Claude Code

What it is

Claude Code is Anthropic’s agentic coding tool: it reads a folder of files, edits them, runs commands, and checks its own work. It runs in a terminal, in VS Code and JetBrains, in a desktop app, and in the browser at claude.ai/code.

The reason it belongs on a PM site has little to do with coding. Three of its features are general-purpose product tooling that happen to ship inside a developer product: CLAUDE.md, a markdown file it reads at the start of every session, so your product context stops being something you re-paste; MCP, which connects it to Jira, Slack, Figma, Google Drive or your database, so it works from your actual systems; and skills, packaged repeatable workflows you can share with a team.

Our verdict

The highest-ceiling tool on this site and the one most likely to change what your job looks like in two years. A PM who can run it can build the internal tool nobody would prioritise, ship a real prototype instead of a Figma of one, and — via MCP — ask questions of Jira and the warehouse in one place. It is also the most honest way to learn what your engineers actually deal with, which quietly improves everything else you do.

Where it falls short: the terminal is a real wall, and the marketing consistently understates it — if you have never used a command line, budget an uncomfortable afternoon, not ten minutes. There is no free tier, so you cannot try it properly without paying. It will confidently do the wrong thing at speed, which is a different failure mode from a tool that just refuses; you need enough judgment to notice, and on a codebase you don’t understand you won’t have it. And it is genuinely dangerous pointed at production systems — the blast radius of an agent with shell access is not theoretical. Keep it on scratch repos and internal tools until you know what you’re doing.

Get value in 10 minutes

Do not start on your company’s main codebase. Start with an empty folder and something small you own.

1. Install it: curl -fsSL https://claude.ai/install.sh | bash on macOS, Linux or WSL. Then mkdir pm-scratch && cd pm-scratch && claude.
2. Write a CLAUDE.md in that folder with five lines about your product: what it does, who uses it, the two constraints that always apply, the words your company uses for things. Every session now starts from that instead of from nothing.
3. Ask for something real and small: “Read this CSV of support tickets and build me a single-page HTML dashboard showing volume by category over time. No build step — one file I can open in a browser.”
4. Open the file. Ask for the two changes you want. That loop — describe, look, correct — is the whole skill, and it transfers to everything else the tool does.