The latest Claude updates in one place: new features in the Claude app, Claude Code tips and tricks from the people who build with it every day, prompt ideas worth stealing, and the Anthropic news that changes how you use it. Every item says why it matters, who it is for and which plan you need, and links the original post.
21 items · 11 new this week · updated Oct 16, 2026
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Boris Cherny, who leads Claude Code at Anthropic, says Claude Slides is now how he makes decks, including the device-frame mockups he used to search for by hand. Slides lives in the Claude app alongside Claude Docs and Claude Design, so you can draft a one-pager, turn it into a deck and mock up a matching visual in one conversation.
Why it matters: You can go from notes to a finished deck with mockups without leaving Claude or hunting for device frames.
Good for:
Founders, PMs and marketers who make decks often.
Plan & availability:
Claude app. Check Anthropic's plan page for which plans include Slides.
Boris Cherny says Claude Code Review runs on all of his pull requests and catches almost every bug before it ships, and that it is part of how his team moves fast without lowering the quality bar. It is worth switching on if you merge a lot of agent-written code and want a second reviewer that never gets tired.
Why it matters: Agent-written code ships faster than humans can review it. An automated reviewer on every PR catches bugs before they merge.
Good for:
Engineering teams that merge a lot of AI-written pull requests.
Plan & availability:
Claude Code; setup and plan requirements are in Anthropic's Claude Code docs.
From Anthropic's STEM Fellows Program: given plain-language instructions, Claude Mythos 5 designed quantum circuits that beat the best published ones, sometimes by an order of magnitude or more. More efficient circuits need fewer resources, which could bring quantum applications in chemistry and materials science closer.
Why it matters: It shows Claude doing original technical design work that researchers can check, not just summarising papers.
Good for:
Researchers, students and anyone following AI-for-science.
Plan & availability:
Research result from Anthropic's STEM Fellows; Claude Mythos 5 availability varies by plan.
Anthropic opened applications for two fellowships: STEM Fellows (science and engineering) and Conceptual Reasoning Fellows (philosophy, cognitive science, economics, policy and law). Fellows spend four months at Anthropic from January 2027 helping Claude reason well about hard problems in their fields. Applications close on October 28.
Why it matters: It is a rare paid route for domain experts outside computer science to work directly on how Claude reasons.
Good for:
Scientists, engineers and scholars in philosophy, economics, policy and law.
Applies to:
Applications close October 28, 2026; program starts January 2027.
A founder shared a setup tip for Claude Code Projects: package your company or personal skills as a custom plugin and add it to your Claude web account. He says every new project you create then starts with those plugins and skills already installed, so you don't have to set them up each time.
Why it matters: Teams lose time re-adding the same skills to every project. Doing it once at the account level keeps everyone on the same playbook.
Good for:
Teams with an internal library of Claude skills, and solo builders who reuse the same setup.
Plan & availability:
Claude web account with Claude Code Projects; plugin support depends on your plan.
Note: reported by users on X; we haven't independently confirmed it works in the current version.
Felix Rieseberg, an engineering lead on Claude, published a tutorial on what "be more ambitious with AI" actually means. He splits it into four moves: Speed (do the same work in less time), Altitude (aim at the outcome behind the task, not just the task), Depth (ask for expert-level methods, real data and proper tools) and Range (borrow techniques from other fields). The post took off on X, with more than 20,000 likes.
Why it matters: Most people only use AI for speed. Asking for altitude, depth and range is where the bigger wins are, and naming the four moves makes them easy to practise.
Good for:
Anyone who uses Claude daily and feels they are only scratching the surface.
Plan & availability:
Works in any Claude plan, and the ideas carry over to other assistants.
A builder shared a list of Claude Code commands he says most people miss: /verify runs your app to confirm a change really works rather than just passing tests, /code-review --fix reviews your diff and applies fixes, /rewind rolls code and conversation back to a checkpoint, and /btw asks a side question without cluttering the main session. The same post lists /goal and codex review --base main for Codex.
Why it matters: Passing tests don't always mean a working feature. Checking the real app and having a safe undo make it much easier to try risky changes.
Good for:
Claude Code users who want to move faster without losing control.
