[
  {
    "i": 0,
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "All right, so we need the origin story."
  },
  {
    "i": 1,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "Where did Claude code come from?"
  },
  {
    "i": 2,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "By the way, it's it's crazy being here and hearing you guys' voices cuz I'm used to hearing you like And probably at 2x."
  },
  {
    "i": 3,
    "speaker": "Speaker 3",
    "text": "Probably at 2x."
  },
  {
    "i": 4,
    "speaker": "Speaker 3",
    "text": ">> [laughter] >> 2x and with all the um editing that we do on all of our little verbal ticks and you know all of that."
  },
  {
    "i": 5,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "Um yeah, it was it was sort of an accident in in a lot of ways. Um so I I joined a team at Anthropic late in 2024 and it it was kind of a prototyping team. Um it was called the Labs team. We"
  },
  {
    "i": 6,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "actually brought it back."
  },
  {
    "i": 7,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "And the idea was to figure out what's the next big product. And at the same time we push the frontier of the model and we figure out how do we improve the model to support that best, you know,"
  },
  {
    "i": 8,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "that future product that hasn't been built."
  },
  {
    "i": 9,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "And it's just hard to know which way to evolve the model because until there's a product that really pushes the frontier then you don't really know."
  },
  {
    "i": 10,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "And at the time there was this like just crazy feeling of product overhang that you know, the model can do all the stuff that there's no product that has yet captured."
  },
  {
    "i": 11,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "Um you know, if you think about coding tools at the time there was like autocomplete tools. Um there was like you can ask the agent a question, but it couldn't write code. It's about it."
  },
  {
    "i": 12,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "Yeah, and like until recently the model just wasn't good. It It couldn't really do it. And so we felt like there there's room to just go all in, build a product that's just a coding agent. And um"
  },
  {
    "i": 13,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "you know, we built it and it kind of sucked at the beginning. It wrote maybe, you know, like 10, 20% of my code for for a while."
  },
  {
    "i": 14,
    "speaker": "Speaker 3",
    "text": ">> Real quick, before before this moment what was the state of coding at Anthropic? How much of a focus was it?"
  },
  {
    "i": 15,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "So, you know, internally at Anthropic we were using IDEs still at at the time. Um but for Anthropic as a company we've always cared about coding."
  },
  {
    "i": 16,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "Um we've always cared about tool use."
  },
  {
    "i": 17,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "We've always cared about computer use."
  },
  {
    "i": 18,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "This has always been kind of the core research direction because uh you know, for us we exist to research AI safety."
  },
  {
    "i": 19,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "That's the reason that we exist at."
  },
  {
    "i": 20,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "Like, if you ask like a random person at Anthropic, you just like pull them over in the hallway and ask like, \"Why are you here?\" They're going to say AI safety."
  },
  {
    "i": 21,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "That's the reason every single person is at the company. That's They deeply believe, including me, this is just the single most important problem to solve."
  },
  {
    "i": 22,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "And there's kind of a bunch of ways to solve it. You can look at kind of mechanistic interpretability, you can do alignment work. There's all sorts of ways to study the model in a petri dish."
  },
  {
    "i": 23,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "But fundamentally, you have to study it in the wild to see what it does, once it's safe in all these other ways. And so that's kind of where Claude code comes in. Mhm. But, you know, for"
  },
  {
    "i": 24,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "Anthropic as a company, the direction has always been safety. And the way you study safety, you know, it has all these kind of layers, including setting the model in the wild. And, uh, kind of"
  },
  {
    "i": 25,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "what's a useful way to do that? It's coding. Because that's the way the model interacts with the world."
  },
  {
    "i": 26,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "And so if you want to study kind of various sorts of model misalignment, you want to, uh, make it useful enough that people use it so that you can study it."
  },
  {
    "i": 27,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "Coding is just a very obvious application."
  },
  {
    "i": 28,
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "Um, so that's just from the beginning, that's that's been the focus. It's just such an unbelievably clean universe, cuz you've got all this training data."
  },
  {
    "i": 29,
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "It either works or doesn't work. And like, depending on the language, it either compiles or doesn't compile, or it either, you know, there's sort of a very clear like pass-fail sort of"
  },
  {
    "i": 30,
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "ability to test it. Um, and it's a very constrained universe of correct solutions. And English is there's an infinite number of correct, beautiful poems, but there is a very constrained,"
  },
  {
    "i": 31,
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "uh, there's a non-infinite number of ways that you can write the correct code to solve a certain problem. Yeah, that's >> And it's there's sort of a elegance to using it as your petri dish,"
  },
  {
    "i": 32,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "given that. Yeah, that's right. There was, uh, you know, you know Hofstadter?"
