Background

How is Claude Code as of August 2026?

Before I dig in, let me describe Anthropic's latest product offerings, as a lot has changed in the past couple of months.

There used to be two ways to use Claude Code: via the terminal or VSCode extension.

Now, Claude Code is also available in the desktop app and the Claude website. Claude Code's capabilities in these two interfaces are broader than in the terminal or VSCode extension. For example, Claude Code can only be executed in cloud environments in these interfaces.

With this context in mind, I tested Claude Code in the terminal and desktop app to understand the latest state of these products. I used Claude Code to help me:

  • build a website
  • trade cryptocurrency
  • create a browser extension
  • resolve a dispute with my electric company

Takeaways

My main takeaways are:

  • The desktop app is my favorite way to use Claude and is replacing my previous default, Claude Code in the terminal
  • Running Claude Code in cloud environments is much better than running it locally
  • Claude does the best when it has access to a lot of tools and environments. The tension is in how to do this safely.

Let's dive in.

The Claude app is a superior UI

Claude Code in the terminal has trouble scaling in two ways: functionality and session management. The Claude app solves these problems:

  1. Claude Code in the terminal exposes functionality via slash commands. This makes new functionality very hard to discover compared to the Claude app, which can surface new features in a rich GUI.
  2. Claude Code in the terminal supports session management via the /resume command, which lets you select from a list of sessions. However, this UI is cumbersome as you must use arrow keys to scroll through a limited number of sessions and your scroll position is lost if you pick the wrong one. The Claude app lets you easily select different sessions via its rich GUI.

Cloud environments

The Claude app is also better than Claude Code in the terminal because it offers Claude Code execution in a cloud environment. You can specify the following for your cloud environment:

  • GitHub repo
  • git branch
  • Network access policy
  • Env variables
  • Setup script

It's not as feature complete as sandcastle, but it's a solid improvement over running Claude Code locally. The main benefits are that it can't accidentally destroy my local machine, that it still runs even when my laptop is closed, and that I can access sessions via the Claude app on my phone!

Getting the most out of Claude

Claude did the best on my projects when it had access to everything it needed:

  • build a website: I gave Claude access to Vercel (for deploying the site) and Cloudflare (domain registrar + DNS records). Claude was able to build the site and deploy it, end to end. It even set up the DNS records for me.
  • trade cryptocurrency: I gave Claude the private key to my wallet. Note that this is not recommended, but this wallet had a small amount of money that I was comfortable with losing. Claude was able to trade cryptocurrency with just my private key. It has made me 12% in the past 7 days.
  • create a browser extension: I gave Claude access to my Firefox developer account, which it used to submit my extension to the Firefox store.
  • resolve a dispute with my electric company: I gave Claude access to my Gmail account via Zapier, which it used to read and write emails related to this dispute.

Challenges

I'd like to define connectors on a per-cloud-environment basis

One use case I have is that I have different Gmail developer accounts per project. However, the Claude app only lets me connect one Gmail account, which is used across all projects and sessions.

The native Gmail connector can't send emails

The Gmail connector can draft but not send emails. Anthropic does technically have OAuth permissions to send emails, but it chooses not to do so. The workaround is to use the Zapier connector.

Claude can't get into accounts with 2FA

I wanted Claude to access my electric company portal. However, this portal login texts a 2FA code to my phone, which Claude can't access.

My number one wish

There are a lot of startups that are building email inboxes, phone numbers, and credit cards for AI agents. I wish these were all baked into Claude Code and could be defined per session. It would be amazing to automatically have an @claude.ai email, a virtual phone number, and a virtual card provisioned for a cloud environment.

Karpathy recently tweeted:

We're starting to leave the territory where you'd test an LLM by e.g. "create an svg of pelican on a bicycle". As one idea to generalize it, I was interested what Opus 5 would do if I gave it the first paragraph of the Lord of the Rings, a 1M token budget (~$10) and asked for three js render of it.

In a similar vein, my test is: "Can Claude Code publish a Chrome extension in one shot with minimum setup?" This requires it to set up a Google developer account, register a phone number for 2FA, and pay a one-time $5 fee.