What A Day - Will Claude Code Change Everything?

Episode Date: January 20, 2026

Today marks a year since President Donald Trump took office for a second time, and a lot has happened. Amidst all the threats to take over Greenland, the Liberation Day tariffs, and the crackdown on education, artificial intelligence development has continued to accelerate — and it's only getting faster. Over the last few months, you may have heard about Claude Code – a product of Anthropic – that makes coding incredibly easy. But the thing about Claude Code that's really cool is that it might be learning how to improve itself. So to talk more about Claude Code, what it does, and what it could do in the future, we spoke to Lila Shroff. She's an assistant editor at The Atlantic, with a focus on AI.And in headlines, President Donald Trump exchanges some heated texts with the Prime Minister of Norway, new research finds Americans are footing the bill for Trump's tariffs, and Americans in all 50 states are staging a walkout to protest the Trump administration's "escalating fascist threat."Show Notes: Check out Lila's piece – https://tinyurl.com/mr39butwCall Congress – 202-224-3121Subscribe to the What A Day Newsletter – https://tinyurl.com/3kk4nyz8What A Day – YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/@whatadaypodcastFollow us on Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/crookedmedia/For a transcript of this episode, please visit crooked.com/whataday Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

It's Tuesday, January 20th. I'm Jane Koston, and this is what a day. The show just wondering what is up to. You guys, having a nice time? Good January so far. Anything new? Any, say, foreign policy debacles involving our NATO allies you want to prevent? On today's show, hooray. It's one year since President Donald Trump took office. We're 25% of the way there. Technically, we have fewer Trump days ahead of us than behind us, if you count his first term. And did Trump's tariffs make us all richer? Look in your wallet or stay tuned to find out. But let's start with artificial intelligence. If you've ever used Claude or ChatGPT, congratulations, you are among millions. According to Pew, 34% of U.S. adults had used chat GPT by the middle of 2025. That's double the number of users

since 2023. And half of all Americans have used some AI large language model, including chat GPT, Claude, Gemini, and Copilot. That's either fascinating or terrifying, depending on how you feel about AI. And AI development is only getting faster. Over the last few months, you may have heard about Claude, another product of Anthropic, the company that makes cloud. Here's an ad from Manthropic attempting to explain cloud code to Normies. Quad code is an agentic coding tool that lets you work with quad directly in your terminal. Okay, I'm already lost. But here's what you need to know.

Claude code is making coding incredibly easy, and thus making everyday life easier too. For example, you could use it to go through millions of data points in a health research study or monitor your plans vitals to help keep them alive, or build a bot to help you unsubscribe from every stupid email list you stupidly signed up for five years ago, even if you're a normie. Okay, to be fair, that's what I do with Cloud Code. But the thing about cloud code that's really cool, or, again, absolutely terrifying, is that it might be learning how to make itself better, an idea called recursive self-improvement. Researchers think that's one critical step towards AGI, or artificial general intelligence, an AI that could problem solve and

apply something it's learned in one space to another, something that, as of right now, only people can do, but maybe not for long, which again is either amazing or the doom of our civilization. Anyway, to talk more about Claude Code, what it does and what it could do in the future, I spoke to Lila Schroff. She's an assistant editor at The Atlantic with a focus on AI. Lila, welcome back to what today. Thanks for having me back. You wrote that a friend tried Claude Code and said, it just does stuff. Now, I've used Claude because apparently I need a robot to tell me different recipes to use skinless, boneless chicken for. But for people who have used Claude, and I've never used Claude code, what is it? And why are people so excited about it?

Yeah, Claude code, it's like an AI chat by, like ChatGBT, or Cloud the ones many of us are more familiar with. But it's also technically an agentic coding tool, which are words that probably don't mean a ton to many of us. But it's sort of a more powerful chat. bot that happens to run by generating code, but also happens to do a bunch of other cool stuff. It's like a superpower chatbot. Okay. Could you give me an example? You used the example in your piece of someone using the chatbot to go through all of this person's text messages and figure out how many times he said like, lol. Yeah. So I talked to one man who wanted to create basically a Spotify wrapped for his text

messages. And so using Claude, he said, hey, take a look at my text and do some analysis. And It did a lot of things. One thing was it filtered for how he was saying, ha ha, versus Lamow. He also had a slide of who he ghosted. But maybe a more practical example. I talked to another woman who said she's looking for a new office space for her company. She was communicating with a ton of different realtors. And so she had cloud code. She asked it to go through her I messages and compile a table with all the listings she's been sent or sent to someone else. And I think the thing, a lot of the time you ask chat GPT for help, and it will tell you to copy, paste something or, you know, do this thing or that thing. And basically, since Claude is good at coding, it's just good at doing things on the computer.