  },
  {
    "i": 33,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "He's the guy that wrote, uh, Gödel, Escher, Bach. Did anyone read Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, great book. Yeah, it was really good. But he he wrote this other really weird book in the in the"
  },
  {
    "i": 34,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "'80s about uh, like his idea about like the path to artificial intelligence. Cuz he's a like he's a professor. He taught AI in school and like he was kind of teaching at the time. And he was he was"
  },
  {
    "i": 35,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "talking about like the the the basis of cognition, the basis of intelligence is recognizing patterns."
  },
  {
    "i": 36,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "And one way that he studied that is one of his one of his hobbies was translating poetry from English to French."
  },
  {
    "i": 37,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "And a direct translation is rarely the right translation. There's actually a lot of taste that goes into it. And sometimes you want to like fudge it a little bit so that like the meter is"
  },
  {
    "i": 38,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "good. And there's kind of various ways to do it. So yeah, it's like a fuzzy problem."
  },
  {
    "i": 39,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "But coding is easier to solve, I think."
  },
  {
    "i": 40,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "It's also very commercially valuable."
  },
  {
    "i": 41,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "Um so it helps us kind of build a business. And it's also the kind of business that our favorite customers, enterprises, startups, companies have."
  },
  {
    "i": 42,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "And so it helps us have this kind of aligned business model. So you know, we don't need to do ads. And you know, we can kind of focus on safety, which is the thing that we care about. It helps"
  },
  {
    "i": 43,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "us build a business where we can actually do that."
  },
  {
    "i": 44,
    "speaker": "Speaker 3",
    "text": "Um you came from Meta before coming to Anthropic. Uh and you had a lot of focus on on code at Meta. I'm curious connecting the dots looking back now, um how did what you were doing at Meta"
  },
  {
    "i": 45,
    "speaker": "Speaker 3",
    "text": "help inform the beginnings of Claude Code?"
  },
  {
    "i": 46,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "Mhm."
  },
  {
    "i": 47,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "For me, building dev tools has always been a side hustle. It was never the main thing."
  },
  {
    "i": 48,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "And I feel like that's the that's the best way to build dev tools because you want to focus on solving a business problem and building a thing that people love and that's useful for people."
  },
  {
    "i": 49,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "That's fundamentally what we're here for as engineers. You know, always YC like beats this into you. And like I feel this way. Had you done YC before?"
  },
  {
    "i": 50,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "Yeah, yeah. I was actually I I was the first hire at a YC company. This is back in like 2010, 2011."
  },
  {
    "i": 51,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "Something like that."
  },
  {
    "i": 52,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "It was like one one first few batches."
  },
  {
    "i": 53,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": ">> Wow, cool. Um so for me, dev tools has always been this kind of side hustle, and I I build product, and on the way to building product, if uh, you know, the dev ex isn't good, then I'll build tools to"
  },
  {
    "i": 54,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "make that a little bit better. That's just always been the way that I approach it."
  },
  {
    "i": 55,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "Um, and and so here I just applied kind of that mindset of build the thing for yourself first, and then hopefully it's useful for others."
  },
  {
    "i": 56,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "And uh, I was surprised to see that it is, which is awesome."
  },
  {
    "i": 57,
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "So you said it was kind of crappy at first, and you only trusted it with like 10% of your work, and it only did about 10% of your work. What was the bottleneck early on, and how did you"
  },
  {
    "i": 58,
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "solve it to to make it better? Cuz from what I understand, it's been like 6 months since you've written a line of code in your job. Yes."
  },
  {
    "i": 59,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "So that's extremely different than it it only does about 10%. What changed? Um, I I I remember it. It was it in May, it was Sonnet 4 and Opus 4."
  },
  {
    "i": 60,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "Um, and then in uh, in November, it was Opus 4.5."
  },
  {
    "i": 61,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "So it was just the the underlying model changing. It was the model. There's a lot of work that went into the harness."
  },
  {
    "i": 62,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "There's a lot of work into making Claude Code better. You know, like everyone likes to use this stuff differently."
  },
  {
    "i": 63,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "This is the thing about building for engineers. It's not a consumer product because engineers are so opinionated in the way they like to use stuff."
  },
  {
    "i": 64,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "And so, you know, we started with a CLI, but then we built uh, we built a desktop app, we built a mobile app, we built uh, iOS and Android apps. We have like Slack app, GitHub app. You can use Claude Code"
  },
  {
    "i": 65,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "in whatever way you want. And so, a lot of this has was us innovating, learning, trying to figure out what features are useful. And this is like plan mode, for example, came out of this. A lot of"
  },
  {
    "i": 66,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "different kind of tools and experiences came out of this. But fundamentally, when I think about the step changes and what percent of my code the model wrote, it was just the model. Like the model"
  },
  {
    "i": 67,
    "speaker": "Speaker 3",
    "text": "got better, and it just went up. How tightly, to the extent you are able to talk about it, how tightly was the experience that Claude Code was having feeding back into the the model work"
  },
  {
    "i": 68,
    "speaker": "Speaker 3",
    "text": "leading up to 4.0, 4.5, etc."
