Claude Code has become one of the hottest AI tools in recent months — and software engineers in Seattle are taking notice.

More than 150 techies packed the house at a Claude Code meetup event in Seattle on Thursday evening, eager to trade use cases and share how they’re using Anthropic’s fast-growing technology.

Claude Code is a specialized AI tool that acts like a supercharged pair-programmer for software developers. Interest in Claude Code has surged alongside improvements to Anthropic’s underlying models that let Claude handle longer, more complex workflows.

“The biggest thing is closing the feedback loop — it can take actions on its own and look at the results of those actions, and then take the next action,” explained Carly Rector, a product engineer at Pioneer Square Labs, the Seattle startup studio that organized Thursday’s event at Thinkspace.

Software development has emerged as the first profession to be thoroughly reshaped by large language models, as AI systems move beyond answering questions to actively doing the work. Last summer GeekWire reported on a similar event in Seattle focused on Cursor, another AI coding tool that developers described as a major productivity booster.

Claude Code is “one of a new generation of AI coding tools that represent a sudden capability leap in AI in the past month or so,” wrote Ethan Mollick, a Wharton professor and AI researcher, in a Jan. 7 blog post.

Mollick notes that these tools are better at self-correcting their own errors and now have “agentic harness” that helps them work around long-standing AI limitations, including context-window constraints that affect how much information models can remember.

On stage at Thursday’s event, Rector demoed an app that automatically fixed front-end bugs by having Claude Code control a browser. Johnny Leung, a software engineer at Stripe, said Claude Code has changed how he thinks about being a developer. “It’s kind of evolving the mentality from just writing code to becoming like an architect, almost like a product manager,” he said on stage during his demo.

R. Conner Howell, a software engineer in Seattle, showed how Claude Code can act as a personal cycling coach, querying performance data from databases and generating custom training plans — an example of the tool’s impact extending beyond traditional software development.

Earlier this week Anthropic — which is reportedly raising another $10 billion at a $350 billion valuation — released Claude Cowork, essentially Claude Code’s non-developer cousin that is built for everyday knowledge work instead of just programming. Anthropic on Friday expanded access to Cowork.

AI coding tools are energizing longtime software developers like Damon Cortesi, who co-founded Seattle startup Simply Measured in 2010 and is now an engineer at Airbnb. He said Thursday’s event was the first tech meetup he’s attended in more than five years.

“There’s no limit to what I can think about and put out there and actually make real,” he said.

In a post titled “How Claude Reset the AI Race,” New York Magazine columnist John Herrman noted the growing concern around coding automation and job displacement. “If you work in software development, the future feels incredibly uncertain,” he wrote.

Anthropic, which opened an office in Seattle in 2024, said it used Claude Code to build Claude Cowork itself. However, analysts at William Blair issued a report this week expressing skepticism that other businesses will simply start building their own software with these new AI tools.

“Vibe coding and AI code generation certainly make it easier to build software, but the technical barriers to coding have not been the drivers of software moats for some time,” they wrote. “For the most successful and scaled software companies, determining what to build next and how it should function within a broader system is fundamentally more important and more challenging than the technical act of building and coding it.”

For now, Claude Code is being rapidly adopted. The tool reached a $1 billion run rate six months after launch in May. OpenAI’s Codex and Google’s Antigravity offer similar capabilities.

“We’re excited to see all the cool things you do with Claude Code,” Caleb John, a Seattle entrepreneur working at Pioneer Square Labs, told the crowd. “It’s really a new era of software development.”

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect that the report cited was from William Blair.

Hi, Microsoft 365 Insiders! Since joining the Microsoft family in 2021, Clipchamp has become a favorite tool for creators, educators, and businesses worldwide to create engaging, on-brand videos fast. In 2025, we added new capabilities aimed at improving accessibility, creativity, and precision as well as increased productivity and we made a number of updates to the editing interface. Let’s take a walk down memory lane!

A cohesive video experience

Last year, we learned from many of you about key overlaps between two of our video offerings within Microsoft 365: Clipchamp and Stream, our enterprise video experience. To capitalize on each product’s unique advantages and reduce friction for users navigating video at work, we spearheaded a new, cohesive Microsoft video experience by evolving Clipchamp and Stream into a single, streamlined video solution. Videos continue to be stored in SharePoint, Teams, and OneDrive, while maintaining the same familiar experiences for sharing, searching, and commenting across other Microsoft 365 apps. Enterprise organizations can now enhance productivity and efficiency, while improvements to video playback capabilities will continue to improve user engagement.

