Thariq Shihipar
Thariq Shihipar is a software engineer and startup founder who worked on Claude Code, Anthropic's agentic coding tool, from 2025 until October 2026. Posting on X as @trq212, he became one of the most visible public voices of the Claude Code team, explaining new features, answering bug reports and announcing fixes such as usage-limit resets.[1][2][6] Before Anthropic he co-founded Chime, a browser extension acquired by HubSpot in 2013, and Multiverse, a Y Combinator-backed games company which built the online tabletop role-playing platform One More Multiverse and raised a reported $17 million Series A in 2021.[12][7][9] He also worked on the academic publishing platform PubPub at the MIT Media Lab.[14][15] On 24 October 2026 he announced that he had left Anthropic.[1]
Career summary
| Period | Organization | Role | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| c. 2012-2013 | Chime (Toronto) | Co-founder, with Fahd Ananta and Guru Mahendran, while an undergraduate at the University of Toronto | [12] |
| 2013 | HubSpot | Joined the product development team when HubSpot acquired Chime | [13] |
| Dates not given | PubPub, MIT Media Lab (Viral Communications group) | Listed on the project team; Media Lab profile gives his title as "Former Engineering Director, PubPub" | [14][15] |
| 2019-2024 | Multiverse, Inc. (One More Multiverse) | Co-founder and CEO; YC Winter 2020 batch | [7][8][11] |
| 2025-October 2026 | Anthropic | Engineer on the Claude Code team | [1][2][5] |
The Media Lab pages that list him do not give dates for his PubPub work. Anthropic's engineering blog shows him writing for the company by September 2025.[5][14][15]
Early career
Chime and HubSpot
Shihipar studied electrical and computer engineering at the University of Toronto. With fellow undergraduates Fahd Ananta (computer science) and Guru Mahendran (aerospace engineering), he began building Chime around 2012. Chime was a Google Chrome extension that collected Facebook notifications, email and tweets into one real-time stream; according to U of T News, it gained almost 30,000 users after its January 2013 launch.[12] HubSpot announced on 28 March 2013 that it had acquired Chime together with PrepWork, a New Haven startup, for undisclosed terms. HubSpot said all employees of both companies would join its product development team at its headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts.[12][13]
PubPub
At the MIT Media Lab, Shihipar was part of the team behind PubPub, an open publishing platform in Andrew Lippman's Viral Communications group. The Media Lab's project page lists the team as Cesar A. Hidalgo, Andrew Lippman, Kevin Zeng Hu, Travis Rich and Thariq Shihipar, and describes PubPub as an "author-driven, distributed alternative to academic journals." The page says it was "optimized for public discussion and academic journals and is being used for both."[14] His Media Lab people page lists him as "Former Engineering Director, PubPub," and his personal website describes PubPub as a non-profit he co-founded and says he did graduate school at the Media Lab.[15][16]
Multiverse and One More Multiverse
Multiverse was founded in 2019 by Shihipar, the illustrator and art director Sara Alfageeh and Hisham Bedri. Y Combinator's directory lists it in the Winter 2020 batch, based in Boston, and describes it as "a web-based game creation system inspired by Dungeons & Dragons and Roblox."[7] Alfageeh told Popverse in 2022 that the three friends started the company partly because they wanted stories and settings that reflected their own backgrounds.[10]
On 13 April 2021 Multiverse, Inc. unveiled One More Multiverse, an online platform based on the virtual tabletop concept, where players could run tabletop role-playing games with character sheets, rulesets and dice, build their own assets and rules, and sell creations in a marketplace. The press release quoted Shihipar as "CEO and cofounder."[8] Game World Observer reported on 22 April 2021 that the company had raised $17 million in a Series A round with participation from Twitch co-founder Kevin Lin, Crunchyroll co-founder Kun Gao and Oculus VR co-founder Nate Mitchell.[9]
In May 2024 One More Multiverse announced that it would shut down in 90 days, saying in a letter to its community that the platform was not sustainable.[11] Y Combinator lists the company as inactive.[7] Shihipar's website says he ran the company for five years and that it "scaled to over a million users" and "went viral on tiktok"; these figures are self-reported.[16]
His website also lists smaller, undated AI projects, including LatentLit (a tool for creating and sharing agents powered by large language models), Quick Edit (AI copyediting), and Sherpa (an email agent), plus Edgeout.gg, a bootstrapped gaming analytics platform he says was sold to Blitz.gg.[16]
Anthropic and Claude Code
In a September 2026 interview on the Latent Space podcast, Shihipar said he joined Anthropic "because of Claude Code," at a time when the tool had just come out and Claude Opus 4 had impressed him.[4] OfficeChai reported that he was a Member of Technical Staff on the Claude Code team and was known for work on its skills system and context engineering.[2]
His public writing for Anthropic includes "Building agents with the Claude Agent SDK" (29 September 2025), the engineering post that announced the renaming of the Claude Code SDK to the Claude Agent SDK. The post credits him as its author.[5] It sets out the agent loop that Claude Code uses ("gather context -> take action -> verify work -> repeat") and argues that the same harness can power agents for finance, customer support and research.[5]
On X he often fielded developer questions and announced changes. On 27 February 2026, for example, he posted that Anthropic had reset rate limits for all Claude Code users after a prompt caching bug consumed usage limits faster than normal, and that the fix was in version 2.1.62 (see AI usage limits).[6] OfficeChai described him as "arguably Claude Code's most recognisable voice on X apart from Boris Cherny."[2] INSIDE, a Taiwanese technology outlet, said he regularly shared Claude Code usage tips and feature tests on X and that it had often quoted him in its own coverage.[3]