  },
  {
    "i": 69,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "So, every you know, everyone Anthropic uses Claude Code every day."
  },
  {
    "i": 70,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "Um so, the researchers building the model use Claude Code and the people building the product use Claude Code."
  },
  {
    "i": 71,
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "So, that that's essentially the cycle."
  },
  {
    "i": 72,
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "Do you have any metrics that like uh ways to numerically describe how much it's changed the company's trajectory? Like it feels from the outside that you guys are shipping a whole lot more product now than you used"
  },
  {
    "i": 73,
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "to. It seems reasonable to assume a lot of that is because you guys are using Claude Code all over the company internally."
  },
  {
    "i": 74,
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "What's the right way to really grasp how much of that is attributable to Claude Code?"
  },
  {
    "i": 75,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "Yeah, so being being at AI lab you get you get kind of used to thinking in exponentials. Essentially, all the charts are exponential. So, we actually use like log-linear charts for pretty"
  },
  {
    "i": 76,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "much everything."
  },
  {
    "i": 77,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "Uh so, it's like x-axis is, you know, like linear and then the y is like log-linear."
  },
  {
    "i": 78,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "Um and so, you know, everything's kind of exponential. Like the revenue is exponential, the usage is exponential, um which is just like the funnest problem as an engineer. And thank you"
  },
  {
    "i": 79,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "for bearing with it."
  },
  {
    "i": 80,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "Um and uh essentially like everything is going up including the like the code. Um and so, when we look at the lines of code written, the number of pull requests written by people at Anthropic since we"
  },
  {
    "i": 81,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "released Claude Code, this has grown many hundreds of percentage points."
  },
  {
    "i": 82,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "Um I think the latest that we shared was like something like 3x. Um but this is actually very very outdated. So, it's it's a lot higher now."
  },
  {
    "i": 83,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": ">> What what was 3x? Uh the amount of code per engineer that everyone at Anthropic is writing. I see. So, the size of the engineering team went up, you know, like many multiples. And usually what happens"
  },
  {
    "i": 84,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "as the size of the engineering team grows is productivity goes down. And when I was at Meta, one of my responsibilities was code quality for all the code bases. And the reason we cared about that was it's useful for"
  },
  {
    "i": 85,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "productivity. If the code is high quality, it makes engineers more productive. And we kind of showed this empirically."
  },
  {
    "i": 86,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "Um and typically what happens is the code quality gets worse, productivity goes down. Another thing that happens is as the number of engineers grows, the productivity goes down because the new"
  },
  {
    "i": 87,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "people are kind of asking engineers, like, \"How do I do this? How do I do this?\" So, the engineers they're asking don't get to write code. And it takes just, you know, like it takes ramp-up"
  },
  {
    "i": 88,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "time."
  },
  {
    "i": 89,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "And the the first thing that we saw at Anthropic is when new people join, the ramp-up time is like 2 days."
  },
  {
    "i": 90,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "Cuz, you know, like this used to be weeks, but now it's 2 days cuz you just like ask Wad."
  },
  {
    "i": 91,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "And we still have to explain to new people that join the team, like people ask, like, \"How do I query the database?\" And the answer is open Wad, run it in the Wad code code base, and"
  },
  {
    "i": 92,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "have Wad query the database."
  },
  {
    "i": 93,
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "Cuz there's like a skill for querying the database, and it just knows. So, of of the new engineers that you've hired in 2026, how many of them have written any code?"
  },
  {
    "i": 94,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "Um I mean, define writing code."
  },
  {
    "i": 95,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "Uh Right, right. That's >> [laughter] >> Wait, wait, wait. How do you define writing code?"
  },
  {
    "i": 96,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "You know, for for me, it's like engineering has always been like like, you know, my grandpa coded with punch cards. Like in the Soviet Union, like you like for him, like programming was"
  },
  {
    "i": 97,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "like it it was like a paper thing, like punch holes into it, and you feed it into this like big machine that it chugs for a while, and it gives you the answer. That was That was coding. Right."
  },
  {
    "i": 98,
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "It's like my dad who wrote a lot of assembly would have like made fun of me for writing Python, and be like, \"You're not coding.\" Exactly, exactly. It's like it's not for, you know, real engineers"
  },
  {
    "i": 99,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "or it's very high-level. But this is sort of the nature of programming is the the level of instruction always goes up."
