- Added serverToolUses to the result of a mod's turn.step hook: the tool calls the API ran itself (the advisor), each with its id, name, input, start and end
- Added agentId to the tool.check event of plugin hooks, so a hook can tell a subagent's permission check from the main session's
- Added ceiling to the question and verdict a mod's tool.check hook reads, naming the approval an organization requires for a tool
- Added ThemeKey and Color types to the plugin hooks typings, so an editor lists the theme colors a mod's drawing can name
- Added to claude plugin validate: each hook a mod registers at a gating site is listed with whether it has a .catch (gatingHooks under --json)
- Added a Deny button to the Claude apps gateway's sign-in approval page: it ends the pending sign-in, so the waiting terminal stops within seconds
Claude Code by Anthropic
Pulse Score
80 / 100
Rank #3 of 157
Downloads, last 7 days
14.8M
up 11.6% vs previous week
Downloads, last 30 days
53.4M
down 36.4% vs previous 30 days
VS Code installs
27.1M
3.7 / 5 from 894 ratings
GitHub stars
150K
about +161 a day
Latest release
2.1.290
yesterday · 26 in 30 days
Terminal-Bench 4.0
57.9%
#2 of 4 agents · Fable 5.1
Price
$20/mo
checked Oct 6, 2026
Overview
Anthropic's agentic coding tool that reads a codebase, edits files and runs commands from the terminal, with VS Code and JetBrains integrations plus desktop, web and mobile access. It runs Claude models through a Claude subscription, an Anthropic Console API key or supported third-party cloud providers.
Claude Code was downloaded 14.8M times from npm in the week ending Oct 4, 2026, up 11.6% on the week before and down 36.4% over the last 30 days compared with the 30 before. Its VS Code extension has 27.1M installs and average 3.7 out of 5 across 894 marketplace ratings. The GitHub repository has 150K stars, 5,837 of them added in the last 30 days. The latest stable release is 2.1.290, published Oct 5, 2026; there were 26 stable releases in the past 30 days. On public GitHub, 527,540 pull requests were opened from branches with Claude Code's default claude/ prefix in the week of Sep 28, 2026, and 94% of the pull requests from the four weeks before that were merged. On Terminal-Bench 4.0 its best listed result is 57.9% with Fable 5.1, ranking 2 of 4 agents on that board. It was mentioned in 1,350 Hacker News posts and comments over the last 30 days.
Claude Code usage and attention over time
Download the raw daily series: claude-code.csv
Install Claude Code
| npm | npm install -g @anthropic-ai/claude-code |
|---|---|
| Homebrew | brew install --cask claude-code |
| VS Code | code --install-extension anthropic.claude-code |
These commands use the packages tracked on this page. The vendor may recommend a different installer; see the official documentation.
Key facts
| Maker | Anthropic |
|---|---|
| Type | Terminal agent + IDE extensions |
| First released | February 2025 |
| License | Proprietary |
| Interfaces | CLI, IDE extension, Desktop, Web, Mobile, SDK |
| Platforms | macOS, Linux, Windows |
| Models | Anthropic Claude models via Claude plans, a Console API key or supported third-party cloud providers |
| Bring your own API key | Yes |
| Main language | TypeScript |
| Open issues and PRs | 14,303 |
| Open VSX downloads | 55,279,659 (includes updates) |
| Homebrew installs | 28,313 in 30 days · 1,146,388 in a year |
Pricing
Included in paid Claude plans: Pro $20/month ($17/month billed annually), Max from $100/month (5x and 20x tiers), Team standard seat $20/seat/month annual ($25 monthly) and premium seat $100 annual ($125 monthly). The Free plan does not include it; pay-as-you-go API credits via a Console account are an alternative.
Source: official pricing page, checked Oct 6, 2026. Prices change often; confirm before you buy.
Pulse Score breakdown
Adoption93
Community91
Attention88
Momentum14
Each component is scored 0 to 100 from public signals; a dash means no data for it. Methodology.