The Latent Space episode, titled "Claude Code's Next Era" and published on 29 September 2026, ran 92 minutes. According to the show's description, Shihipar discussed the Ask User Question tool, artifacts as persistent interfaces for agents, Claude Tag and Projects for multiplayer agent work, the Claude Mods system for customizing the harness, and agent security in connection with Anthropic's "Pacing the Frontier" argument.[4] The hosts also referred to an earlier AI Engineer World Tour talk of his titled "Field Guide to Fable," about Anthropic's Claude Fable models.[4]
Departure from Anthropic
On 24 October 2026 (UTC) Shihipar posted on X: "I've left Anthropic after more than a year of working on Claude Code and seeing it scale larger than I ever imagined." He wrote that he believed "deeply in the mission, and most of all, the idea of a race to the top," praised his former colleagues, and said: "For me, it is time for a bit of a break before diving into something new." He recommended several accounts for Claude Code content, including ClaudeDevs and Boris Cherny, whom he credited as the one "who started it all."[1] The post did not give a reason for leaving or name a next role.[1][3]
OfficeChai and INSIDE both covered the departure. OfficeChai noted that it came weeks before Anthropic's expected initial public offering and that Anthony Morris, who described himself as the creator of Claude Code on desktop, announced his own exit within a day.[2] INSIDE reported that Anthropic had not publicly commented.[3] As of 30 October 2026 his X profile read "playing WoW forever, formerly Claude Code @anthropicai."[19]
Game prototyping
Shihipar has posted publicly about a personal game project. In a thread on 30 September 2026, while still at Anthropic, he called it "a personal side project." Describing himself as "a former games founder," he wrote that making a game is "deeply satisfying and creative, don't outsource that to AI. Use AI to work with you to bring your vision to life."[17] The prototype is a fighting game inspired by Brawl Stars, Avatar and Street Fighter in which the goal, he wrote, is "(probably)" to knock the other player or team off the edge; he wrote that he was iterating on one heavy character inspired by wrestlers from Persia and India, that the work was "prototype quality," and that he would ideally build a real game with a small group of two or three people.[17] On 29 October 2026 he shared a "vibe UI" exploration for what he called his "elemental fighting game," made with Claude and GPT for images, and wrote that one of his frustrations with agents doing UI work is that "it adds too many details."[18] For the wider practice, see AI game development and vibe coding.
Continue reading
- Claude CodeClaude Code is an agentic software development product made by Anthropic. It uses models from the Claude family to inspect software projects, propose and apply changes, run development tools, and report…Mentioned 16 times above
- AnthropicAnthropic is an American artificial intelligence (AI) safety and research company founded in 2021 by Dario Amodei, Daniela Amodei, and other former OpenAI researchers, best known for the Claude family of large…Mentioned 16 times above
- Y CombinatorY Combinator (YC) is an American startup accelerator and early-stage venture firm headquartered in San Francisco.Mentioned 3 times above
- Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyThe Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts.Mentioned 3 times above
- AI usage limitsAI usage limits are the caps that providers of subscription AI services place on how much computing a customer can consume before waiting for a reset.Links back to this article
- AI game developmentThis article is an overview. For a step-by-step guide to making a game with AI tools, from setup and prompts to testing and release, see Developing Games with AI.Links back to this article
More to read
References
- ^1 ^2 ^3 ^4 ^5Thariq (@trq212), post announcing departure from Anthropic - X, October 24, 2026
- ^1 ^2 ^3 ^4 ^5Thariq Shihipar & Anthony Morris Announce They're Leaving Anthropic, Weeks Before Its IPO - OfficeChai, October 24, 2026
- ^1 ^2 ^3Claude Code engineer Thariq Shihipar announces he is leaving Anthropic (in Chinese) - INSIDE, October 2026
- ^1 ^2 ^3Claude Code's Next Era: Thariq Shihipar, Anthropic - Latent Space, September 29, 2026
- ^1 ^2 ^3 ^4Building agents with the Claude Agent SDK - Anthropic Engineering, September 29, 2025
- ^1 ^2Thariq (@trq212) on the prompt-caching bug and rate-limit reset - X, February 27, 2026
- ^1 ^2 ^3 ^4Multiverse - Y Combinator company directory
- ^1 ^2One More Multiverse to Combine Tabletop RPGs with Video Game-Styled Creative Elements - Multiverse, Inc. press release via Gamespress, April 13, 2021
- ^1 ^2Multiverse raises $17 million to expand online Tabletop RPG platform - Game World Observer, April 22, 2021
- ^Sara Alfageeh and friends are building One More Multiverse - Popverse, October 20, 2022
- ^1 ^2DnD Greyhawk Returns, Adventure Time Hits $1M, One More Multiverse Shuts Down - StartPlaying, May 15, 2024
- ^1 ^2 ^3 ^4U of T undergraduate entrepreneurs sell web services startup - U of T News, March 28, 2013
- ^1 ^2HubSpot Acquires Two Companies to Continue Rapid Growth - HubSpot, March 2013
- ^1 ^2 ^3 ^4PubPub - MIT Media Lab project page
- ^1 ^2 ^3 ^4Thariq Shihipar - MIT Media Lab people page
- ^1 ^2 ^3Thariq Shihipar - personal website
- ^1 ^2Thariq (@trq212), thread on prototyping a video game - X, September 30, 2026
- ^Thariq (@trq212), "vibe UI" exploration for an elemental fighting game - X, October 29, 2026
- ^Thariq (@trq212) profile - X, accessed October 30, 2026
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Cite this page: AI Wiki. "Thariq Shihipar." aiwiki.ai, updated 30 Oct 2026, fact-checked 30 Oct 2026. CC BY 4.0. https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/thariq_shihipar



