Woofun AI reports that Anthropic disclosed the development history of Claude Code, tracing its origins to an internal 2023 tool named clide. Early iterations faced performance bottlenecks due to context window limits, requiring parallel execution of 100 Claude Haiku models for directory processing.

Boris Cherny joined the team in September 2024 and pivoted from building a linter to creating Claude CLI from scratch. Leveraging Claude 4 capabilities and a lightweight architecture allowing minute-level hot updates, the tool was renamed Claude Code during February 2025 public testing. By late 2025, Cherny and Igor Kofman achieved 100% AI-generated code output, with Cherny directing 88 automated commits in a single day.