Everything accelerated, again, in Nov-Dec-Jan. Lots of people are noticing.
We passed some kind of crazy milestone recently, one that is only becoming obvious in retrospect. I felt it, and wondered if others had sensed it too.
It turns out they had.
What I’ve Been Saying
Claude Opus 4.5 arrived in November, powering up Claude across all its surfaces—Claude.ai, Claude Desktop, and Claude Code. So smart, such encyclopedic knowledge.
In The Workflow:
Moving from “I wish I could do something about X” to “I can definitely now do something about X—and Y and Z and A-B-C,” is a huge deal. AI is the enabler, but more specifically, the November arrival of Claude Opus 4.5 was, for me, the tipping point. That model crossed some kind of “smart enough” line where there was literally no workflow challenge it could not take on. (Things are now even better with Opus 4.6.)
What Others Are Saying
I’ll put Doug O’Laughlin from SemiAnalysis up front because he’s the one who calls this phenomenon “The Awakening” in this Latent Space podcast with Shawn “Swyx” Wang:
O’Laughlin is also the guy who detected and charted the insane trend whereby Claude Code co-authored commits now represent a substantial and exponentially-growing percentage of all commits on GitHub:
Swyx himself covers the phenomenon thoroughly in this Latent Space AI news post:
Swyx even created a dedicated site for it, wtfhappened2025.com:
Ethan Mollick wrote on LinkedIn in December about Opus 4.5’s off-the-chart performance on METR benchmarks:
Here’s METR’s updated chart for Opus 4.6, yet another exponential outlier:
Boris Cherny on Twitter in December:
Pretty convincing evidence, eh?
My Take on What’s Powering This
The arrival of Claude Opus 4.5 in November began the exponential
Some kind of significant Claude Code agent harness improvements in December ratcheted up the curve
Opus 4.6 in January, even more so
MCP Apps bring your custom UIs inside Claude. I built 4 and share what I learned: how they relate to MCPs and skills, rules of thumb, and more.
MCP Apps—a way to add our own custom UIs inside Claude—arrived as a standard on January 26th. MCP Apps work inside all of the in Claude surfaces that have UIs, which is “everything but Claude Code.” The list of Claudes that support MCP Apps increased by one just last week, with the addition of Claude Cowork. MCP Apps also work on OpenAI and a number of other platforms, but we’ll focus on the Claude world here.
How We Got Here
On December 9th, Anthropic announced:
Today, we’re donating the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), a directed fund under the Linux Foundation, co-founded by Anthropic, Block and OpenAI, with support from Google, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Cloudflare, and Bloomberg.
Then, just over a month ago (Jan 26th), the MCP core maintainers announced:
MCP Apps are now live as an official MCP extension. Tools can now return interactive UI components that render directly in the conversation: dashboards, forms, visualizations, multi-step workflows, and more. This is the first official MCP extension, and it’s ready for production.
MCP Apps actually brought together work from OpenAI (OpenAI Apps SDK) and the independent creators of MCP UI including Ido Salomon and Liad Yosef, with Anthropic co-authoring the MCP Apps spec in November:
MCP-UI and OpenAI Apps SDK pioneered the patterns that MCP Apps now standardizes. The projects proved that UI resources can and do fit naturally within the MCP ecosystem, with enterprises of all sizes adopting both the OpenAI and MCP-UI SDKs for production applications.
Claude supported MCP Apps from day zero, January 26th.
Cool, But …
I was excited about MCP Apps joining the already-exciting lineup of Claude extensions that enable us to distill our business domain knowledge (skills) and connect to our business context (MCPs). But honestly, I wasn’t exactly sure about their real-world applications.
The announcement included one of Anthropic’s brief demo videos showing off the Figma MCP app, and this helpful bit:
Here are a few scenarios where MCP Apps shine:
Data exploration: A sales analytics tool returns an interactive dashboard. Users filter by region, drill down into specific accounts, and export reports without leaving the conversation.
Configuration wizards: A deployment tool presents a form with dependent fields. Selecting “production” reveals additional security options; selecting “staging” shows different defaults.
Document review: A contract analysis tool displays the PDF inline with highlighted clauses. Users click to approve or flag sections, and the model sees their decisions in real time.
Real-time monitoring: A server health tool shows live metrics that update as systems change. No need to re-run the tool to see current status.
These interactions would be less smooth as text exchanges, whereas MCP Apps make them natural — it’s like using any other UI-based web app.
Great, that’s kinda helpful, but … this is so high-level, so far from me understanding how to architect and build MCP Apps—and the MCPs they live inside—let alone how MCP Apps should relate to the other members of the team, most importantly skills. And let’s not forget, how do you deploy these guys?
Longer post, continue reading here!