Dear Dario, Open Source Claude Code
Photo Credit: TechCrunch at https://www.flickr.com/photos/techcrunch/53202070940/
It’s a nightmare that wakes any developer in a cold sweat: I exposed internal code. This week, some poor developer at Anthropic unintentionally published the source code to Claude Code. The internet genies have copied it thousands of times and now all the king’s horses and all the king’s men will never get the code off the internet again.
But now what? I’d argue that Anthropic should open source Claude Code. Here’s the open letter I’d write to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei if I thought there was any chance he’d pay the likes of me any attention.
My Successes with AI-augmented Code as of March 2026
Being a computer dork of a certain stripe, I’ve had a TODO(.md) in my
personal wiki for a long time that was full of IT / tooling tasks that I wanted
to do, but that I never found the time:
- Port the NeXT desktop to FreeBSD
- Clean up my blog repository of incorrectly committed binary assets that were bloating out my storage footprint and slowing up checkouts
- Remedy data loss in my blog due to a botched cleanup operation
- etc.
I delivered every one of these with the help of AI. So I thought I’d take a quick inventory from roughly last year at this time to now.
FreeBSD Users: We Need to Talk About Claude Code
Recently, Anthropic changed their Claude Code installer from using npm to a
native installer. It works on Linux/WSL. It works on Windows. It works on Mac.
On FreeBSD today, you get a scary yellow deprecation warning suggesting that you and your platform might be a dead end. I think that’s a problem.
History is littered with tasteful products made by artisans who gave the high-hat to unwashed technologies and their users:
- MULTICS / Unix
- Apple Macintosh Look-and-Feel / Windows
- Metallica / Music file-sharing
- Sony / iPod
- et al.
In every one of these cases, worse/grubby/philosophically-impure/commercial/lazier/legally-questionable/scrappier won.
We need to meet users where they are. As the classic demotivational poster had it for phone support desks (of which I am a proud veteran): If We Don’t Take Care of the Customer, Maybe They’ll Stop Bugging Us.