  },
  {
    "i": 100,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "So, it's it's got It went from, like, switches to punch cards to, like, assembly, then to like Cobol, Fortran, then Java and the the high-level languages, and then like JavaScript and"
  },
  {
    "i": 101,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "Python and the really high-level languages. Hm. This has just always happened, and like I see what we're doing as somewhere on this continuum."
  },
  {
    "i": 102,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "Um and so, for me, the way that I coded a year ago was I wrote code with some kind of autocomplete in IDE."
  },
  {
    "i": 103,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "In November, I uninstalled my IDE cuz I wasn't using it."
  },
  {
    "i": 104,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": ">> [laughter] >> I I just like I I was just, you know, for I I was like in the last month, I just haven't opened it, so I I'll just uninstall it. Wow. At that point, I was running, you know, maybe five, 10 quads"
  },
  {
    "i": 105,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "in parallel. And my coding was prompting Claude to to write code. Now, it's actually leveled up, I think, again to the next level of abstraction where I don't prompt Claude anymore. I have"
  },
  {
    "i": 106,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "loops that are running. They're the ones that are prompting Claude and kind of figuring out what to do. My job is to write loops."
  },
  {
    "i": 107,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "And this is this kind of next transition that I think we're going to see in the next few months and you know, maybe through the rest of the year. Wow."
  },
  {
    "i": 108,
    "speaker": "Speaker 3",
    "text": "Um hypothetical me, obviously not actual me, uh is an engineer who wants to join the engineering team at Anthropic."
  },
  {
    "i": 109,
    "speaker": "Speaker 3",
    "text": "Um how do you evaluate me today?"
  },
  {
    "i": 110,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": ">> [laughter] >> I think something that I look for in our team in particular for Claude code is we love generalists."
  },
  {
    "i": 111,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "So, I I think a thing that we started to see maybe six months ago is there were very few engineers on the team that were just doing engineering in the traditional sense of like, you know, you"
  },
  {
    "i": 112,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "have a user researcher, they talk to the user, and then they handed that down in a document to a designer who then made a mock, and then that went to a product manager, you know, scoped it, and then"
  },
  {
    "i": 113,
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "it goes to an engineer for implementation."
  },
  {
    "i": 114,
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": ">> I I worked at Microsoft. I'm extremely familiar with this process."
  },
  {
    "i": 115,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": ">> [laughter] >> This is what it used to be, but it you know, we we just realized this is not what the team is doing anymore."
  },
  {
    "i": 116,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "And our team was always kind of more prototypy than this, but maybe six months ago, the thing we found is every engineer on the team does scoping."
  },
  {
    "i": 117,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "Everyone talks to users every day."
  },
  {
    "i": 118,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "People are doing design. Engineers, everyone on the team is comfortable like pulling data and doing data science work, building dashboards, and things like that. So, I think like we're we're"
  },
  {
    "i": 119,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "kind of starting to see all the roles merge and kind of melt into one builder. I think like Satya calls it a builder, so it's something like that."
  },
  {
    "i": 120,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": ">> It's almost like a product engineer, but you don't even really necessarily have to be an engineer. That's right. And you know, like we have designers that are shipping code or finance guy ships code."
  },
  {
    "i": 121,
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "Um I think this is >> Our chief of staff ships code. Yeah."
  },
  {
    "i": 122,
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": ">> we actually all of our infrastructure at at Acquired now is is pretty rapidly shifted to Claude code, um which is why Can I tell a little fun Acquired story?"
  },
  {
    "i": 123,
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "So, we um We are an audio podcast. YouTube doesn't have a way to upload just audio. You have to upload something in the video."
  },
  {
    "i": 124,
    "speaker": "Speaker 3",
    "text": "It should be interesting. Um For a long time it was just a a a black screen MP4."
  },
  {
    "i": 125,
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": ">> [laughter] >> Uh so, a transcript would be a good idea, but we don't have a transcript yet cuz it takes it a week for humans to make the transcript. Fortunately, there's AI."
  },
  {
    "i": 126,
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "Anyway, um there's a whole like Claude code set of scripts that I sloppily wrote, well, I and Claude wrote, and then at some point I sort of heaved it over to David and I was like, \"Can you like continue working"
  },
  {
    "i": 127,
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "on this?\" And there at first a little resistance, but then you you did spin up an idea like Yeah. Yeah. Yeah."
  },
  {
    "i": 128,
    "speaker": "Speaker 3",
    "text": "Yeah. Um open the terminal. Uh What One day after >> classes in college, and that was the last time I opened a terminal."