Learn more: The future of video in Microsoft 365

More precise and intuitive video editing

Video is rapidly transforming the way modern enterprises operate, communicate, and compete. At Microsoft, we believe video editing should be simple whether it is for work, school, or personal projects. In 2025, we released several features with this goal in mind. Now it's easy to trim video directly from transcripts, view timestamps and clip duration by hovering over the timeline, transcribe and add subtitles in minutes, edit the speed of any video or audio clip, and remove unwanted audio. Along with other functionalities like grouping and applying effects to multiple elements at once, you can edit faster and with more precision.

 

Learn more:

• Trim a video by editing the transcript in Clipchamp
• Make video editing simpler with new updates to Clipchamp
• How to transcribe audio to text in Microsoft
• How to trim a video online for free
• How to speed up and slow down videos
• How to use the audio speed changer
• How to split videos online for free
• How to add AI subtitles to videos
• How to remove audio from video
• How to speed up video editing with multi-item editing tool

More ways to customize and get creative

Greater customization was a priority in 2025, with many of our improvements geared toward helping you create on-brand and professional-looking videos with ease. Our refreshed brand kit stores logos, fonts, and other key elements for making organization-specific content, while the new color picker allows you to easily pick colors from your media files for precise color matching. Paired with the ability to create and share video templates, you can facilitate better collaboration and promote efficiency. Plus, we’ve expanded our library of stock images, text styles, vector shapes, gradient backgrounds and more design elements to suit your unique tone and drive better audience engagement.

Learn more:

• Clipchamp’s brand kit: simplifying consistent video creation for organizations | Microsoft Community Hub
• Stay on brand with video templates in Clipchamp for work
• Kickstart your creativity with new content and creative tools in Clipchamp
• How to make logo animations with free effects
• How to overlay text on videos and GIFs
• How to add vintage filters to videos
• How to add forms and callouts to a video in Clipchamp
• How to add glitch effect to videos
• How to add frames and borders to videos

A seamless interface

Using Clipchamp feel natural and enjoyable, and over the past year we’ve refreshed the interface to make that experience even smoother. We introduced both dark and light modes to suit your working preferences and a collapsable side bar and timeline. In addition, it’s now more intuitive to take common actions such as zooming in and out of the timeline, undoing and redoing edits, and changing the aspect ratio of videos.

Learn more:

• Make video editing simpler with new updates to Clipchamp
• How to change the aspect ratio of a video

AI-powered productivity

Microsoft 365 Copilot Create experience makes it easier to create videos from a prompt. Add a file, your organization's brand kit to help consuming and sharing information more dynamic and engaging. And if you need to catch up on what's happening across your company, from missed meetings to the latest townhall, Clipchamp has it all in one place. With the help of Copilot, leverage your transcripts to summarize your videos and get answers to your questions.

And to top it off, at Ignite 2025, we announced the availability of OpenAI’s latest video model, Sora 2, in Frontier—bringing advanced video generation capabilities to Microsoft 365 Copilot licensed users.

Looking ahead, our focus is on strengthening video creation and consumption by making it easier for people to create high-quality video inside their everyday tools, and in turn enabling those videos to be discovered, shared, and reused across the organization. By tightening this loop, we aim to accelerate learning, collaboration, and the impact of video throughout Microsoft 365.

Learn more:

• How to prompt Copilot to create a video storyboard
• How to summarize a video in Clipchamp
• How to generate and download a podcast transcript for free
• How to remove background noise from videos with AI
• How to remove silences from audio and video with AI
• How to use the AI video editor in Clipchamp
• Ask questions & get summaries of any video with Microsoft Copilot in the Clipchamp player
• Create a video with the Microsoft 365 Copilot app
• Available today: OpenAI’s Sora 2 in Microsoft 365 Copilot

 

Your feedback makes us better

We hope that these announcements have inspired you to take advantage of new and improved capabilities in Clipchamp and supercharge your video creation. We value your ongoing support and insightful feedback as it inspires us to continually innovate and enhance our products as an essential tool for millions around the globe. Every suggestion and comment you share plays a pivotal role in our journey towards excellence. Please keep them coming and help us make Clipchamp the best product it can be for YOU using any of these methods!

