We Gave Claude Code to Everyone at Intercom. Not Just Engineers. Everyone. It Took Us a Few Weeks.
How we did it. What we learned.
I was grabbing breakfast in our SF office a few weeks ago when I overheard two people at the next table. “I spent three months building that thing,” one of them said, “but now I can do it in an hour. Pretty sick.” I didn’t recognize either of them. I leaned over and asked if they were talking about our team’s work. They were. I’d never met them. They were from a team I’d never even heard of.
That’s the moment it clicked for me. When people you’ve never met are casually talking about doing in an hour what used to take them three months - using the tool you’re building - something real is happening.
The Bet
Less than a year ago, Intercom made a company-wide decision: all-in on Anthropic and Claude Code. The engineering organization adopted a set of principles that are aggressive even by today’s standards. All technical work is becoming agent-first. Agents write, test, and review code. Give agents problems, not tasks. We are not satisfied until the agent completes the work end-to-end.
Within weeks, hundreds of engineers were shipping at a pace that would have seemed impossible a year ago. This wasn’t a branding exercise. Anthropic’s technology became the foundation of how Intercom builds software.
But Intercom has maybe a thousand people who aren’t engineers. Marketers, sales leaders, accountants, lawyers, product managers, customer success teams, researchers. They work with the same data. They have the same questions. They need to build things - reports, analyses, tools, automations, even apps - just as urgently as engineers do. And they had no way to participate in this revolution.
A small team of us - you can count us on one hand - decided to change that. Not by building a dumbed-down interface. Not by creating yet another dashboard tool or chatbot wrapper. We decided to give everyone the real thing: Claude Code, with its full power, connected to every system in the company - and make it work for people who have never written a line of code.
What We Built
We didn’t build a new product from scratch. We built on top of Claude Code - because Anthropic designed it to be extended. This is the part a lot of people miss about Claude Code: it isn’t a closed tool you use as-is. It’s a platform. It supports plugins, skills, integrations, and open protocols like MCP that let you connect it to anything. We treated it like infrastructure and built a company-specific intelligence layer on top.
We packaged everything into a single installation - one click and you have Claude Code installed, connected to Snowflake, Google Drive, Slack, other tools, and every skill your domain needs. From there, we covered the full workflow: building, publishing, and distributing what people create so the whole organization benefits. Three things made this work.
One Conversation, Everything Connected
In a single conversation with Claude Code, someone can pull data from Snowflake, enrich it with context from Google Drive, build an interactive visualization, publish it to a shared catalog, post it in Slack, and schedule it to auto-refresh every Monday morning.
No switching between tools. No understanding how any of these systems work under the hood. Claude handles the plumbing. The human handles the thinking.
This is what the Anthropic partnership made possible. Not just a powerful AI model - a platform designed to be woven into the fabric of a company. Plugins for company-specific capabilities. MCP for connecting to any data source. Skills for encoding domain knowledge. Claude Code isn’t just an interface to Claude; it’s the connective tissue between a person’s intent and every system in the organization.
From Conversation to Published Page
People were building incredible things in their Claude Code sessions - interactive charts, analytical tools, data explorations - but everything lived and died in individual conversations. There was no way to share what you made.
So we built a publishing platform. In the same conversation where you create something, you say “share this” and your work - a fully interactive web app with charts, tables, and filters - gets published to a shared catalog with its own URL. It has versioning so you can iterate. Multiple people can contribute to the same page. View tracking so you know who’s using it. A comment sidebar so colleagues can discuss findings inline.
This is the moment that consistently blows people’s minds. They go from “I asked Claude a question” to “I published an app my whole team uses” without ever leaving the conversation. People across every function - marketing, finance, product, sales - started publishing pages for their teams within days.
We built this catalog in weeks. Every single line was authored with Claude Code. We were shipping multiple features a day - dark mode, a collaboration sidebar, performance optimizations, a full design system overhaul - a small team moving at a speed that only makes sense when you’re building with the same tool you’re building for. We were our own best case study.
