused on Claude Code, which makes sense for several reasons. Primarily, it aligns perfectly with Anthropic’s goal of best serving its enterprise audience, and this product is one of its biggest profit generators at the moment. More interestingly, though, it seems the company could be strategically positioning itself to better compete with OpenAI, which is rumored to be developing a superapp that would merge Codex, Atlas and the ChatGPT app. That would enable OpenAI to combine the strongest features of all the apps into a single hub, including the ability to run Codex agents in multiple Atlas browser tabs. Since Anthropic doesn't have a browser, its latest Claude Code update addresses the same need for agentic multitasking.