You installed Claude code. After using it yourself, what surprised you the most about what this AI tool can do? This was one of those moments. There's been a few moments in my life where I've been completely astounded by a technology. I think, you know, getting in a driverless car for the first time was sort of surreal. You hear about it and you think, yeah, sounds cool. And then you try it. And there's something about it that just you feel like you were catapulted into the future a little bit. This was one of those moments. It was, to me, almost more impressive than using chat TVT for the first time.

Here's an example. I have this massive data set that had been sitting on my desktop for months, this health data I wanted to write a story about. And I was struggling to do good analysis on it. And I asked Claude Codd, hey, can you, you know, take a little. of this data and answer these questions, it produced results. The question now for me is how valid were those results? And that is what's interesting here is a lot of the times you can ask it to do more powerful stuff. But if you don't know how to build an app and it builds you an app, you have the app, but does the app actually function with good cybersecurity practices?

That's harder to tell. Now, given all of the questions I'm asking you, you can tell I have not used Claude Code. And you wrote that the app's popularity skyrocketed in December and everyone in tech was using cloud code. But why do you think it hasn't popped off for the general public? What are the barriers to entry? So for one, it costs money. This isn't like chat GPT where you can send it for free. It's more than your average streaming subscription. So you need to be excited in or if it feel like there's real utility there for you, maybe going into it. And then until now, until pretty recently, it's been accessible through the computer terminal, which isn't that scarities, but if you've never taken a coding class, it looks a little bit like crazy hacker in a

movie. But they actually just released a new product that's not as scary looking for non-technical users. And I think, you know, Anthropic, when I talked to people that work there, they said they were surprised because they did build this as a coding tool. They built it for developers. And so seeing it all of a sudden pop off among all these non-technical people, they themselves were kind of surprised to see that. You talk about how cloud code could turn out to be an inflection point for AI progress, especially towards artificial general intelligence or AGI, because there are early signs of what's called recursive self-improvement. First of all, what's recursive self-improvement? Basically, the idea is at some point we're going to get to possibly AI systems that can start

making themselves better. One of my co-workers, Mateo Wong, has put this pretty nicely. If the GPT-5 model starts improving the GPT-6 model, which improves the GPT-7 and on and on and on, you get this takeoff of kind of rapid improvement. This is somewhat theoretical. And so, you know, we can reason about whether it's a legitimate theory of how I progress will continue. But the anthropic employee who created Claude code said they're starting to see Claude come up with ideas of what to build next.

And so for him, it was kind of early sparks of this. Now, if you could see what my face is doing, I just made the face that you said, Claude is coming up with ideas. And I've seen Terminator 2 Judgment Day. So I am very anxious about this. And I think that if anyone's been paying attention to people being concerned about AGI, there's either been like AGI is going to save us all or AGI is going to kill us all because it's going to become a god and everybody loses their minds.

So based on what you've seen, how worried about AI spinning out of control, given that you just said that someone at Anthropic is seeing Claude come up with ideas. humans come up with ideas. AI coming up with ideas is new and very scary. So how worried should we actually be? What are experts saying about this? You know, I'll start by just saying I haven't seen whatever is going on inside of Anthropics. So I can't say what exactly they're seeing and whether it is actually, you know, AI coming up with novel ideas or just doing a good job of a kind of recreating already existing human ideas. Even if this is actually what's going on, I think that I, I'm not polarized to the, you know, abundance crazy AI future or the extreme we all need to go hide out. I think the biggest questions I have around employment and automation. I think this is the first time I've started to think, wow, I can really see how there's a lot of work that we do on a day-to-day basis that could be pretty radically transformed and perhaps automated with the technology. That sense is becoming more clear.