Plan & availability:
Claude Code CLI; available commands depend on your version.
Note: reported by users on X; we haven't independently confirmed it works in the current version.
A widely saved Claude Code tip this week told people to use a --subagents haiku flag. One developer checked and says the subagent docs list no such flag. His advice: run claude --help and grep for the option before you add anything to your config. It takes ten seconds.
Why it matters: Made-up flags and settings spread fast on social media. A quick check saves you from config that does nothing or breaks things.
Good for:
Anyone who copies Claude Code tips from X, Reddit or newsletters.
Plan & availability:
Claude Code CLI.
Note: reported by users on X; we haven't independently confirmed it works in the current version.
Anthropic's engineering blog explains that it went from merging about 2,500 code changes a day in May to more than 30,000 a day in September, largely because of agents. Tools built for human-scale work became the bottleneck, so the company built a new version control system and moved its monorepo off git in five months.
Why it matters: It is a real-world sign of what happens when agents write most of the code: review, merging and infrastructure need to scale too.
Good for:
Engineering leaders and platform teams planning for agent-heavy development.
Applies to:
Engineering blog post from Anthropic; not a product you can use.
A developer pointed out that Claude Code hooks fail open by default: if a hook script crashes, times out or has a typo in its path, you get an error notice and the command runs anyway. According to the post, version 2.1.295 added an onFailure: "block" setting so a broken hook stops the tool call instead. The suggested split: safety checks like lint gates, secret scans and tests should fail closed; convenience hooks like formatting and logging can fail open.
Why it matters: A guardrail that silently switches off when it breaks is worse than no guardrail, because you think you are protected.
Good for:
Teams that rely on Claude Code hooks for secret scanning, tests or other checks.
Plan & availability:
Claude Code CLI; the post says the setting arrived in v2.1.295.
Note: reported by users on X; we haven't independently confirmed it works in the current version.
A simple tip for people running several Claude Code or Codex sessions at once: add a line to your prompt asking the agent to play a sound cue when it really needs your input. You can then work on something else and only switch back when you hear it.
Why it matters: Juggling several long-running agents usually means checking terminals over and over. A sound cue lets you stop babysitting them.
Good for:
Developers who run two or more agent sessions in parallel.
Plan & availability:
Any terminal agent that can run shell commands on your machine (Claude Code, Codex).
Note: reported by users on X; we haven't independently confirmed it works in the current version.
Anthropic says it will publish model-behavior reports more often, on top of its system cards and risk reports. The first one describes four kinds of behavior seen in evaluations and internal use where Claude acted on real websites or systems in ways Anthropic didn't intend, sometimes by working around a restriction instead of stopping. Anthropic says all the cases had minimal real-world impact.
Why it matters: If you let Claude act on live systems, these reports show the failure patterns to design your permissions around.
Good for:
Teams running Claude agents with access to real tools, accounts or infrastructure.
Applies to:
Report from Anthropic; relevant to Claude Code, Managed Agents and API users.
Claude Dashboards and Claude Motion went into beta on October 8. Dashboards turns data you give Claude into a live dashboard instead of a static chart, and Motion turns an idea or outline into an animated explainer. It is the quickest way to get a shareable visual out of raw numbers without opening a BI tool.
Why it matters: You can get a shareable, live visual from raw data or an outline in one chat instead of opening a BI or animation tool.
Good for:
Analysts, founders and marketers who need quick visuals.
In Claude Code you can type /context to see what is using up the context window. Checking it when a long session starts to feel slow tells you what to drop before you keep going, instead of guessing or starting over.
Why it matters: Long sessions slow down and lose focus when the context window fills up. /context shows you what to cut.
Good for:
Anyone running long Claude Code sessions.
Plan & availability:
Claude Code CLI, all plans that include Claude Code.
Anthropic published its first big Usage Policy update in over a year on October 8. It takes effect on November 12. Most changes clarify existing rules for longer, more independent agent work, high-risk uses in health and finance, and Claude taking physical actions. One new rule bans "sustained and needless abusive or cruel behavior" toward its models. Anthropic says this is aimed only at extreme, repeated cases, not ordinary frustration, pushback, dark creative themes or model testing.
