Anthropic redesigns Claude Code and adds routines that run without your laptop

Anthropic shipped two notable Claude Code updates on Monday. The first is a redesigned desktop app. The second is a feature called routines, which lets you run Claude Code automations on a schedule or triggered by GitHub events — running on Anthropic's infrastructure, not your laptop.

The redesign is the more obvious one. You can now open multiple Claude sessions side by side in one window, with a sidebar to switch between them. It now also has an integrated terminal, file editing, HTML and PDF preview, along with a faster diff viewer. The layout is drag-and-drop. It's a lot closer to what you'd expect from an IDE than the terminal-first experience Claude Code launched with last May.

It's a better app. The people who liked it exactly as it was will disagree. Everyone else gets a sidebar and a built-in terminal.

Routines are the more interesting part

Routines are automations you configure once and run repeatedly. Give Claude a prompt, point it at a repo, attach whatever connectors you need, and set it to run nightly or wire it to your deploy pipeline via API, or have it fire automatically when a PR opens on GitHub. It runs on Anthropic's servers. Your machine doesn't need to be on.

Also Read: Anthropic Accidentally Exposes Claude Code Source Code in npm Release    

With GitHub webhook Claude opens one session per PR and keeps feeding it updates — comments, CI results, follow-up pushes. Helping it to work like a teammate that watches your repo.

Limits vary by plan: 5 routines a day on Pro, 15 on Max, 25 on Team and Enterprise. Extra runs cost extra.

Anthropic has been chipping away at the constraint that Claude Code only works when you're sitting in front of it with remote control, scheduled tasks, auto mode, and now routines with cloud infrastructure. At some point it stops being a coding assistant and starts being closer to a background process. Monday's update is the furthest that trajectory has gone.

Also: v2.1.108

Same day, version 2.1.108 also shipped. Worth flagging a few things from the changelog: there's a new /recap command that summarises what happened in a session when you come back to it. The model can now discover and call built-in slash commands like /review through the Skill tool. /undo is now an alias for /rewind. Error messages got smarter  rate limit errors and plan usage errors are now distinguished from each other, which honestly should have happened a while ago.

There are also 14 bug fixes, including a few annoying ones: diacritical marks being dropped from responses when the language setting was configured, terminal escape codes showing up as garbage after --teleport, and sessions losing their custom name after --resume.

Routines are in the research preview. The desktop redesign is live now.