  },
  {
    "i": 129,
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": ">> One day after that, uh Codox comes out."
  },
  {
    "i": 130,
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "And the you know, the the pitch for Codox is it it's if you want the power of Claude code, but you don't want to have to deal with the terminal and you know, typing commands and um installing NPM and blah blah blah. We"
  },
  {
    "i": 131,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "actually heard that David had to open a terminal, so we were like, \"We have to release this. We have one day.\""
  },
  {
    "i": 132,
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "So, uh I want to use that as my like hook to like uh tell us the story of Claude Codox because to me it seems Claude Codox is a much much bigger market of people who don't want to open terminals than people"
  },
  {
    "i": 133,
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "who do know how to open terminals. It's kind of interesting that it went the direction of Claude code first, and then to be honest, like kind of a really long time before Quadcode came out. Yeah,"
  },
  {
    "i": 134,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "that's right."
  },
  {
    "i": 135,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "Honestly, it was the story."
  },
  {
    "i": 136,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "It was like it was some version of this played out like In April, I remember walking into the office, and right next to where the Quadcode, you know, a few of us sit, there's the a couple data scientists."
  },
  {
    "i": 137,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "And I walked in, and one [clears throat] of the data scientists had Quadcode up on his screen."
  },
  {
    "i": 138,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "And this was like This was back in the day when Quadcode was only available in a terminal. It wasn't yet available in the desktop app. It wasn't available in the mobile app. So, like you really had"
  },
  {
    "i": 139,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "to know what you're doing. And I asked Brandon like, \"Dude, what are you doing?"
  },
  {
    "i": 140,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "Are you like dog fooding it? Just trying to kind of figure out what this thing is?\" Cuz he, you know, like he just joined the team."
  },
  {
    "i": 141,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "And he was like, \"No, I'm using it for data analysis.\" And so, he figured out how to open a terminal. He figured out how to, um, you know, download Node.js cuz you had to do that. Uh, he figured"
  },
  {
    "i": 142,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "out how to install Quadcode, how to set up the API key. I don't think we even had subscriptions then."
  },
  {
    "i": 143,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "And he was just like using it to do analysis. And then, the the next week all of the data scientists had multiple Quadcode windows doing their analysis cuz it was just good at it."
  },
  {
    "i": 144,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "Um, and then fast forward to maybe May or June or something, and there there was some guy on Twitter. You guys see this? He was using it to grow his tomato plants."
  },
  {
    "i": 145,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "He has like he had like a little webcam, and he set it up to like just monitor his tomato plants. And it was controlling like the nutrition for the plants, and like over over weeks. And"
  },
  {
    "i": 146,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "then at some point like the little tomato like got it."
  },
  {
    "i": 147,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "And Quad was like, \"This is so delightful. Like all our work is paying off.\""
  },
  {
    "i": 148,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "And like I just saw this tweet, and I was like, \"Oh my god, I think it's time."
  },
  {
    "i": 149,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "Like now we're we're starting to break through to the mainstream. It took a while to get engineers to understand what this is, and finally they did. And now we're starting to see a critical"
  },
  {
    "i": 150,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "mass of non-engineers do it. And when the weight and demand is that strong, I think that just means it's like it's the time to build a product. And so, we started exploring. There's a bunch of"
  },
  {
    "i": 151,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "different ideas. Claude code itself we built in it was like a little over a week, like maybe eight, nine days. Mhm."
  },
  {
    "i": 152,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "Something like that. It was 100% built using Claude code. It was one of a bunch of ideas. And as soon as we had it we were like, this is it."
  },
  {
    "i": 153,
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "What were the other paths that you killed? Cuz it um if I were to describe the sort of creative brief as take all the power of Claude code and make it available to people who don't want to"
  },
  {
    "i": 154,
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "open a terminal, it doesn't really translate one-to-one. You kind of have to be opinionated in the product that you build to bite off some set of the work that Claude code can do."
  },
  {
    "i": 155,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "Yeah, we tried man. I don't even remember all the prototypes. We tried something I think that was based on Slack. And it didn't really work cuz building Slack chatbots that feel good"
  },
  {
    "i": 156,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "is just really hard. Mhm. Um we tried something that was based on web. There was a bunch of different web-based prototypes um that we weren't sure about and none of them really felt great. Like there"
  },
  {
    "i": 157,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "there's something about being in a browser that just didn't feel really good. Um and it also if it's in a browser it doesn't have access to all your tools. So I have a word document on"
  },
  {
    "i": 158,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "my desktop. I can't tell something in the browser."
