Anthony Morris, creator of Claude Code desktop edition, officially announces departure from Anthropic

Father of Claude Code Desktop announces departure, rising from high school dropout to the pinnacle of AI Xinzhiyuan October 25, 2026 06:35:17 From Beijing Updated October 25, 2026 08:06:16

Xinzhiyuan Report

In a single day, Claude Code lost two key figures in a row!

Following Thariq Shihipar's departure, Anthony Morris, the creator of Claude Code Desktop, also sent out a farewell letter, officially announcing his departure from Anthropic.

When you open a few sessions in the Claude desktop app, browse web previews on one side while having AI modify code on the other, you're using what he built.

Behind the desktop version was just a small team, yet it has influenced the lives of millions. In his letter, he wrote that he built this product because he believes everyone can become a creator.

Yet this very person never even finished high school, and even set up a dedicated section on his personal website to record his failures over the years.

In the end, after being turned away at the door time and again, he spent 18 years building a product meant to let everyone walk through the door.

The "Failures" section on Anthony's personal website, the earliest entry being his 2008 high school dropout

High school dropout, scored 57 on an algorithms test

He turned his failures into a diary

If Thariq is the person who tells the whole world about Claude Code on X, then Anthony is the one who moved it out of the black-box terminal and put it into ordinary people's hands.

The two men's paths are almost polar opposites. Thariq came from the MIT Media Lab and went through YC, following the star-geek route; Anthony's life script was exactly the reverse.

1. In 2008, a teenager who thought he wouldn't live past 21

When Anthony was 12, his parents divorced. He lived with his father, who was away working all year round, so no one cared if he skipped school—he even blacklisted the school's number to stop it from leaving messages on the answering machine at home.

In high school, severe depression crushed him, and many days he could barely get out of bed. At the time he was certain he wouldn't live past 21, and in 2008 he simply dropped out.

Later, although he earned a high school equivalency diploma, he always called dropping out the biggest failure of his life. At the end of that diary entry, he wrote a line: "I forgive you for not finishing high school."

2. An IT guy who installed printers, self-taught his way into Cisco

Without a diploma, he could only start from the bottom of IT—racking servers, installing printers, and helping customers troubleshoot over the phone every day.

To cut out the grunt work, he used the scripting tool AutoHotKey to write the first code of his life, and even forced it to cobble together a graphical interface program. In the Linux terminal he also relied entirely on trial and error, and it took him a long time to learn about the "man" command for looking up command usage.

After four years of self-study like this, he went from zero foundation to a software engineer at Cisco, earning an annual salary of $120,000 and paying off all his debts.

3. Quit his job to start a company, scored only 57 on an algorithms test

The stable job at the big company drained him bit by bit.

In 2019 he took a week off and built the writing app Wrabit, felt he had come back to life, and so in March 2020 he resigned from Cisco to develop the writers' platform Bard full-time.

At the end of June, he signed up for Toptal's algorithms test. Three problems in 90 minutes; he wrote the whole time, submitted two, and felt he was almost done with the third.

When the results came out, with a full score of 300 and a passing line of 150, he had scored only 57.

The most painful part was that the first two problems he thought he had finished almost completely failed on the hidden tests, while the one he hadn't finished got the highest score—and because of this he was banned from taking the test for two years.

By the end of the year, both Wrabit and Bard had been shut down by his own hand.

4. Returned to university at 30, turned down a Spotify interview

In the fall of 2020, at age 30, Anthony went back to university full-time to study computer science. Despite having already been an engineer for four years, he had always felt he wasn't smart enough to attend university.

A few weeks after the semester started, Spotify and 1Password sent interview invitations, and out of self-doubt he politely declined them both.

It wasn't until a friend sent him Jobs' 2005 Stanford speech that the line "love what you do" woke him up—more than studying, he loved making things with his own hands.

While preparing for his first interview at Square, he got stuck on an algorithms problem that morning and had his first panic attack in life, so he had to cancel the interview.

But this time he didn't shrink back again. Over the following month he intensively interviewed with 10 companies across 28 rounds, received 3 offers, and joined the learning platform Monthly in April 2021.

5. Only 3 products out of 12, then rejected over 15 words

In early 2022, he and his partner Alice set a plan: make a new product every month for a year, livestream coding every week, and open-source it. Nine months later, the two had made only 3 products, and the plan was declared a failure.

What made him feel most guilty was the messaging app poke.

There was once a user who emailed for help, saying the system had a bug and kept inexplicably texting him to go to the gym. But because he was busy rushing the next month's new project, he didn't even get around to fixing the bug for an existing user.

In his retrospective he admitted frankly that at heart he is a craftsman, and shoddy work truly goes against his nature.

In August 2025, after reaching the final round at a dream company, he received a rejection letter of only 15 English words:

He wrote that this short sentence instantly crushed him.

On paper, his résumé really does make him look like someone who job-hops frequently, but that thin sheet of paper cannot contain his rough-and-tumble years in startups, nor the core tools he built for Cisco, Stripe, and others.