And so how this plays out on the jobs front is the biggest question in my mind. You report that Anthropic, the maker of Cloud Code, discovered Chinese state-sponsored hackers were using the tool for cyber espionage. Can you tell us more about that? Yeah. I mean, if it's me who has a very limited programming experience using Cloud Code can all of a sudden be a much better programmer, people with nefarious or ill intent can also be kind of leveled up. We all kind of get a boost. The good guys and maybe the people with a little bit less. worse attentions. And so I think that kind of creates an arms race effect on the cybersecurity front

where you get more powerful ways of tracking down bad actors, but then you also get bad actors doing crazier things. And so there's a lot of open questions, I think, there. And cybersecurity in particular is an area. I also have some concerns about. Yeah, I think that the concerns for me, I mean, we've seen this with other AI tools like GROC, where it's creating, through users, but the users wouldn't have the ability to do this without Grock, child sexual abuse material and non-consensual sexual content. What does that tell us about the risks of AI? I think you just said something really smart, which is that like if, you know, the white hats are going to use it to do even better white hat things and the bad people are going to use it

to do even worse things, what does that mean for the challenge of regulating these technologies? That's a big question. I think, you know, there is a degree to which this is all happening really fast. The sorts of questions that get introduced by a much more powerful tool like Cloud Code, you know, I think that this kind of makes me think across the board, you know, in education, how do you want students learning to use these tools? There's been a lot of talk about whether we should have this streamlined national AI policy or what states figure things out. I think there's just a ton of confusion and lack of direction as to how we handle this. And so I think hopefully hopefully this is a moment that sort of prompts people to start putting their heads together and thinking more seriously.

Lila, thank you so much for coming back to the show. Thanks for having me. That was my conversation with Lila Shroff, assistant editor at The Atlantic. We'll link to her piece in the show notes. We'll get to more of the news in the moment, but if you like this show, make sure to subscribe, leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts, watch us on YouTube, and share with your friends. More to come after some ads. This episode is brought to you by IQ Bar, our snack, hydration, and coffee sponsor.

IQ Bar Protein bars, IQ Mix, Hydration Mixes, and IQ Joe Mushroom Coffees are the delicious, low sugar, brain and body fuel you need to win your day. All IQ Bar products are clean label certified and entirely free from gluten, dairy, soy, GMOs, and artificial ingredients. And all IQ Bar products are packed with clean, delicious ingredients to keep you physically and mentally fit, like magnesium, Lions Main, and more. The new year gives us all a chance to reset. Maximize your brain and body's potential with IQ bars, protein bars, hydration mixes, and mushroom coffees. Their ultimate sampler pack includes all three. I have a lot of goals I want to achieve this year, and IQ bar is helping me hit my macros and make sure I'm ready for big races and big PRs.

And right now, IQ Bar is offering our special podcast listeners 20% off all IQ bar products, including the ultimate sampler pack plus free shipping. To get your 20% off, text Wad to 64,000. Text Wad to 64,000. That's Wad to 64,000. Message and data rates may apply. See Terms for Details. What a Day is brought to you by Acorns.

So many people are focused on where their money is going today. Acorns is a financial wellness app that cares about where your money is going tomorrow. And with the Acorns potential screen, you can find out what your money is capable of. Acorns is easy. You can sign up in minutes. and start automatically investing your spare money, even if all you've got is spare change. Acorns grows with you.

Whether you're just starting out or thinking about settling down, Acorn supports your big and small goals across every life stage. The Acorns potential screen shows you the power of compounding and how your money could grow over time. Plus, you can quickly adjust how much you're investing every day, week, or month to make sure you're building towards your goals. And Acorns is all in one. No more finance apps cluttering your phone.

With Acorns, you can invest, save, and give your money a chance to grow in one trusted place. Sign up now and Acorns will boost your new account with a $5 bonus investment. Join the over 14 million all-time customers who have already saved and invested over $27 billion with Acorns. Head to Acorns.com slash Wad or download the Acorns app to get started. Paid non-client endorsement. Compensation provides incentive to positively promote Acorns. Tier 2 compensation provided. Potential subject to various factors such a lot of.

as customers' accounts, age and investment settings. Does not include ACORN's fees, results do not predict or represent the performance of any ACORN's portfolio. Investment results will vary. Investing involves risk. ACORN's Advisors, LLC and SEC registered investment advisor. View important disclosures at ACORNs.com slash WAD. Here's what else we're following today.

