Could Claude Code Work for ChinaTalk?

"a few words of instruction, repaid with thousands of lines of code"

This post originally appeared in ChinaTalk.

“Without guidance, Claude leans on the most accessible sources — not the best ones.”

Jordan, Jasmine Sun (of jasmi.news) and Nathan Lambert (of Interconnects) talk about their Claude Code adventures on the latest episode of Overfit. Check it out in your favorite podcast app or find it in the ChinaTalk feed!

Claude Code is a coding tool by Anthropic that uses natural-language prompts to create remarkably workable computer programs. In practice, just by opening your computer’s terminal and typing in “claude” and telling it what to do in plain English, it can code, organize and edit local files, build apps, and conduct internet-based research.

Anthropic’s focus on coding agents means that Claude Code is incredibly popular among software developers. It’s also let non-technical people vibecode our way into programming.

After a morning spent watching Claude write Python code for my graphs (in this article), I had an idea: would Claude Code be any good as a China analyst? In theory, the chatbot format is perfect for work that’s both qualitative and quantitative — the exact kind of mixed intellectual tasks a policy analyst or data-oriented journalist might perform.