 

Learn about the Microsoft 365 Insider program and sign up for the Microsoft 365 Insider newsletter to get the latest information about Insider features in your inbox once a month!

FunctionGemma is a specialized AI model for function calling. This post explains why fine-tuning is key to resolving tool selection ambiguity (e.g., internal vs. Google search) and achieving ultra-specialization, transforming it into a strict, enterprise-compliant agent. A case study demonstrates the improved logic. It also introduces the "FunctionGemma Tuning Lab," a no-code demo on Hugging Face Spaces, which streamlines the entire fine-tuning process for developers.

If you have been on the internet long enough, you probably remember Digg. The social news aggregator was a major player in the mid-2000s before its infamous redesign sent users fleeing to Reddit. Well, Digg is back, and this time it has communities.

And yes, Aurelia has one .

What is the Aurelia Community on Digg?

The Aurelia community on Digg is a dedicated space for discussing all things Aurelia. Whether you want to share projects you have built, ask questions about the framework, or just connect with other Aurelia developers, this is another place to do it.

Electron 40.0.0 has been released! It includes upgrades to Chromium 144.0.7559.60, V8 14.4, and Node 24.11.1.

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The Electron team is excited to announce the release of Electron 40.0.0! You can install it with npm via npm install electron@latest or download it from our releases website. Continue reading for details about this release.

If you have any feedback, please share it with us on Bluesky or Mastodon, or join our community Discord! Bugs and feature requests can be reported in Electron's issue tracker.

Stack Changes​

• Chromium 144.0.7559.60

  • New in 144
  • New in 143

• Node v24.11.1

  • Node 24.11.1 blog post

• V8 14.4

  • V8 roll increment

Electron 40 upgrades Chromium from 142.0.7444.52 to 144.0.7559.60, Node.js from v22.20.0 to v24.11.1, and V8 from 14.2 to 14.4.

New Features and Improvements​

• Added "memory-eviction" as a possible reason for a child process to exit. #48362
• Added RGBAF16 output format with scRGB HDR color space support to Offscreen Rendering. #48265 ^{(Also in 39)}
• Added app.isHardwareAccelerationEnabled(). #47614 ^{(Also in 37, 38, 39)}
• Added bypassCustomProtocolHandlers option to net.request. #48883 ^{(Also in 38, 39)}
• Added methods to enable more granular accessibility support management. #48042 ^{(Also in 37, 38, 39)}
• Added support to import external shared texture as VideoFrame. #48831
• Added the ability to retrieve the system accent color on Linux using systemPreferences.getAccentColor. #48027 ^{(Also in 39)}
• Allowed for persisting File System API grant status within a given session. #48170 ^{(Also in 37, 38, 39)}
• Automatically focus DevTools when element is inspected or breakpoint is triggered. #46386 ^{(Also in 37, 38, 39)}
• Enables resetting accent color to follow system accent settings if a previous color has been set via window.setAccentColor(null). #48274 ^{(Also in 38, 39)}
• Support dynamic ESM imports in non-context isolated preloads. #48375 ^{(Also in 37, 38, 39)}
• Updated nativeImage.createFromNamedImage to support SF Symbol names. #48772 ^{(Also in 39)}

Breaking Changes​

Deprecated: clipboard API access from renderer processes​

Using the clipboard API directly in the renderer process is deprecated. If you want to call this API from a renderer process, place the API call in your preload script and expose it using the contextBridge API.

Behavior Changed: MacOS dSYM files now compressed with tar.xz​

Debug symbols for MacOS (dSYM) now use xz compression in order to handle larger file sizes. dsym.zip files are now dsym.tar.xz files. End users using debug symbols may need to update their zip utilities.

End of Support for 37.x.y​

Electron 37.x.y has reached end-of-support as per the project's support policy. Developers and applications are encouraged to upgrade to a newer version of Electron.

E40 (Jan'26)	E41 (Mar'26)	E42 (May'26)
40.x.y	41.x.y	42.x.y
39.x.y	40.x.y	41.x.y
38.x.y	39.x.y	40.x.y

What's Next​

In the short term, you can expect the team to continue to focus on keeping up with the development of the major components that make up Electron, including Chromium, Node, and V8.