  },
  {
    "i": 159,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": ">> File system access feels necessary. And just that little bit of friction of like having to drag and drop the file to the to the browser, that was enough to make it feel not good. And I I"
  },
  {
    "i": 160,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "think this is just back to the way that we think about product is we build the thing that we love and you want to build a product that you yourself fall in love with and that you use every day and then"
  },
  {
    "i": 161,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "maybe some users will like it too and hopefully it will work for other people too. Mhm."
  },
  {
    "i": 162,
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "I have um it has been surprising to me how my Claude code usage has dropped because of how much Python gets written in Claude the chat window. I'll ask it questions that require a lot of data"
  },
  {
    "i": 163,
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "analysis and I can see like, oh it's it's writing some software right now to do the analysis and then it's going to write a bunch of HTML and CSS and JavaScript and then render a brand new"
  },
  {
    "i": 164,
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "UI for me to play with it in and that used a lot of Claude code generation although I never once interacted with Claude code the product to have that be accomplished. Yeah, yeah. There's this"
  },
  {
    "i": 165,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "kind of interesting kind of theoretical thing about like when do you want to do the computation? Do you want to do it in real time when you sample from the model and kind of do inference? Or do you want"
  },
  {
    "i": 166,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "to kind of pre-compute so you can have the model write a program and then you can run that program repeatedly and that's free for you."
  },
  {
    "i": 167,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "And essentially we want to do the latter as much as possible."
  },
  {
    "i": 168,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "But it really it's up to the model. You know, like this is just back to like the model exists as software and it needs a way to interact with the world. Because it exists as software, the way it does"
  },
  {
    "i": 169,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "this is coding. That's just kind of the natural language it speaks, it's the thing it understands."
  },
  {
    "i": 170,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "And so, you know, like from the earliest days of Claude Code, I the very first version I gave it a bash tool so it can run commands on my computer. I didn't tell it anything about the tool and it"
  },
  {
    "i": 171,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "just kind of figured out how to use it."
  },
  {
    "i": 172,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "And you know, there's this anecdote I've told a thousand times, but I asked it like what music am I listening to?"
  },
  {
    "i": 173,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "And it opened up the bash tool, it wrote a little program that wrote a Apple script script and like I've never written Apple script."
  },
  {
    "i": 174,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "And it wrote a little Apple script and it opened my music player and was like, this is the song that you're listening to."
  },
  {
    "i": 175,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "And even back then, this was like Sonnet 3.5, that was like not a very intelligent model. It was like the best at the time, but you know, by now by modern standards it's not very intelligent."
  },
  {
    "i": 176,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "Um it it just knew how to do this. So there's something about writing code, there's something about you know, using tools to interact with the world that's it's just something the model wants to"
  },
  {
    "i": 177,
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "do. Mhm."
  },
  {
    "i": 178,
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "I want to ask I'm going to come off of this product specific questions for a minute to ask a little bit about culture and org design."
  },
  {
    "i": 179,
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "Um you're a member of the technical staff."
  },
  {
    "i": 180,
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "I think a lot of people have that title."
  },
  {
    "i": 181,
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": ">> [laughter] >> Um what's up with that? What are the pros?"
  },
  {
    "i": 182,
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "What are the cons? Would you recommend that to this group?"
  },
  {
    "i": 183,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "Okay, so the so the worst thing that was pretty annoying when I joined is you message someone on Slack and you know, it just says member of technical staff."
  },
  {
    "i": 184,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "Is he like is this person like a designer or are they an engineer? Are they a manager? You don't know. And like what do they work on? What do they work on? Yeah, you don't know."
  },
  {
    "i": 185,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "Um I actually really like it."
  },
  {
    "i": 186,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "Um when it When I was at Meta, something I really liked is every software engineer, their title is software engineer."
  },
  {
    "i": 187,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "There's no like senior software engineer or principal software engineer."
  },
  {
    "i": 188,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": ">> Oh, really? Yeah, it's like not a thing."
  },
  {
    "i": 189,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "Huh. Um and I I like it because actually if you give people kind of senior titles, sometimes they'll give you bad ideas and people out of deference will just go with those ideas. Mhm. But"
  },
  {
    "i": 190,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "actually they should push back. And it's actually a really good cultural forcing function to put everyone on the same playing field in that way."
  },
  {
    "i": 191,
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": ">> Does it come out though? Like, okay, yeah, I know you're just a software engineer and I'm just a software engineer, but like I'm well aware you're a level something software engineer even"
  },
  {
    "i": 192,
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "though it's not in your title."
  },
  {
    "i": 193,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "I think sometimes you know this, but often times you don't. Mhm. Yeah, like [clears throat] um you know, I was like a when I was at Facebook, I was when I joined, I was like an L4 engineer. And I"
  },
  {
    "i": 194,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "had an idea and then I like I found like the VP of connectivity and like went to him and I was like, here's my idea, let's go build it. And like he didn't know what level I am."
