On August 13, 2025, Anthropic unveiled Claude AI's two new educational styles: Explanatory and Learning modes, which completely transform how programming is taught and learned. The Explanatory mode enables Claude to explain its reasoning step-by-step, sharing architecture decisions, tradeoffs, and best practices while writing code. The Learning mode, in contrast, employs a Socratic teaching approach where Claude pauses to ask the user to complete certain tasks, providing a genuine pair programming experience that helps both with learning and getting work done.
The Claude Code Command Line Interface (CLI) tool, which was released in February 2025, originally offered these modes only to enterprise customers, but on August 13, Anthropic made them available to all users and developers. According to developers, the Explanatory mode is particularly useful for understanding complex logic as it provides structured, thoughtful explanations that help developers understand how code works and the thinking behind it. Meanwhile, the Learning mode follows Socratic dialogue principles, where Claude doesn't provide immediate answers but asks guiding questions, suggests sub-goals, and allows users to discover solutions at their own pace. According to Anthropic, this method results in 85% better code quality as developers gain a deeper understanding of what they're creating.
Claude's new educational methods represent a significant advancement in AI-based programming education, especially for beginner developers. The Explanatory mode helps understand the decisions and tradeoffs behind code, while the Learning mode encourages active participation from users, resulting in deeper understanding and better skill development. With the Claude Code CLI tool, developers can now access these features directly from the terminal, which simplifies workflow and improves productivity. According to Anthropic's data, 76% of users experienced significant improvements in code quality and understanding when using Claude's learning methods, indicating that these tools could fundamentally change how software development is taught and learned.
Sources:
CherryZhou
Igor Bonifacic
