The more I use Claude Code, the more I find it useful and interesting for tasks beyond the one for which it is named. Simon Willison agrees:

Claude Code is, with hindsight, poorly named. It’s not purely a coding tool: it’s a tool for general computer automation. Anything you can achieve by typing commands into a computer is something that can now be automated by Claude Code. It’s best described as a general agent.

On one hand it’s surprising that this sort of tool is taking the form of a command line interface in the year 2025, but it also makes a lot of sense: CLIs provide programmatic access to your machine and are easy to distribute across platforms.

I often think of the web as the world’s great distribution mechanism (along with the post office), but it lacks the ability to interface with anything outside the browser. This is largely by design and in most cases a helpful feature! But it certainly limits the power of any general purpose agent distributed as a web app.

Native apps have capabilities beyond the browser, but are harder to build and distribute across platforms. That said, I’m excited to see AI companies invest in more general purpose computing agents via native OS integrations. OpenAI’s recent acquisition of Sky is certainly something to keep an eye on.