  },
  {
    "i": 195,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "Oh, that's interesting. And like he it was a bad idea and it didn't work."
  },
  {
    "i": 196,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "But then I did this again with a different VP and then that also didn't work, but but the third time it worked."
  },
  {
    "i": 197,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "And then you know, we we started a team and we started building stuff and then moved on to the next idea. I and I kind of see this all the time now."
  },
  {
    "i": 198,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "You know, people on our team all these kind of old seniority ideas, it's sort of like it doesn't matter anymore in a in a lot of ways. Like these engineers that have 20 years of experience, 30 year like they have to"
  },
  {
    "i": 199,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "unlearn so much. And you spend months teaching them how to unlearn all these old habits that just aren't relevant anymore."
  },
  {
    "i": 200,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "Whereas sometimes a new grad joins the team and they will teach me something about how to use quad code better. Mhm."
  },
  {
    "i": 201,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "Because they think about it natively, whereas it's not my instinct. And it it's extra hard because with every new model, you just have to recalibrate and relearn."
  },
  {
    "i": 202,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "But going back to the member of technical staff thing, I I think it's actually a really important thing because all these old distinctions about engineer versus PM versus designer versus user researcher by the end of the"
  },
  {
    "i": 203,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "year it's gone."
  },
  {
    "i": 204,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "And so this helps us kind of very clearly see this and kind of act in this way today."
  },
  {
    "i": 205,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "And this is I think I think you have to do within a AI lab is kind of push everyone to be more agile built and think about the future more in this way."
  },
  {
    "i": 206,
    "speaker": "Speaker 3",
    "text": "I'm curious on that front maybe generalize a bit you know for all the founders all the companies in this room um what should they be thinking about now for their organizations by the end of the year."
  },
  {
    "i": 207,
    "speaker": "Speaker 3",
    "text": "Um what do you think that founders and companies are going to have to change in their mindset over the coming set of months?"
  },
  {
    "i": 208,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "I would I would think today the thing that I would do was I would give everyone as many and I'm going to say this cuz I work at a AI lab of course but give everyone as many tokens as possible."
  },
  {
    "i": 209,
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": ">> [laughter] >> The more to quote Jensen the more you buy the more you save."
  },
  {
    "i": 210,
    "speaker": "Speaker 3",
    "text": ">> you buy the more you save."
  },
  {
    "i": 211,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": ">> [laughter] >> So this is this is sort of the place that I would start is like give people as many tokens as possible let them experiment and the other thing I would do is underfund everything a little bit."
  },
  {
    "i": 212,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "So if you're working on a project and you're like this feels like it needs like four engineers put two engineers on it and give them a bunch of tokens and have them figure out how to do it. And"
  },
  {
    "i": 213,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "chances are they can do it. There's probably a bunch of stuff they can automate there's a bunch of stuff they can streamline and because they're automating it they can do it better next"
  },
  {
    "i": 214,
    "speaker": "Speaker 3",
    "text": "time but it'll just be cheaper next time. So it's like a compounding effect to It's compounding. a compounding effect to having fewer resources besides tokens. That's right. It's sort of like"
  },
  {
    "i": 215,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "you know like in business and product you make so many decisions it's really good to have a set of principles."
  },
  {
    "i": 216,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "So you don't have to you can lean on the principles and you don't have to make ad hoc decisions every time and often times founders and you know companies they have these like principles documents and"
  },
  {
    "i": 217,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "so this is kind of like that but it you know the model can use these principles also and it, you know, it comes in the form of skills. And and of course like if there's some use case that takes off"
  },
  {
    "i": 218,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "and uses a bunch of tokens, that's when you go in and optimize it and try to make it efficient."
  },
  {
    "i": 219,
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "But in general, if I were to pair it back the advice to you of staff with fewer humans, shift budget from humans to tokens, what the output of that is is to raise your upfront costs but decrease"
  },
  {
    "i": 220,
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "your ongoing costs. Cuz you you've already like It's almost like pre-compiling. Like you've done a big pile of work upfront so that the over and over and over again tasks are easy and streamlined. Yeah, yeah. That's"
  },
  {
    "i": 221,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "That's maybe a way to think about it."
  },
  {
    "i": 222,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "And and because you put less people on it, that means, you know, the people at your company can do much more."
  },
  {
    "i": 223,
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "This feels like the biggest reckoning to me of building teams is people are pretty used to having a title and a discipline and people take great pride in being a good a good PM. I'm going to"
  },
  {
    "i": 224,
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "write a bunch of blog posts and stuff about the the discipline of product. You know, there's a lot of those people out there or designers. I can't wait to show off my portfolio of my beautiful"
  },
  {
    "i": 225,
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "designs. And like do we all just need to within 12 months shake off the idea that we are anything and everybody is just this like flexible bag of token generation?"
