Using Claude Code as a general agent
When Anthropic announced Claude Skills in October 2025, Simon Willison said this in his blog post:
Claude Code is, with hindsight, poorly named. It’s not purely a coding tool: it’s a tool for general computer automation. Anything you can achieve by typing commands into a computer is something that can now be automated by Claude Code. It’s best described as a general agent. Skills make this a whole lot more obvious and explicit.
While I had this in mind, using Claude Code for music is something that didn't come cross my mind before. Josh Cohenzadeh got Claude Code to write an original song, an original EDM song, original rock song with vocals, and an original album -- actually getting it to create an audio file for each using one-shot prompts. He didn't mention the model he used in his blog post but I assume it is Opus 4.5 with extended thinking (the transcripts he added to the post had thinking blocks).
Reading the blog post made me realize that I am still blinded by Claude Code's poor naming because I haven't used it for anything other than building software. I use it everyday and I am aware that it is not "just a coding tool", yet I haven't really of thought of doing anything with it.
So, I thought why not get it to create a video. Specifically, a bar chart race video illustrating the most popular girl names in Telugu states from 1950s - 2020s (because why not?). So that's what I did. I started a claude code session with --dangerously-skip-permissions and gave it the following prompt (heavily inspired from Josh's prompts):