Head aligns. The meeting we had last week left me with a clear impression that the president honestly and full-heartedly want to acquire Greenland. But we also made it fiddly clear that this is a red line. The Danish foreign minister spoke with reporters Monday, reiterating the quagmire that is Trump versus Greenland. And if he was looking for optimism today, he didn't find any. That's because Trump's petty little fingers were flutter this weekend,

texting the Prime Minister of Norway. In the texts acquired by PBS Monday, Trump said in part, quote, Considering your country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped eight wars plus, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of peace. He's like a six-year-old who didn't get the trophy, quits the soccer team, and tries to take the ball home. In a statement about the exchange, the Norwegian prime minister said, quote, I have on several occasions clearly explained to Trump what is well known,

namely that it is an independent Nobel committee and not the Norwegian government that awards the prize. So it's like a six-year-old stole the trophy from an entire, a different soccer league. Also, he's in charge of the military for some reason? The message comes on the heels of Trump threatening new tariffs on the European nations backing Denmark and Greenland. The EU will weigh a potential response at an emergency summit in Brussels on Thursday. The Supreme Court is set to hear arguments on Wednesday in a case involving President Trump's attempt to fire Federal Reserve Board Governor Lisa Cook. Last year, Trump tried to fire Cook, citing accusations of mortgage fraud. Cook has denied the allegation and no charges have

been made against her. She sued to keep her job, and the Supreme Court issued a brief order allowing her to stay on the board while it considers the case. So here we are. According to sources, Fed Chair Jerome Powell plans to attend the session, a show of support by the Central Bank chair. It's unusual, but the Fed has really been going through it lately. Just last week, Powell revealed that the Department of Justice subpoenaed the Fed and threatened a criminal indictment related to his congressional testimony over the cost of a renovation of Fed buildings. I always say tariffs is the most beautiful word to me in the dictionary. Then I was reprimanded by the fake news.

They said, what about love, religion, and God? I said, I agree. Let's put God number one. Let's put religion number two. Love, I don't know. We've got to put that number three, I guess, right? And then it's tariff. Because tariffs are going to make us rich as hell.

It's going to bring our countries. That was President Trump exactly a year ago today, professing his undying love for tariffs, and he hasn't stopped since. But have tariffs made us all rich as hell, as a president promised? It seems unlikely. In fact, new research published by the Keele Institute for the World Economy found Americans are actually footing the bill for the country's tariffs.

Researchers of the German think tank analyzed more than 25 million shipment records spanning a total value of almost $4 trillion in U.S. imports. From that, they found that foreign exporters took on about 4% of the tariff burden, leaving 96% to be passed to U.S. buyers. The researchers found that ultimately, tariffs are bad for everyone. U.S. companies will be confronted with shrinking margins and consumers will face higher prices in the long run. The report concluded, quote, the claim that foreign countries pay these tariffs is a myth. The tariffs are, in the most literal sense and own goal.

Reading us for filth. As of today, January 20th, we, We are officially one year into President Trump's second term. And just in case our previous headlines didn't make it clear, things aren't going great. That's why this afternoon at 2 p.m. local time, Americans in all 50 states are expected to walk out of their jobs, schools, and businesses to protest the country's quote, escalating fascist threat. The call to action comes from the same group behind the monumental women's march during Trump's first term. They're calling it the Free America Walkout. According to the website, a Free America begins the moment we refuse to cooperate.

This is not a request. This is a rupture. This is a protest and a promise. In the face of fascism, we will be ungovernable. So no matter what's on your agenda today, we hope you celebrate this year's Trump aversory like a true American, whether it's exercising your freedom of speech, right to assemble, or liberty to demand better from your government. Because that's what this country was built on. Not tariffs, or Greenland, or demanding talk show hosts be fired for not being nice enough to the president of the United States. Actually, we don't have to be nice to the president of the United States at all, because this is America. And that's the news. One more thing. Immigration and customs enforcement is very busy in Minneapolis right now, as you may know. Breaking car windows, hospitalizing children with flashbangs, screaming obscenities, they've got lots to do.