Teaching Claude Your Company
Claude is extraordinarily capable, but it doesn’t know your company. It doesn’t know which Snowflake table holds your ARR data. It doesn’t know that “5-box” means something specific in your finance org. It doesn’t know that your GTM team measures pipeline in stages S1 through S6, or that your customer success metrics live in a completely different schema than your product metrics.
So we built what we call “guidance skills” - domain-specific knowledge packs that load into Claude automatically. A finance skill that maps every metric to the correct table and knows the business logic behind the numbers. A go-to-market skill that understands the sales funnel. A customer success skill. When a VP asks “show me pipeline by stage this quarter,” Claude doesn’t guess - it knows exactly where to look, which joins to make, and what caveats to flag.
We built the first skills ourselves, but domain experts across the company quickly started building their own. The system improves every time someone contributes - and Claude can discover and invoke skills on its own, even when the person asking a question doesn’t know they exist. If they discover a pattern worth sharing, they contribute it back so the whole system gets smarter for everyone.
The engineering org had framed this transformation as “2x” - doubling engineering output through AI. What we discovered is that when you extend Claude Code beyond engineering, you don’t get 2x. You get something qualitatively different. You get a company where anyone can build software.
What Happened Next
We launched to the company a month ago. The adoption convinced me this isn’t a productivity story. It’s a structural change in how an organization works.
The numbers moved fast. Over a thousand people now have access. More than 300 are active every week. 330 pages published in the last week alone. Over 2,500 views in a single week. Sixty percent of Director-level and above are active users. And people started onboarding their own teammates without us being involved - they just showed a colleague and said “you need to try this.”
One example. Our VP of Demand Generation sat down with Claude Code for the first time, and the next day he’d published a full Global Marketing Calendar - an interactive app that pulls 270+ events from Coda across five regions and enriches each one with campaign metrics and attendance. Filters by status, event type, region. It replaced scattered spreadsheets with a single living page his whole team now uses. One day - from zero to a published app - with no prior experience in Claude Code.
But the numbers only tell part of the story. People who had never built anything were publishing pages their teams use daily. People who had never touched a code editor were contributing skills back to make Claude smarter. One person told the company: “It has unlocked an army of high-agency individuals. Friends at other tech companies are nowhere near this level.” Another wrote: “I truly believe this tool is the most transformative one I’ve ever seen in my career.”
The Flywheel
We didn’t fully anticipate this part. When you give everyone Claude Code with the right skills and integrations, people don’t just use the system. They improve it. When someone notices Claude pulling from the wrong source, they fix it. When someone builds something useful, they share the pattern so it works for everyone. The system gets smarter every week - not because our small team makes it smarter, but because hundreds of people across the company are finding edges and closing gaps for everyone else.
What This Means
There’s a pervasive assumption in the industry that AI coding tools are for developers, and that non-technical people need a different kind of product - a chatbot with a friendly UI, a dashboard builder, a no-code platform. Something simpler.
We’ve found the opposite. The most powerful thing you can give a non-technical person is the same tool engineers use, enhanced with a layer of company-specific intelligence that makes it safe, accurate, and productive. You don’t need to simplify the tool. You need to adapt it - teach it your company’s language, connect it to your systems, and let it meet people where they are.
Anthropic built Claude Code to be exactly this kind of platform - extensible, connectable, designed to be shaped by the organizations that use it. The Intercom-Anthropic partnership didn’t just change how our engineers work. It dissolved the boundary between who can and who can’t build software.
What the engineering org set out to achieve - making all technical work agent-first - turned out to be a much larger idea than anyone planned for. It’s not just engineers who can work this way. It’s everyone.
To be honest, we just wanted to help people answer their own questions. But when you give a thousand people the ability to build anything they can describe in a conversation, something shifts. They don’t just work faster. They start thinking differently about what’s possible.
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