You can find Electron's public timeline here.

More information about future changes can be found on the Planned Breaking Changes page.

Comment

If you’ve spent any time at all reading about AI coding agents, you’ll likely have heard that people get better results when working with languages other than Swift.

Is that because Swift isn’t as AI-friendly as other languages? Absolutely not. In fact, I’ve seen people say that type-safe languages produce better results as the agent can rely on the compiler to automatically catch basic errors. No, I believe there are two main reasons you don’t get quite as good results with Swift and SwiftUI:

1. Swift has a much smaller footprint of publicly available open-source code compared to other languages like Python and JavaScript. Less training data means less language knowledge.
2. Swift and SwiftUI have both seen sustained and significant changes since their releases, and they continue right up to today with major changes like Swift concurrency constantly moving the goalposts.

There’s so much churn in not only best practices with the language and frameworks, but also with the basics of creating a working app.

So I’ve been interested to receive several recommendations of a tool that really helps the agents get to grips with the current state of Swift. Cupertino is a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that crawls Apple’s locally installed developer documentation, Swift.org (including Swift Evolution proposals, which often contain really great documentation), the HIG, and more.

It even has access to all package repository information (courtesy of the Swift Package Index package list) so it’s much less likely to hallucinate packages that sound like they’ll solve your exact problem. 😂

I’ve not had a chance to try it in a real-world project yet, but I’ve had enough people reach out and suggest I link to it that I thought I’d make it the focus of this week’s comment. Give it a try if you’re working with an agent or other LLM-based coding assistant.

– Dave Verwer

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News

The Swift Programming Language - PDF edition

What a lovely thing Peter Friese has done! He has automated the production of a beautiful PDF file from the DocC version of The Swift Programming Language. You can download a pre-built release or build it yourself if you’re curious how he did it, too!

Tools

Let Steve test your macOS app

Here’s yet another tool to help LLM coding agents work with your project! Mikkel Malmberg’s latest project is a command line tool that can automate and test the UI of Mac apps. It includes instructions for the agent in the form of a skill, too, so agents will be able to figure out what they need to test and use the tool to verify your app’s UI.

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Make nice tools

What a great article from Paul Samuels on abstracting away Docker from a multi-person app development team. SwiftUI is perfect for building little tools like the ones in this post.

Code

Validator

Nikita Vasilev’s SwiftUI and UIKit form validation library isn’t new, but I hadn’t seen it until his Community Showcase forum post earlier this week. I love that it splits the validation itself from reporting validation issues back to the UI, so you don’t need to take both if you want it to fit better with the rest of your app. The README file is comprehensive, and there’s fantastic documentation if you need more.

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Universal Links At Scale: The Challenges Nobody Talks About

Every time I hear people talk about setting up non-trivial Universal Links for their app, I hear stories of pain and suffering. I can’t imagine a better guide to getting everything correct than the one in Alberto De Bortoli’s latest blog post.

Business and Marketing

I did a Daring Fireball ad

I enjoyed this post from Slaven Radic on marketing his Finalist app. He talks about the other aspects of success that can come from advertising on personal sites run by influential people. The kind of results that App Store or Facebook Ads could never deliver.

Books

The Swift AI Playbook

There has been a lot written on the internet over the past few years about using AI inside your apps. 😬 Some of what you’ll find is great, and some … not so much. The initial release of Paul Hudson’s latest book contains only the first of many chapters, but it already comprehensively covers the iOS 26 Foundation Models and comes with a load of sample code. Best of all, it’s written with Paul’s typical teaching style, which I know you all love.

Videos

WWDC TV

This is a fun one! Shai Mishali has an Apple TV app in beta which uses the WWDC Index’s catalogue of 3,667 WWDC (2000 to 2025) sessions, plus various Tech Talks. The app looks beautiful, and while it’s not fully released, you can join a TestFlight to give it a try right now!

Jobs

Senior iOS Engineer @ alba – We have a unique approach to identifying opportunities, entering markets, and scaling our products. This approach puts us on a fast trajectory for maximizing the reach and delight our products create. Founded about three years ago, our products have been used by more than 50M users. – Remote (within European timezones) or on-site (United Kingdom)

And finally...

You won’t need a pixel font every day of your life, but when you do…

Oh, and if you’ve not played Time Flies yet, please do. It’s very charming.