What changed: recent Claude Code releases
74 stable releases in the last 90 days · Full changelog
- Fixed a deny or ask rule on a nested part of a compound shell command not holding over a user-installed mod's approval on managed machines
- Fixed the terminal freezing on short code blocks with many unclosed <script> tags or deeply nested ${ substitutions
- Fixed Read deny rules not applying to files @-mentioned, changed, or selected in the IDE through a symlink
- [VSCode] Reverted a 2.1.288 change to claude auth status that may have made sign-outs more frequent
- Improved how quickly large files open in a plugin code pane by laying the highlighted view out once at its final width
- Fixed plugin list, plugin eval and plugin update showing a stale copy of a plugin installed from a local folder marketplace, and hot reload for a symlinked --plugin-dir
- Added $.ui.selection() for mods: returns the text you last selected in fullscreen mode and, when the selection lies within one transcript row, that row
- Added a built-in gh api to cloud sessions whose image has no GitHub CLI, and fixed the built-in sending control characters from file names, jq filters or GitHub errors to the terminal
- Added recovery for a prompt cleared with Ctrl+C: pressing Up on the empty prompt brings the draft back, including pasted text and images
- Added a re-authenticate prompt when an MCP server asks for more OAuth scope during a tool call
- Added --max-findings <n>|all to /code-review to report more or fewer findings than the usual limit; the choice is reused until you pass --max-findings default
- Added Ctrl+F to find a session by name and Alt+↑/↓ to jump between groups in the agents view; both, and rename, can be rebound in keybindings.json
- Added Claude Mods: plugins may now modify deeper behavior
- Added You should know, a built-in mod where a side agent watches your back and flags things you or Claude might miss. Turn it on with /plugin enable cc-plugin-you-should-know@builtin (for…
- Added an n:<text> filter to the agents view that matches session names and tasks; a filter now shows matches in collapsed sections and Enter opens the first match
- Added prompttext to the OpenTelemetry userprompt event, a copy of prompt for backends that nest dotted keys; drop or mask it wherever you drop or mask prompt (anthropics/claude-code
- Added URL prompts from MCP servers on the 2025-11-25 protocol, for example to sign in. If a server no longer connects after this update, add "bareElicitationCapability": true to its MCP config entry
- Windows: Added a startup warning when denying the Bash tool also turns off the PowerShell tool, so Claude has no shell tool
- Added a count such as "2 of 5" to the permission prompt when several permission requests stack up
- Added mouse support for the "N more" rows of lists in fullscreen mode: click one to jump to that end of the list, with hover and pressed states
- Fixed several Claude Code processes and IDE extensions each opening a login browser when gcpAuthRefresh or awsAuthRefresh credentials expire
- Fixed claude --resume and --continue sometimes losing every turn after a batch of parallel tool calls when the earlier session crashed or was killed
- Fixed API 400 errors after a tool or hook returned an object, number or boolean instead of text, including in resumed sessions
- Fixed cloud sessions with very large histories never waking up because the container was stopped while the transcript was still loading
- Added CLAUDECODEDISABLEWEBFETCH environment variable to turn off the WebFetch tool
- Added claude --desktop to open the Claude desktop app on the current directory, or on a session with --continue / --resume <id>
- Added claude plugin configure <plugin> to show a plugin's options and which are unset, or save new values read from stdin with --values-stdin
- Added <server>.<key>=<value> to claude plugin install --config, so a bundled .mcpb MCP server's own settings can be set at install time and it starts without visiting /plugin → Configure
- Added allowedProviders managed setting to limit which API providers a machine may use (Anthropic API, a custom endpoint, Bedrock, Mantle, Vertex AI, Foundry, Claude Platform on AWS, or a Cloud…
- Added CLAUDECODENONSTREAMINGTIMEOUTRETRIES environment variable to cap re-sends of a non-streaming fallback request that timed out
Claude Code benchmark results
| Benchmark | Model | Effort | Tasks solved | Cost of run | Place |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Terminal-Bench 4.0 | Fable 5.1 | max | 57.9% ± 3.8 | $6,244 | #2 of 4 |
| Fable 5.1 | xhigh | 57.9% ± 3.4 | $4,872 | ||
| Fable 5.1 | high | 54.5% ± 3.4 | $3,985 | ||
| Fable 5.1 | medium | 53.9% ± 3.4 | $2,833 | ||
| Terminal-Bench 3.0 | Fable 5 | max | 34.0% ± 3.4 | $6,481 | #3 of 6 |
| GLM 5.3 | max | 32.4% ± 2.9 | $1,771 | ||
| Opus 4.8 | max | 21.1% ± 3.0 | $5,214 | ||
| Sonnet 5 | max | 14.6% ± 2.9 | $6,891 | ||
| Terminal-Bench 2.1 | Fable 5 | xhigh | 83.8% ± 2.3 | $553 | #2 of 6 |
| Opus 4.8 | high | 78.9% ± 2.6 | $287 | ||
| Sonnet 5 | high | 74.6% ± 3.2 | $288 | ||
| Opus 4.7 | max | 68.9% ± 2.8 | $600 | ||
| Terminal-Bench 2.0 | Claude Opus 4.6 · v2.1.34 | — | 58.0% ± 2.9 | — | #31 of 43 |
| Claude Opus 4.5 · v2.0.72 | — | 52.1% ± 2.5 | — | ||
| Claude Sonnet 4.5 · v2.0.31 | — | 40.1% ± 2.9 | — | ||
| Claude Opus 4.1 · v2.0.31 | — | 34.8% ± 2.9 | — |
Up to four best runs per board. Scores are not comparable between Terminal-Bench versions. Source: Terminal-Bench (tbench.ai).
