Actually lately, I’ve been following AI model releases for a while and let me tell you — few have been as highly anticipated as Claude 3.7 and earlier Grok3 and even openAI o3 model.

Recently, I have seen many reviews about this Claude 3.7 model and its really great.

actually ever since Anthropic hinted at a new “hybrid reasoning” system the developer community has been abuzz.

Why all the excitement?

Well, Claude 3.7 isn’t just an incremental update actually it’s being touted as the first AI of its kind that can think in two modes — fast and deep — within a single model​

its impressive!!

Also compared to previous versions (remember Claude 3.5 Sonnet?) this one promises to be smarter, faster, and far more capable.

Claude 3.5 already made waves with its speed and accuracy and I personally liked this model alot, when it comes to coding.

However, 3.7 is a “whole new level of smart”

it is actually introducing hybrid reasoning approach where you get both quick answers and step-by-step thinking in one AI​.

As I love to see how these model works I myself, I couldn’t wait to see how this would change the game for coding assistance.

We’re talking about improved coding skills that is an extended thinking mode for complex problems and even a new CLI tool called Claude Code that could let the AI loose on your development tasks.

If Claude 3.7 could deliver on these promises, it would directly address a lot of the pain points we’ve had with AI coding assistants.

On top of that I felt Anthropic claimed they wouldn’t even charge extra for the upgrade — same pricing more power​

So now its an AI that’s stronger and doesn’t cost more?

You bet I was counting down the days for the release.

In short, the stage was set.

Claude 3.7 had big shoes to fill by following on the success of 3.5 and going up against other new models like OpenAI’s O3 Mini and the much-talked-about DeepSeek R1.

So, I did some research like what’s new in Claude 3.7 and how it stacks up in performance. Also what my (and others’) experiences have been using it in real coding scenarios.

Let’s Jump in!

New Features

So, what’s actually new in Claude 3.7?

In one word: plenty.

Anthropic really loaded this update with features that make a coder like me feel like a kid in a candy store.

lol 🙂

Let’s break down the most notable improvements (and why they matter):

Extended “Thinking” Mode (Hybrid Reasoning)

This is the headline feature everyone’s talking about.

Claude 3.7 can switch between giving you a lightning-fast answer and doing a more step-by-step and deep reasoning process and all within the same AI.

just think of it like having two gears: a quick mode for simple questions and a slow and methodical mode for tough problems.

You as the user can even dial up or down how much time (or tokens) Claude spends “thinking”​

For example, if I ask a complex coding question, I might allow Claude to use its extended thinking mode to reason through it step by step.

But for a simple question like

“What’s 2+2?”

it can just blaze ahead with the answer.

I tried o3 mini model and grok to see how they respond, OpenAI took 2–3 second to think as its not requirred, whereas Grok and claude 3.7 did in a blink, even claude 3.7 marked as “simple math question”.

This hybrid reasoning is great because earlier models (and competitors) often forced you to choose between speed and depth — now you get both on demand.

One caution: using the deep thinking mode will naturally take longer and use more tokens so it’s a tool to use when you need it (more on the pros and cons of this in a bit).

‘Claude Code’ — The New CLI Coding Assistant

This one had me particularly excited.

Claude Code is a command-line tool Anthropic introduced that basically lets you interact with Claude 3.7 through your terminal for coding tasks​.

In other words, Claude can now act like a developer’s assistant who can edit files, run tests, debug code and even commit to GitHub — all via CLI commands you give it.

Imagine saying

“Hey Claude, open my app.js and optimize the search function”

and it just does it.

Or asking Claude to run your test suite and fix any failing tests it finds. It’s like having a super-intelligent junior developer who never gets tired.

I tried a simple scenario where, I let Claude Code suggest a refactor in one of my Python scripts and it not only provided the updated code but actually executed it to verify it worked (under my supervision, of course).

I have used the windsurf and they now added this claude 3.7 model for paid user.

It feels a bit like sci-fi to have an AI directly manipulating code on my machine.

Do note, Claude Code is in limited preview right now​ but not everyone has access yet — and it works under human oversight (thankfully!).

So you still have to review and approve its changes (no skynet scenarios… yet).

But as a glimpse of the future of AI-assisted development it’s incredibly promising.

Improved Coding Prowess

Beyond the fancy new CLI, Claude 3.7 is generally better at coding tasks than its predecessors.

Anthropic did a lot of tweaking under the hood so that Claude understands programming contexts more deeply.

It’s better at following coding instructions, documenting its logic and catching its own mistakes.

In my experience so far I used windsurf with claude 3.5 model and 3.7 and in most of the time, it generates cleaner code with fewer errors.

Early testers noticed it can handle full-stack development tasks with a lot fewer hiccups by meaning everything from front-end components to back-end logic​.

This was backed up by Anthropic’s own claims that partner companies found Claude 3.7 to be “best-in-class” for real-world coding — tackling complex codebases and tool use better than other models​

I have to say, it does feel like pair programming with a really knowledgeable (and insanely fast) colleague.

I even threw an entire multi-file project at it, and it managed to keep track of the context far better than Claude 3.5 ever did.

Larger Memory (Context Window up to 128K tokens)

If you’ve wrestled with AI models forgetting what you said two pages ago, this upgrade will sound heavenly.

Claude 3.7 can handle 128,000 tokens of context​

In plain terms, it can read and remember extremely large documents or codebases. You could feed it entire libraries or a huge code repository and it can still give coherent answers referencing all that information.

This is roughly equivalent to tens of thousands of words (think of a novel-length text). For developers, that means you might not need to chop your code into pieces when asking Claude for help — it can take in the whole project architecture or a massive log file and keep it all in its head.

I tried providing it with a lengthy API documentation file (about 67 pages worth) plus some code and Claude 3.7 was able to draw from both the docs and the code to answer my question about integrating a feature.