  },
  {
    "i": 226,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "Well, Ben, you're so optimistic."
  },
  {
    "i": 227,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": ">> [laughter] >> Uh I might use slightly different words, but yeah."
  },
  {
    "i": 228,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "There you go. You should make a t-shirt out of that."
  },
  {
    "i": 229,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": ">> [laughter] >> I think I think it's something like that. So, you know, for for me I I've been an engineer for for a bit, but I I've always worn different hats. Like I I've started startups startups before"
  },
  {
    "i": 230,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "and I've been on the business side. I've worked on the product side. I've been on the user research side, on the design side. So, for me personally, I just love building product. I don't I don't care"
  },
  {
    "i": 231,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "that it has to be an engineering hat that I'm wearing. And so sort of like right now I see that being born out. So, yeah, I feel like right now this is just the golden age of of the generalist."
  },
  {
    "i": 232,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "People that want to do more than one thing, it's just it's never been more fun. It's never been easier."
  },
  {
    "i": 233,
    "speaker": "Speaker 3",
    "text": "Maybe one more question um we spoke about with Jared a little bit."
  },
  {
    "i": 234,
    "speaker": "Speaker 3",
    "text": "I'm curious your take on it. Um how do you think about taste? Uh either you personally or Anthropic?"
  },
  {
    "i": 235,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "I I feel like every time I think there's you know something's kind of special about the way that I do coding, I'm wrong."
  },
  {
    "i": 236,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "I I used to have all these opinions about the way that we write the code."
  },
  {
    "i": 237,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "Like um you know, I I I really like functional programming. And so, you know, I'm a big like yeah, I like like Haskell and Scala and these kind of weird functional languages. And at the very beginning, I"
  },
  {
    "i": 238,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "had this rule for our code base, we have no classes in the code base, we only have functions in the code base. Cuz that's the way that I write my code."
  },
  {
    "i": 239,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "That's the way that I like it. And um on the weekends, engineers just started sneaking in changes that had classes."
  },
  {
    "i": 240,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "And uh I would find that on Monday and then I would like pull out the pull request and I'd be like, \"No, no, no, don't do that.\""
  },
  {
    "i": 241,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "And then at some point the model started writing all the code and it just started writing classes. And I was like, \"Okay, well, maybe the model's right. Like maybe this opinion's kind of stupid and"
  },
  {
    "i": 242,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "it's just like this particular thing that I have that and then it doesn't matter cuz the business outcome is met."
  },
  {
    "i": 243,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "And it's met faster as a result. And the code actually is not bad."
  },
  {
    "i": 244,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "Um and obviously the code's been getting better over time."
  },
  {
    "i": 245,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "And so I I feel like every time that I have this kind of like sense that like I'm special in in some way, I'm often proven wrong."
  },
  {
    "i": 246,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "And and I think right now kind of with the current model capabilities, something that people talk a lot about is like the alpha is product taste."
  },
  {
    "i": 247,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "And I think this is also going to go away. Like this is alpha today, but also, you know, right now I have, you know, like a couple hundred quads running doing stuff. And a bunch of them"
  },
  {
    "i": 248,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "are looking at like Twitter feedback and they're looking at like GitHub issues and they're looking at Slack and they're figuring out what to build next."
  },
  {
    "i": 249,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "And right now most ideas are bad, but maybe 20% are good."
  },
  {
    "i": 250,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "If you wait for the next model and, you know, if you project out maybe 3 months, 6 months, most ideas will probably be good."
  },
  {
    "i": 251,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "Um and you know, there's going to be some new there's going to be some new thing. There's going to be something else that we're really great at, but I think in the long term this kind of"
  },
  {
    "i": 252,
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "erodes. Any guesses at what it is? Is there some final thing where humans are uniquely good at it?"
  },
  {
    "i": 253,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "I think I think the final thing that we're going to be teaching the models is values."
  },
  {
    "i": 254,
    "speaker": "Speaker 2",
    "text": "How to be, you know, the the way that we teach our kids how to be good people, we're going to teach the model how to be a good model."
  },
  {
    "i": 255,
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "Fascinating."
  },
  {
    "i": 256,
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "Well, that is quite the place to leave it."
  },
  {
    "i": 257,
    "speaker": "Speaker 3",
    "text": "Yeah. Boris, thank you so much. This is fascinating."
  },
  {
    "i": 258,
    "speaker": "Speaker 1",
    "text": "Thank you."
  }
]