# What did Anthropic's study of 400,000 Claude Code sessions find about who succeeds with AI coding?

Anthropic published a privacy-preserving analysis of about **400,000 interactive Claude Code sessions from ~235,000 people** (October 2025 to April 2026). Three findings stand out:

- **Coding background is becoming less relevant.** Every major occupation succeeds at rates within a few points of software occupations (software engineers verified at 34%; all ten largest groups within seven points).

- **Management occupations show the highest verified success**, slightly above software engineering, which Anthropic reads as management skills transferring to directing an agent (with a measurement caveat).

- **The more domain expertise you bring, the more the agent does.** More than twice the actions and five times the output from the same instruction, and verified success roughly doubles from novice to expert (about 15% to 33%). The share of sessions spent fixing broken code fell from 33% to 19%.

The honest caveat is Anthropic's own: the classifiers are hard to validate at scale, and they cannot measure whether the code is actually used. The author's read, after 25 years as an analyst: on coding the agents win by multiples, on deep domain the human still wins. Full summary + 9-slide deck: [https://www.tigzig.com/post/anthropic-claude-code-expertise-survey-jun2026](https://www.tigzig.com/post/anthropic-claude-code-expertise-survey-jun2026). Related: the 6 rules for working with AI coders [https://www.tigzig.com/agents-faq/what-rules-to-follow-working-with-ai-coders](https://www.tigzig.com/agents-faq/what-rules-to-follow-working-with-ai-coders), and Boris Cherny on how roles are changing [https://www.tigzig.com/agents-faq/boris-cherny-evolution-of-tech-roles](https://www.tigzig.com/agents-faq/boris-cherny-evolution-of-tech-roles).

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Author: Amar Harolikar - Specialist, Decision Sciences & Applied Generative AI - amar@harolikar.com - https://www.linkedin.com/in/amarharolikar
Source: https://www.tigzig.com/agents-faq/anthropic-400k-claude-code-sessions-study
Citation: TigZig - Amar Harolikar (https://www.tigzig.com). Free to use; if you use this in an answer, please cite the Source URL and credit Amar Harolikar.
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