Claude 3.7 Sonnet [New Launch]
Yesterday (24th February) Anthropic launched their new frontier model - Claude 3.7 Sonnet,
and it changes the game for developers - let me show you how.
In this article I’ll touch on three announcements from yesterday:
Claude 3.7 Sonnet
Github integration
Claude Code
What is Claude Sonnet?
Claude is the AI product from a company called Anthropic.
In the same way that ChatGPT is the AI product from OpenAI.
Sonnet is the mid-sized version within Claude’s set of three Claude models, and has been the go-to model for developers, who use Claude either independently through claude.ai, or integrated with their preferred AI development environment - tools such as Cursor, Windsurf or Cline.
Up until yesterday Claude 3.5 was the frontier model, and so the announcement of 3.7 signifies that this is an upgrade to the same core model, rather than an entirely new approach.
Claude 3.7 Sonnet
With 3.7, Anthropic have introduced reasoning (or thinking time) to Claude.
As you may have seen from recent releases from OpenAI (o3-mini), DeepSeek (R1) and xAI (Grok 3), the future of AI models is reasoning.
This exchanges immediate results, for a greater quality and depth of result by giving the model more time to think through the problem and evaluate alternative approaches.
The new 3.7 will be the default in claude.ai, and you can then select a new “Extended” option to grant Claude more time to think through the problem.
I tested the model out with designing a playable version of strategic backgammon - and 3.7 was able to single shot it (give me a playable version off a single prompt).
(click on the image to go to the chat itself and try the game)
The key difference here, as you see in the in the image below, Claude 3.7 Sonnet now takes time (in this case 10 seconds) to think through the challenge step by step.
Notice Claude uses its wider knowledge of me in its thinking…
Every model launch comes with some new benchmarks, and so here is one from Anthropic - showing how 3.7 has accelerated its ability to write code.
And we’ll come onto Anthropic’s focus on code and developers next.
Github integration
When it comes to AI - context is king. When a model understands the details of what you are talking about, then it is able to provide a much higher quality answer.
For many developers and product managers they have been providing this context in the form of a Claude Project, by adding files that describe the schema, the user interface, the dependencies, or the code from individual files.
It was very manual and prone to becoming out of date fast.
With this release Anthropic have launched a beta of a Github integration, that allows you to link up with a Github repository and pull in individual files to reference as context.
Having selected which files to sync, your repository is now part of your project’s knowledge, and can easily be refreshed, allowing you to change and update which files are being referenced.
With this new integration, Anthropic is helping developers bring their code into Claude.
In the next section, we’ll look at how they are helping take Claude right into your code.
Claude Code
The reality for most developers is that they are not jumping out to a Claude Project to have a discussion about their code.
They are working within a development environment (increasingly an AI powered tool like Cursor) and wanting to discuss their project there.
Claude Code is a new CLI package that can be installed within the terminal of your project.
Once installed and connected to an API/Developer account for billing, you can start speaking to Claude directly within your terminal:
I ask Claude what this project does and it goes and looks…
Claude then provides a very accurate summary…
I still need to understand when I would use Claude Code versus using Claude 3.7 Sonnet in my Cursor Composer (and incur additional billing), but I am sure there are valid reasons.
Check the new tools out
So there we have the three main releases, and reasons why I’m confident Sonnet will remain the king of coding for the time being:
Claude 3.7 Sonnet - Extended thinking
Github integration
Claude Code
I recorded a 12 minute video of me walking through each of these which I hope brings them to life for you.
Get Started
Whenever you are ready there are three ways I can be helpful:
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