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I reverse-engineered it a bit, figured out its container specs, used it to render a PDF join diagram for a SQLite database and then re-ran a much more complex "recreate this chart from this screenshot and XLSX file" example that I previously ran against ChatGPT Code Interpreter last night.

Here's my review: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Sep/9/claude-code-interpreter...

It looks to me like a variant of the Code Interpreter pattern, where Claude has a (presumably sandboxed) server-side container environment in which it can run Python. When you ask it to make a spreadsheet it runs this:

  pip install openpyxl pandas --break-system-packages

What's weird is that when you enable it in https://claude.ai/settings/features it automatically disables the old Analysis tool - which used JavaScript running in your browser. For some reason you can have one of those enabled but not both.

The new feature is being described exclusively as a system for creating files though! I'm trying to figure out if that gets used for code analysis too now, in place of the analysis tool.

It can actually drive emacs itself, creating buffers, being told not to edit the buffers and simply respond in the chat etc.

I actually _like_ working with efrit vs other LLM integrations in editors.

In fact I kind of need to have my anthropic console up to watch my usage... whoops!

Would appreciate if that could be fixed but of course new features are more interesting for them to prioritize.

I just tried this new feature to work on a text document in a project, and it's a big difference. Now I really want to have this feature (for text at least) in ChatGPT to be able to work on documents through voice and without looking at the screen.

Finally they figure out that there is no money or interest in code-plagiarizing apps!

You could even ask claude code with scopecraft/cmd to plan it all out and implement this.

For anthropic, the excuse that there's not enough time to implement this is a pretty glaring admission about the state and success of AI assisted development.

all SaaS projects building on it to resell functionality will go away because there will be no point to pay the added costs.

it can take a .PDF with single table with, say, a list of food items and prices. And then in a .docx in the same folder with a table with, say, prices and calories. Can this thing then, in a one shot, produce a .xlsx with the items and calories and save that to the same directory? It really doesn't matter what the lists are of, just keep it very simple A=B, B=C, therefore A=C stuff.

Because, strangely enough, that's pretty much my definition of AGI.

I'm on 100$ Max plan, I would even buy 2x 200$ plan if Opus would stop randomly being dumb. Especially after 7am ET time.

A lot of the people I graduated with spent their 20s making powerpoint and excel. There would be people with a master's in engineering getting phone calls at 1am, with an instruction to change the fonts on slide 75, or to slightly modify some calculation. Most of the real decision making was, funnily enough, not based on these documents. But it still meant people were working 100 hour weeks.

I could see this resulting in the same work being done in a few minutes. But I could also see it resulting in the MDs asking for 10x the number of slide decks.

Headline demonstrates why SWEa don’t have to worry about vive coders eating their lunch. Vibe-coders don’t know what a container is, nor why it would be good for it to be in the context of an environment (what’s an environment?), or be server-side for that matter. Now if there were a course that instructed all this kind of architectural tradecraft that isn’t taught in university CS courses (but bootcamps..?), then adding vibe-coding alongside might pose a concern m, at least till the debugging technical debt comes due. But by then the vibecoder had validated a new market on the back of their v0, so thank them for the fresh revenue streams.

At the start of summer you could still ask for any kind of file as an artifact and they would produce it and you could download it.

They they changed it to artifacts were only ever seen pages that you could share or view in the app.

Yes this is going to transform how I use Claude... BACK to the way I used it in June!

As a user this post is frustrating as hell to read because I've missed this feature so much, but at the same time thanks for giving it back I guess?

That's the functionality which I could use for my day job, but I'm not finding an LLM which directly affords that capability (without programming or other steps which are difficult on my work computer).

Something with OAuth authentication.

Our org isn't interested in running a local, unofficial MCP server and having users create their own API keys.

ChatGPT can package up files as a download.

Both Gemini and ChatGPT accept zip files with lots of files in them.

Claude does neither of those things.

Hope not.

I've been paying $10/month for GitHub Copilot, which I use via Microsoft's Visual Studio Code, and about a month ago, they added ChatGPT5 (preview), which uses the agent model of interaction. It's a qualitative jump that I'm still learning to appreciate in full.

It seems like the worst possible thing, in terms of security, to let an LLM play with your stuff, but I really didn't understand just how much easier it could be to work with an LLM if it's an agent. Previously I'd end up with a blizzard of python error messages, and just give up on a project, now it fixes it's own mess. What a relief!

Malware writers are rejoicing!