• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, April 28, 2025

Anthropic released an economic index that details the impact of AI on software development. The report was released on Monday.

Software development is a major part of advertising platforms, ensuring that ads serve up in the correct place at the perfect time, so it's important for marketers to understand how a variety of AI methods will impact the future.

The company conducted an analysis of 500,000 coding-related jobs across Claude.ai, the “default” way most people interact with Claude, and Claude Code, Anthropic's coding “agent” specialist. The goal was to better understand changes in more detail.

Analysis of the data identified three key patterns. The coding agent is used to gain higher volumes of automation. Coders commonly use AI to build user-facing apps. Startups are the main early adopters of Claude Code.

Seventy-nine percent of conversations on Claude Code were identified as “automation” — where AI directly performs tasks — rather than “augmentation,” where 21% of AI collaborates with and enhances human capabilities. Only 49% of Claude.ai conversations were classified as automation.

Web development languages such as JavaScript and HTML were the most common programming languages used to develop apps, and user interface and user experience tasks were among the top coding uses. 

In a preliminary analysis, Anthropic estimated that 33% of conversations on Claude Code served startup-related work, compared with 13% identified as enterprise-relevant applications. 

Startup work accounted for 32.9% of Claude Code conversations -- nearly 20% higher than their Claude.ai usage -- whereas enterprise work represented only 23.8% of Claude Code conversations, slightly below their 25.9% share on Claude.ai, the company reported.

These results show the differences between specialist, coding-focused agents (in this case, Claude Code) and the more “standard” way users interact with large language models through a chatbot interface like Claude.ai.

The analysis suggests that as more agentic agents are released, the company may see differences in the way AI is integrated into people’s jobs.

At least in coding, this might involve more automation of tasks. And it raises questions about how much developers will remain involved.

This is important not only for developers in building apps as well as optimizing content on search engines, social sites, and websites. For now, results show that as automation increases, humans are still involved much of the time.

Students, academics, personal project builders, and tutorial/learning users collectively represent half of the interactions across both platforms. Individuals — not just businesses — are significant adopters of coding assistance tools.

Coding is among the most developed uses of AI in the economy, but there are inherent limitations.

Since so many more startups use this platform, it could give them an advantage.