Ted Hisokawa
Oct 30, 2025 11:03
Anthropic introduces significant upgrades to Claude Code, enhancing autonomy with a native VS Code extension, terminal updates, and checkpoints for complex task management.
Anthropic has unveiled a series of significant upgrades to its Claude Code platform, enhancing its autonomy and expanding its capabilities. These updates include a native Visual Studio Code (VS Code) extension, improvements to the terminal user experience, and the introduction of checkpoints to better manage complex development tasks.
Integration with VS Code
The new native VS Code extension, currently in beta, integrates Claude Code directly into the Integrated Development Environment (IDE), allowing developers to see changes in real-time through a dedicated sidebar. This extension offers a richer graphical experience for users who prefer working within IDEs rather than terminals.
Terminal and SDK Enhancements
Claude Code’s terminal interface has been refreshed to improve status visibility and provide a searchable prompt history, making it easier for developers to reuse or edit previous prompts. Additionally, the Claude Agent SDK, formerly known as the Claude Code SDK, now supports subagents and hooks, enhancing customizability for building agents tailored to specific workflows.
Developers are already leveraging the SDK for diverse applications, including financial compliance, cybersecurity, and code debugging, according to Anthropic.
Checkpoints and Long-Running Tasks
With the introduction of checkpoints, Claude Code is now equipped to handle more complex tasks. This feature automatically saves the code state before each change, allowing developers to rewind to previous versions as needed. Checkpoints apply exclusively to Claude’s edits, not user edits or bash commands, and are recommended to be used alongside version control systems.
The checkpoint feature is particularly beneficial when combined with Claude Code’s subagents, hooks, and background tasks, which facilitate autonomous workflows by allowing the delegation of specialized tasks, automatic action triggers, and the maintenance of long-running processes.
Availability and Getting Started
These enhancements are immediately available to all Claude Code users. Claude Sonnet 4.5 is now the default model, and users can switch models by running /model. The VS Code extension can be downloaded from the VS Code Extension Marketplace, and terminal updates, including the visual refresh and checkpoints, can be accessed by updating the local installation. For more details on the Claude Agent SDK, users can refer to the official documentation.
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