When Anthropic announced its Claude 4 models, the marketing focused heavily on improved reasoning and coding capabilities. But having spent months working with AI coding assistants, I’ve learned that the real revolution isn’t about generating better code snippets — it’s about the emergence of genuine agency.
Most discussions about AI coding capabilities focus narrowly on syntactic correctness, benchmark scores or the ability to produce working code. But my hands-on testing of Claude 4 reveals something far more significant: the emergence of AI systems that can understand development objectives holistically, work persistently toward solutions and autonomously navigate obstacles – capabilities that transcend mere code generation.
Rather than rely on synthetic benchmarks, I decided to evaluate Claude 4’s agency through a real-world development task: building a functional OmniFocus plugin that integrates with OpenAI’s API. This required not just writing code, but understanding documentation, implementing error handling, creating a coherent user experience and troubleshooting issues — tasks that demand initiative and persistence beyond generating syntactically valid code.
