Cat Wu, Anthropic’s Head of Product for Claude Code, recently laid out the company’s approach to building what amounts to a context-rich harness for AI coding agents. The core idea: give AI tools persistent memory, shared workflows, and enough situational awareness to handle complex development tasks.
For crypto developers writing security-sensitive smart contracts or auditing DeFi protocols, that shift from “fancy autocomplete” to “contextually aware coding partner” matters more than most people realize.
From prompts to persistent context
Wu joined Anthropic in August 2024 to lead product development for Claude Code and a related product called Cowork. Since then, the team has shipped features like Claude Tag, which introduces persistent context and memory layers for shared workspace management.
A July 2026 discussion featuring Wu alongside engineer Thariq Shihipar dove into Claude Fable and Claude Tag, two features that push this persistent-context approach further. The emphasis wasn’t on making the underlying model smarter, necessarily. It was on making the harness, the orchestration layer sitting between the developer and the model, dramatically more capable.