But something else they've been doing is arresting Native Americans. Yes, Native Americans. Last week, members of the Oglala Sioux tribe in Minneapolis sounded the alarm after multiple members of the tribe were allegedly detained by ICE, taken away with no details as to where they are or when they'll be released. The Twin Cities is home to at least 50,000 American Indians, and they are being targeted by ICE with allegations of harassment and abuse. And American Indians from across the country, from Utah to Arizona to Washington State, are reporting the same thing. Despite literally being indigenous Americans, ICE is going after them. Here's Native American actress Elaine Miles on CNN, talking about an incident in December in which she was told that her ID looked, quote, fake by ICE agents in Redmond, Washington. And I kept telling them that it was from a federally recognized tribe in eastern Oregon,

and it's a federal ID, and only enrolled members can get those. because they kept saying anybody could make them. Now, you might be wondering, why in the hell would indigenous Americans literally the most American of Americans be targeted by ICE? The answers, as far as I can tell, are racism and government overreach. Last September, the Supreme Court found that, quote, apparent race or ethnicity could be used as a relevant factor

that would allow ICE to detain someone. These stops, now called Kavanaugh stops for Justice Brett Kavanaugh, are now being used against indigenous Americans because, to put it bluntly, ICE thinks they look foreign. But you heard Elaine Miles mentioned her tribal ID, which is a real form of identification and can be used as proof of citizenship. There are 574 federally recognized American Indian and Alaska Native tribes in the United States. Those tribes receive specific rights and protections,

including some powers of self-government and limited sovereignty. And that gets to the government overreach part. See, because of Trump, treaties made between the government and American Indian tribes, ICE doesn't have the same powers on Indian land it has elsewhere. But as you might guess, it would really, really like those powers. Specifically, ICE wants American Indian tribes to sign 287G agreements, which would create a relationship between the federal government and Indian tribes to enforce immigration laws. And according to the president of the Oglala Sioux tribe, Frank Starr comes out, federal officials said that they

wouldn't give up information about the people they detained until the tribe signed a 287G agreement. But Frank Starr comes out said no. In a letter to multiple Trump administration officials, he wrote, quote, We will not enter an agreement that would authorize or make it easier for ICE or homeland security to come onto our tribal homeland to arrest or detain our tribal members. In an interview with the Washington Post, Minnesota State Representative Leish Kozlowski, who is of Anishinaabe O'Gibwe descent, said that the Trump White House wants to, quote, crush dissenters.

But they said, quote, the thing is, they've never been able to crush our spirits, ever. Before we go, Crooked Media's newest book, Hated by All the Right People, Dr. Carlson and The Unraveling of the Conservative Mind is releasing next week on January 27th. It's by one of our favorite political journalists, New York Times Magazine writer Jason Zengarly.

in hated by all the right people, Jason Zengarly gives a fascinating, informative look at Tucker's political evolution and how his rise traces the rise of the MAGA movement. Tommy just interviewed Jason on today's Potsive America episode, so make sure to check that out. This is your last week to pre-order the book to get a discount. Head to crooked.com slash books to get your copy and check out Jason's book signing tour dates. That's all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review, don't bet on sports and tell your friends to listen. And if you're into reading, and not just about how we are in the midst of the NFL playoffs. And the NBA is in full swing.

And we just watched the college football national championship. And I just want to remind you that betting on sports is a terrible idea. Like me, what a day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at cricket.com slash subscribe. I'm Jane Koston. And most Americans think sports betting is ruining the integrity of sports. So just say no to betting real American currency on sports or politics or pretty much anything. What a day is a production of Crooked Media.

It's recorded and mixed by Desmond Taylor. Our associate producers are Emily Four and Chris Allport. Our producer is Caitlin Blummer. Our video editor is Joseph Tutra. Our video producer is Johanna Case. We had a production help today from Ethan Oberman, Greg Walters, and Matt Burke. Our senior producer is Erica Morrison and our senior vice president of news and politics is Adrian Hill. Our theme music is by Kyle Murdoch and Jordan Cantor.

We had helped today from the Associated Press. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America. East.