Install Claude Code in VS Code, and change how you work. That’s perhaps the most important recommendation I’ve ever given.
I set my father up in Claude Code the other day. He spent all of last weekend coding. At nearly 80 loops of the Sun, young.
Some context, for anyone who hasn’t followed the tools. Claude Code is Anthropic’s coding agent, born in the terminal. In September Anthropic shipped a native VS Code extension, so that “you can now see Claude’s changes in real-time through a dedicated sidebar panel with inline diffs,” along with a checkpoint system that lets you “instantly rewind to previous versions by tapping Esc twice or using the /rewind command.” That’s the version I’m recommending: an editor most people already have, with a panel on the right and an undo button for the agent. OpenAI’s Codex has had an IDE extension of its own since August, which “can read, edit, and run code in your workspace” and “works with VS Code, VS Code Insiders, Cursor, and Windsurf.”
The VS Code version is the easy way into some of what you get in a full setup. It’s still not a full replacement — I tried it all yesterday. Claude Code and GPT Codex in a fully empowered environment, with the whole machine at their disposal, are really marvels. But the easy way is a real start, and the door is a click in a marketplace rather than a week of configuration.
I’m certain you’ll come to know this in due course. It’s impossible to imagine nearly all work being done any other way. When you do, you’ll wish you’d known even a day earlier.
Anthropic seems to think the same, because this week it previewed Claude Cowork, a tool for office work rather than code, which the company says “was inspired by Claude Code.” It’s a research preview, macOS only for now, and it needs a Max subscription, so not yet the easy way for everyone. But the direction is plain: the agent that rewrote programming is being pointed at everything else.
If you want the easy way in, this episode of The AI Daily Brief, on Cowork as Claude Code for everyone else, is a must-listen.