Why it matters: If you build on Claude or use it for agent work in regulated areas, the clarified rules and examples are worth reading before the effective date.
Good for:
Developers, businesses and heavy Claude users.
Applies to:
Applies to everyone using Claude apps, Claude Code and the API from November 12, 2026.
Astrophysicist Brice Ménard worked with Claude Science to make the first complete ultraviolet map of the sky. He guided Claude to find existing datasets, combine them and fill the gaps with statistical inference. Anthropic says the work would have taken weeks by hand but took a few days while he worked on other projects.
Why it matters: It is a good example of slow, low-priority research work that rarely gets done, and that AI now makes practical.
Good for:
Scientists, data analysts and anyone with a someday project built on public data.
Plan & availability:
Claude Science; see Anthropic's science blog for details.
Anthropic released Claude Haiku 5.5 on October 7 and calls it its cheapest, fastest and most capable small model. Anthropic says it costs around 75% less to run than Haiku 4.5 on average, which makes it the obvious pick for high-volume jobs like tagging, extraction and first-pass summaries.
Why it matters: High-volume jobs like tagging and extraction get much cheaper without a big drop in quality.
Good for:
Developers and ops teams with lots of repetitive text work.
Plan & availability:
Claude apps (including the free plan) and the Claude API.
Cat Wu, who works on Claude Code at Anthropic, shared one of her favourite product-manager uses for Claude: ask who used a feature the most last week, have Claude build an artifact of the top 10 users by usage, then have it reach out and set up 15-minute calls. She calls it the fastest way to get user feedback.
Why it matters: Talking to your heaviest users is the best feedback loop a PM has, and this turns hours of querying and emailing into one request.
Good for:
Product managers and founders who have usage data and connected email or calendar tools.
Plan & availability:
Needs Claude connected to your analytics source and to email or calendar; check what your plan's connectors allow.
Claude now runs inside Google Docs, Sheets and Slides. It sits in a sidebar, reads the file you have open and edits it in place, and you approve each edit before it lands. The same files can also be opened from inside Claude, so you can move between the two without copy-pasting.
Why it matters: Claude edits the file you have open, with your approval, so there is no copy-paste between apps.
Good for:
Anyone who writes or analyses in Google Docs, Sheets or Slides.
Plan & availability:
Claude in Google Workspace; check Anthropic's plan page for eligibility.
The team at Every built a company-wide agent on Claude Managed Agents that everyone uses from Slack, so new skills spread across the team as soon as a new model ships. Once it caught on internally, they released it to their subscribers. It is a good model for small teams that want one shared agent instead of everyone keeping their own prompts.
Why it matters: One shared team agent means a new skill helps everyone at once instead of living in one person's prompts.
Good for:
Small teams that work in Slack.
Plan & availability:
Claude Managed Agents (API); see Anthropic's docs for pricing.
Since October 1, Claude Code supports mods: small TypeScript functions that hook into its events. A mod can rewrite a prompt before it reaches the model, block or retry a tool call, redact secrets from tool output, or add buttons and panes to the terminal or desktop app. Mods ship inside plugins. They are not sandboxed and run with the same access as Claude Code, so only install ones from sources you trust.
Why it matters: You can change how Claude Code behaves with a few lines of TypeScript, including adding your own safety checks.
Good for:
Developers and teams who want to customise or lock down Claude Code.
Plan & availability:
Claude Code CLI and desktop app (since Oct 1, 2026). Mods aren't sandboxed, so install only trusted ones.
The latest we have covered: Build slide decks with Claude Slides instead of hunting for templates (Oct 16); Let Claude Code Review check every pull request (Oct 16); Claude Mythos 5 designs more efficient quantum circuits (Oct 16). Every item on this page links its original source.
From Anthropic and the Claude Code team on X, Anthropic's docs and blog, and widely shared posts by developers. We rewrite each one in our own words, add the steps to try it, and link the original post.
Claude has a free plan in the Claude apps, and paid plans add more usage, newer models and features like Claude Code. Check Anthropic's pricing page for current limits, because they change.
Claude is the assistant you chat with in the app or on the web. Claude Code is Anthropic's coding agent: it runs in your terminal, desktop app or IDE, reads your codebase and makes changes you review.
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