At the end of the post he wrote, "The desire to build beautiful, impactful software has never been stronger. I will not give up on myself because of a stupid piece of paper."

Just the day before, he had used AI and vibe coding to build everbloom, a permanently free mental wellness app, for his mother and sister. In the introduction he wrote that building a small piece of software for the people you love has never been easier.

He moved Claude Code from the terminal to the desktop

Four months later, in December 2025, Anthropic announced on X that the Claude desktop app had officially integrated Claude Code, for users who don't like using the terminal, and at the end of the post named Alice and Anthony as the people behind it.

This Alice is none other than Alice Zhao, his partner from those days of livestreaming code together. From poke's few dozen users to today, the two of them have spent four years.

Claude Code was originally a geek tool Boris Cherny built in the terminal, which naturally shut out a large number of people who don't write code. What Anthony and his team did was push that door open, and behind it are the four tenets he left in the desktop version.

Tenet one: let the terminal recede into the background, so even non-coders can get started

From the start of the project Anthony was very clear that the desktop version would have far more non-technical users than the command-line version, so while simplifying the interface he specifically kept the permission confirmation safeguard before actions, to prevent the AI from overstepping and damaging the system.

In April this year, the desktop version was completely rebuilt: multiple sessions can run at the same time, and the terminal, editor, web preview, and code diffs are all placed in the same window, so whichever one has finished or wherever something has gone off track, you can switch over and check.

In the rebuilt desktop version, the web preview, code diff, and terminal sit alongside the session

On launch day, Anthony said he hadn't opened an IDE or terminal in weeks. The self-taught teenager who once kept hitting walls in a black-box terminal has now built a product that lets him go weeks without opening a terminal.

Tenet two: point at what you want changed, and circle it instead of writing a long description

In August this year, Anthony introduced a new way to use the browser panel. Press ⌘⇧S to select any element on the page, or simply draw a circle on the page to mark it, and Claude will first read the corresponding DOM, React components, and styles, then make the change.

Select an element in the browser panel, circle it to mark it, then hand it to Claude to modify

Tenet three: many sessions without chaos, and even a few hundred milliseconds must be shaved off

In mid-October, the team simplified the interface again, grouping sessions by in progress, waiting for input, and completed, so that running several tasks at once doesn't easily become chaotic.

In the session list after the October update, which one is running, which one is waiting for someone, and which one is done can be seen at a glance

The team is also still grinding away at speed, and within two weeks cut the time to create a new session by more than half, from 837 milliseconds down to 347 milliseconds.

Tech blogger Peter Yang posted specifically to praise it, saying the Claude Code app is now much faster and even easier to get started with than ChatGPT.

Tenet four: whether it's good to use is up to the users

In 2024, while working on conversational products at Stripe, he had already learned the hard way from "I think it's good to use." When engineers tested it themselves, they always followed the quick replies all the way to the end, and the flow looked smooth.

But later the team had the large model play a real user, asking random follow-ups and going off topic, and about 80% of the first 500 conversations never reached the end. The team spent a month and a half fixing it before they first produced a conversation with a 0% failure rate. What developers see as "very easy to use" does not hold up when an ordinary user phrases things differently.

By the time of the desktop version, he announced that every Wednesday he would set aside two hours, 15 minutes per user, and welcome people to come talk about their needs and complaints.

On the night he left, he was still reminding people in the farewell post that for future desktop version feedback, they should go to his old partner Alice and former Microsoft VS Code veteran Benjamin Pasero.

Someone who once thought he wouldn't live past 21

now counts every remaining week

There is another page on Anthony's website, filled with dense little dots.

Each dot represents one week of his life, and based on the average life expectancy of Canadian men, the ones filled in purple are the days already past.

The "life in weeks" grid on Anthony's website, where the purple dots are weeks already past

The teenager who once was sure he wouldn't live past 21 now counts the remaining time week by week on his website.

The homepage of the site states his current situation: first figure out what kind of life ten years from now would make him proud, then work backward step by step from there to today.

This may be exactly why he chose to turn and leave at this moment.

Claude Code is currently at its peak, with 90% of its internal code already generated by itself, and Anthropic is standing on the threshold of a sky-high IPO.

At this moment of flowers and brocade, Thariq, who was in charge of the CLI ecosystem, and Anthony, who created the desktop version, waved goodbye almost back to back on the same day.

In the comments, Anthony specifically replied that he had not been fired.

And less than an hour after Thariq officially announced his departure, AI commentator Andrew Curran speculated on X about whether another new AI lab was quietly being incubated.

As for GTA VI, which he keeps going on about in his farewell letter—a guy who, right after finishing his resignation, is already itching to come back and handle user feedback probably wouldn't be able to play it in peace for long.

From a depressed teenager who dropped out of a rural Canadian high school in 2008 and blacklisted the school's phone number, to the creator of Claude Code's desktop version whom millions of developers pleaded with to stay, Anthony has spent 18 years proving the belief he wrote in his farewell letter.