Anthropic Accidentally Leaked the Secret Roadmap of Claude Code
The source code of Claude Code reveals unreleased features, internal codenames, and the future of your new favorite AI product. Here's what it all means.
Someone leaked the source code of Claude Code.
It appeared online earlier today, and I’ve gone through it (with the help of Claude itself, which makes this a sort of predictive introspection exercise).
I’ve already published a post today, so you can take this one as an extra timely edition.
My goal is to translate into simple English what the leaked code reveals about the future of Anthropic and Claude Code.
(Due to the leak, Anthropic might change the schedule, but my impression of these features—and the business rationale behind them—suggests most are final.)
Before I explain what’s in the leaked files, a quick note on what isn’t (for my non-technical audience). This is not Anthropic’s model weights, training data, or internal strategy documents. It’s the client application; the software that runs on your computer and talks to Claude’s brain in the cloud. It’s a leak, yes, but one of moderate importance rather than a critical risk.
Think of it as finding the blueprints for the cockpit rather than the engine. Or the menu of a new restaurant but not the exact recipes of the dishes. Meaning, this is what Anthropic is building that should not be public yet; you can’t install or turn it on yourself anyway. You can’t suddenly deploy Claude locally or something (not that you could if it were open source: running it requires industrial-grade hardware).
These blueprints are nevertheless interesting. Software companies hide upcoming features behind “feature flags,” switches in the code that turn things on and off for different users. These features are already built, waiting to be activated on launch day. Because the leak allows us to read the code, we can also read the feature flags, which means we know everything that’s there but turned off for normal users.
That is, you and me.
Anthropic’s codename for Claude Code is Tengu (a shapeshifting creature from Japanese mythology; make of that what you will). Every feature flag in the codebase starts with a reference to Tengu; over 60 in total. (For the sake of clarity, I will omit the majority and leave only the ones I consider most relevant. I will also omit the flag names, which are unimportant for non-technical users.)
To give you a high-level idea of what we’re dealing with here: Anthropic is clearly turning Claude Code into a cloud-based, easy-to-use, vertically-integrated version of OpenClaw, the AI agent framework that went viral earlier this year. Most features point in that direction.
(The code contains no launch dates, but the level of polish varies. Some features look nearly ready to ship, others look experimental.)
