Catching Up with Claude Code
A guided tour of the features, primitives, and platform shifts behind Anthropic's coding agent
A recent product email listed roughly ten Claude Code and platform updates. If you’ve been heads-down shipping and haven’t tracked every changelog, this is your catch-up guide. The platform moves fast enough that your mental model of what Claude Code can do may already be out of date.
Taken individually, these are incremental improvements. Taken together, they reveal a coherent architecture: code execution as the foundational primitive, context management as the core engineering problem, and multi-surface access as the interface layer. The underlying shift is concrete. Claude used to generate text about solutions. Now it executes them and verifies the results. That shift underpins everything below.
The Multi-Surface Shift
If you’ve been using Claude Code primarily from the terminal, the biggest shift you may have missed is how many surfaces it now covers. The Claude desktop and mobile apps now have a dedicated Code tab. Claude Code on the Web runs sessions in Anthropic-managed cloud VMs, no local install required. VS Code and JetBrains extensions embed it in your IDE. And with Remote Control (more on this below), you can connect any of these surfaces to a session running on a machine of your choosing. The underlying agent is the same one you know. The surfaces are different entry points into it.
This matters because it changes the relationship. Claude Code stops being “a tool you sit down and use” and becomes something that’s available wherever you are. Start debugging in the terminal at your desk, switch to VS Code for visual diffs, check on progress from your phone. The conversation and context follow you.
You’re likely already familiar with CLAUDE.md, skills, hooks, and subagents. These have continued to mature, but the conceptual model hasn’t changed. What has changed is where you can access all of it. The customization you’ve built into your workflow now travels with you across surfaces.
Remote Control: The Always-Available Agent
The feature that makes the multi-surface story tangible is Remote Control. It connects claude.ai/code or the Claude mobile app to your running local session. Everything stays local. Your filesystem, MCP servers, project config. The web or mobile interface is just a window into it.
# Start a remote-controlled session
claude remote-control --name "My Project"
# Or from an existing session
/rcPress spacebar to get a QR code for your phone. The session syncs across all connected devices. Send messages from terminal, browser, and phone interchangeably.
The architectural decision here is deliberate. Unlike Claude Code on the Web, which runs on Anthropic-managed cloud VMs, Remote Control keeps execution on your machine. Your local tools work. Your MCP connections work. You get the mobility of a cloud-based tool without giving up local control.
I’ve been experimenting with Remote Control over the past few weeks. The appeal is real. Starting a long-running task at my desk and continuing from my phone is exactly the workflow I wanted, without going the full OpenClaw route of setting up a persistent headless agent. Remote Control is the lighter-weight version of “Claude Code is always available.”
In practice, connection stability has been a challenge. Sessions drop more often than I’d like, particularly during longer tasks. This is a research preview, so rough edges are expected. The underlying idea is sound. The execution needs time to mature. I’ll keep testing it because the workflow it enables is worth the friction.
All traffic runs through the Anthropic API over TLS, using multiple short-lived credentials scoped to single purposes. No cloud VMs, no external sandboxing. Available on Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise plans.
