Yes! I organized the first Claude Code meetup in Amsterdam ever! Around fifty Claude Code enthusiasts came to an evening all about Claude Code and vibe coding: what can AI do for you when coding? We kicked off with a solid base for future meetups and I’m planning on the next one already!
Last October I contacted Anthropic via a web form; they were open to support meetup organizers for local Claude Code meetups. After a few weeks of back and forth on location, planning and cost and made the meetup public via Luma with the help of Anthropic.
On Thursday, December 11th 2025, around fifty attendees came to The Social Hub Amsterdam City to be part of the first Claude Code meetup Amsterdam. Apart from myself I invited two additional speakers, Eugene Ter-Avakyan and Daniel de Vos, to talk about their experiences with Claude Code. This resulted in three informative presentations of which mine was most technical, which balanced nicely with Daniel’s and Eugene’s presentations.
Anthropic was supportive by having two of their coworkers available for an online Q&A. Both Ado and Daisy joined online from San Francisco in their early morning to respond to my and the audience’s questions.
Takeaways:
- Claude Code can be used as a general agent too without it writing code! I showed how a text book on writing style can be used to make Claude Code a writing style improvement tool.
- Your global
CLAUDE.mdfile can be a great directory for what you want Claude Code to do. I demonstrated that adding directives to the globalCLAUDE.mdfile makes Claude Code align better with your coding process. - Escape Driven Development is the new paradigm. Thank you for this great name, Eugene! Keeping your fingers near the escape button of your keyboard is important as Claude Code can be too eager when writing code; sometimes it requires interception.
- Claude Opus is the best, concluded Daniel. Using Cursor with Claude Opus boosted his productivity last year!
On to the next meetup, which I want to approach as open-mic: present your project built with Claude Code! Keep an eye on this blog and on the Luma page for the next edition!!
Thanks to Anthropic to financially support this meetup and for the stickers. Thanks to Daniel de Vos and Eugene Ter-Avakyan for their great talks. Thanks to Leo Metasch for helping out during the evening.
Slides of my presentation can be found on Github.