Pull requests by Claude Code on GitHub
In the week of Sep 28, 2026, 527,540 pull requests matching Claude Code's signature (head:claude/) were opened in public repositories; 94% of those opened in the four weeks before were merged. A branch prefix identifies the tool; the pull request itself is usually opened under the developer's own account.
Reliability
From the vendor's public status page · now: All Systems Operational
9 incidents reported in the last 30 days, 6 of them major or critical, 113.6 hours in total from report to resolution.
| Oct 5, 2026 | Elevated errors for Claude Mythos 5.1 and Claude Fable 5.1 · major |
|---|---|
| Oct 1, 2026 | Delayed credits on the Claude Platform · minor |
| Sep 29, 2026 | Elevated errors on claude.ai, Claude Code, Claude Cowork and the Claude API · major |
| Sep 22, 2026 | Elevated errors for multiple models · major |
| Sep 16, 2026 | Issues with Google Play subscriptions · none |
| Sep 15, 2026 | Intermittent error spikes for Claude Mythos 5.1 and Claude Fable 5.1 · major |
Claude Code alternatives
| # | Agent | Pulse | Downloads 7d | 7d | 30d | VS Code installs | Stars | Latest release | Price | Last 90 days | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 |
OpenAI CodexOpenAI |
82 | 25.6M | up 5.7% | up 21.2% | 15.2M | 128K+153/day | 0.160.1yesterday | Free + $8/mo | ||
| 5 |
PiEarendil Inc. (created by Mario Zechner) |
75 | 5.2M | up 29.8% | up 52.1% | — | 113K+378/day | 1.0.4yesterday | Free (OSS) | ||
| 7 |
OpenCodeAnomaly (SST team) |
73 | 3.3M | up 22.0% | up 6.1% | 1.2M | 212K+200/day | 1.18.346d ago | Free + $10/mo | ||
| 24 |
Gemini CLIGoogle |
57 | 453K | up 4.7% | up 1.8% | 1.1M | 107K+24/day | 0.62.07d ago | Varies | ||
| 26 |
Oh My PiStencil Labs (Can Bölük) |
56 | 241K | up 11.4% | up 53.9% | — | 34.4K+111/day | 18.6.12d ago | Free (OSS) | ||
| 34 |
ClineCline Bot Inc. |
52 | 95K | up 10.1% | down 37.2% | 5.5M | 69.9K+63/day | 0.0.434d ago | Free + $9.99/mo | ||
| No agents match that filter. | |||||||||||
Head to head: Claude Code vs OpenAI Codex · Claude Code vs Cursor · Claude Code vs GitHub Copilot · Claude Code vs OpenCode · Claude Code vs Gemini CLI · Claude Code vs Aider · Claude Code vs Antigravity CLI · Claude Code vs GitHub Copilot CLI · Claude Code vs Pi
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Claude Code FAQ
How much does Claude Code cost?
Included in paid Claude plans: Pro $20/month ($17/month billed annually), Max from $100/month (5x and 20x tiers), Team standard seat $20/seat/month annual ($25 monthly) and premium seat $100 annual ($125 monthly). The Free plan does not include it; pay-as-you-go API credits via a Console account are an alternative.
Is Claude Code open source?
No. Claude Code is a proprietary product from Anthropic.
How popular is Claude Code?
Claude Code was downloaded 14.8M times from npm in the week ending Oct 4, 2026, up 11.6% on the week before and down 36.4% over the last 30 days compared with the 30 before. Its VS Code extension has 27.1M installs and average 3.7 out of 5 across 894 marketplace ratings. The GitHub repository has 150K stars, 5,837 of them added in the last 30 days.
What is the latest version of Claude Code?
The latest stable release we track is 2.1.290, published on Oct 5, 2026.
What are the alternatives to Claude Code?
The closest alternatives in the same category by Pulse Score are OpenAI Codex, Pi, OpenCode, Gemini CLI.
Where these numbers come from
npm: @anthropic-ai/claude-code. GitHub: anthropics/claude-code. VS Code Marketplace: anthropic.claude-code. Homebrew: claude-code. See data sources for how each one is collected.
Product facts and pricing were checked against: claude.com, code.claude.com, registry.npmjs.org, formulae.brew.sh, marketplace.visualstudio.com, open-vsx.org, github.com, en.wikipedia.org.