# How Claude Code and VS Code turned Anthropic from a safety lab into a developer phenomenon > Source: > Published: 2026-07-28 04:25:11+00:00 *Before Claude Code landed on Visual Studio Code, Anthropic was respected but overlooked by working developers. What happened next rewrote the company's entire trajectory.* There is a version of Anthropic that remained a well-funded AI safety research lab with a capable but niche language model, orbiting the edges of the developer world without ever quite landing in it. That version of the company no longer exists, and the reason it doesn't comes down to one tool, one platform, and one decision to build where developers already live. The origin of Claude Code is less mythic than it sounds. Boris Cherny, a former Meta engineer, joined Anthropic in September 2024 and within his first month had wired Claude up to a terminal as something close to an AppleScript toy. By November, half of Anthropic's own engineering team was using the prototype daily. The company launched it publicly in February 2025. It was buggy. It was a command-line interface most developers had to seek out deliberately. Adoption climbed inside the building faster than it climbed outside. Then came the VS Code extension. Visual Studio Code is not just popular. It is dominant in a way that most software tools never become. According to the Stack Overflow Developer Survey, VS Code commanded 75.9% of the developer market as of 2025, its highest share ever, and the ninth consecutive year it led the list. Microsoft reported 50 million monthly active users across Visual Studio and VS Code as of May 2025. The extension marketplace had crossed 100,000 extensions. When you build natively for VS Code, you are not entering a popular ecosystem; you are entering the place where most professional software development already happens. Anthropic published the native Claude Code extension to the VS Code Marketplace on September 29, 2025, as part of the Claude Code 2.0 release. The extension brought a dedicated sidebar panel, real-time inline diffs, plan mode, and tabbed session history directly into the environment developers were already spending eight hours a day inside. No context switching. No learning a new interface. The tool arrived in the IDE the way a new plugin from a trusted team arrives: quietly, in a place you already trusted. That decision changed the adoption curve entirely. Developers who had ignored the CLI out of friction now encountered Claude Code as a natural feature of their existing workflow. The distinction is not subtle. A terminal tool asks developers to change their habits. A VS Code extension asks them to try a new tab. ## What the numbers look like after that pivot The growth since is difficult to describe without the figures sounding invented, so here they are. According to data published by SemiAnalysis and reported by multiple outlets, Claude Code was authoring approximately 4% of all public GitHub commits by February 2026, about 135,000 commits per day, double its share from the month prior. A single day in March 2026 saw 326,731 public GitHub commits attributed to Claude Code. SemiAnalysis projects that figure will reach 20% of all daily GitHub commits by end of year. Anthropic's annualized revenue went from roughly $1 billion in December 2024 to $47 billion by May 2026, according to Sacra and VentureBeat reporting. The company's valuation climbed from $61.5 billion in early 2025 to $380 billion after a $30 billion Series G in February 2026, and it filed confidentially for an IPO at a reported $965 billion valuation in June 2026. Enterprise customers including Netflix, Spotify, KPMG, and Salesforce are now on the books. Over 1,000 customers spend more than $1 million annually, up from a dozen two years ago. Fortune reported in January 2026 that Claude Code was having its "ChatGPT moment", the phrase journalists reach for when a product breaks out of an enthusiast audience and becomes the thing everyone is talking about. That moment did not happen in February 2025 when the CLI launched. It happened when the tool found its way into VS Code and met developers where they were. Satya Nadella did not build Claude Code, and Microsoft did not set out to make Anthropic successful. But the platform Microsoft spent a decade building into the default environment for software development is the single piece of infrastructure Anthropic's breakout most directly depends on. Without VS Code's installed base of 50 million monthly users, without its extension architecture, without the cultural reflex developers have developed of reaching for the VS Code marketplace when they want a new capability, Claude Code would have remained a compelling CLI that most working developers never quite got around to trying. That is what infrastructure does. It is not glamorous, and it rarely gets credited in the founding story. But the triumphant trajectory of Anthropic, the one that ends with a near-trillion-dollar IPO filing, traces a fairly direct line back to a marketplace listing on September 29, 2025, on a platform Microsoft built and Satya Nadella has run since 2014. Frankly, that's a debt worth acknowledging out loud. **Also read:** [China is giving its best AI models away free and that should worry OpenAI](https://startupfortune.com/china-is-giving-its-best-ai-models-away-free-and-that-should-worry-openai/) • [Samsung posted 1,800% profit growth and its stock fell anyway](https://startupfortune.com/samsung-posted-1800-profit-growth-and-its-stock-fell-anyway/) • [TravelAI bought Sonder's name out of bankruptcy and turned a dead hotel brand into an AI travel agent](https://startupfortune.com/travelai-bought-sonders-name-out-of-bankruptcy-and-turned-a-dead-hotel-brand-into-an-ai-travel-agent/)