Art of the Year: Claude Opus 4.5

If nothing dominated 2025 like vibe coding, then the art of the year should be…Claude Opus 4.5. Computation has changed with Anthropic’s Claude Opus and “vibe coding.” What was previously only possible with years of coding knowledge or a developer can now be accomplished in minutes—assuming you’ve paid for enough tokens—in natural language. The magnitude of Claude really hit me at Glitch Residency, where vibe coding was the air everyone breathed at the chateau; it was everywhere, on every laptop, on every lip, a part of every discussion. Is it that some used ChatGPT while others used Gemini? No. Every serious (and non-serious) coder in the room used Claude Opus; it was remarkable. This is what artists do. They constantly test new tools to see how they can express themselves more clearly. AI is the most powerful tool humanity has built, and it’s the same for artists. It opens up seemingly unlimited creative opportunities to bend and sculpt computation in ways that illuminate our society, its promise, its challenges, and this landed alien civilization we’re somehow creating.