By Steven Levy
Publication Date: 2026-05-26 10:00:00
“Hello, my name is Peter, and I’m a Claudeholic.”
It was August 2025 and Peter Steinberger was in London speaking at a meeting called Claude Code Anonymous. Steinberger and several other addicts had organized the event to connect with people like themselves—techies excited about coding tools like Anthropic’s paradigm-breaking Claude Code. “I devote pretty much all of my time to this, but it doesn’t feel like enough,” he told the gathering in a cozy brick-walled room.
A few months later, Anthropic released a new version of Claude Code and the ranks of Claudeholics exploded. Called Opus 4.5, it could handle more complicated programming tasks, retain much more memory, run for many hours at a time, and manage a team of AI subagents. Anthropic offers a “notoriously difficult” take-home exam for aspiring engineers; In a side-by-side comparison of these people and their models, Anthropic claimed that Opus 4.5 “performed better than any other human…”