Anthropic’s Product Team Speed & Strategy with Cat Wu

Source material

Transcript

I think it is very hard to be the right amount of age I've killed.

It's very easy to build a product for the super age I strong model.

The hard thing is figuring out for the current model.

How do you omiss it the maximum capability?

I've never seen anything like the pace you folks at Anthropica are shipping at.

We want to remove every single barrier to shipping things.

The timelines were a lot of our product features have gone down from six months to one month and sometimes to even one day.

You're interviewing hundreds of pms and you just keep feeling like they're approaching it very correctly.

The PM roll is changing a lot.

It's changing really quickly.

The thing that is extremely important for building AI native products is iterating so quickly.

Bearing out away for you to actually launch features every single week.

What do you think are the emerging skills pms need to develop?

It comes back to product taste as code becomes much cheaper at a rate.

The thing that becomes more valuable is deciding what to write.

Today my guest is Kat Wu, head of product for cloud coding, co-work at Anthropica.

Kat is at the center of everything that is changing in AI and product and building and she and her team are building the product that is most changing the way that we all build our products.

She is so full of insights and wisdom and lessons.

This is an episode you cannot miss.

Before we get into it, don't forget to check out Lenny's productpast.com for an insane set of deals available exclusively to Lenny's news that are subscribers.

With that I bring you Kat Wu.

Kat, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks for having me.

I have so many questions.

I'm so excited to have you on this podcast.

I want to start with giving people an understanding of your role alongside Boris.

Everybody knows Boris.

He's episode is the number one most popular episode on this podcast.

No pressure.

He created cloud code.

He leads the NCH team, ships a bazillion PRs a day from his phone, just like the numbers anymore.

I think people don't give you enough credit for the success that cloud code has had and co-work and all the things you all are building.

Help us understand your role on the team, how you work with Boris, how you split responsibilities, just like what does the PMR look like on the cloud code team?

I feel very lucky to work with Boris.

He's been an amazing thought partner.

He's our tech lead.

He's very much the product visionary and he is great at setting like, this is what the product needs to be in like three months, six months from now.

This is like what the HCI-pilled version of the product is and a lot of my role is figuring out, okay, what is the path from where we are today to like that vision three to six months from now?

And I spend more of my time on the cross-functional, so making sure that our marketing team, sales team, finance, capacity, etc, are like bought in on the plan and that we're all rowing the same direction and that once the feature is ready, that there aren't any blockers to shipping it.

I think in many ways it works well because we kind of like mind-milled, but it is actually like remark.

We worry of a line.

Like I think we're like 80% mind-milled, and then there's like this 20% of things that like maybe I care a lot more about them for, so like all drive those and like 20% work.

He cares a lot more than me and he just like drives those.

This episode is brought to you by our season's presenting sponsor Work OS.

What do open AI and Theropic cursor, Versel, Replet, Sierra Clay and hundreds of other winning companies all have in common?

They are all powered by Work OS.

If you're building a product for the Enterprise, you've felt the pain of integrating single sign-on, skim, r-back, audit logs, and other features required by large companies.

Work OS turns those deal blockers into drop-in APIs with a modern developer platform built specifically for B2B SaaS.

Literally every startup that I'm an investor that starts to expand up market and is upworking with Work OS.

And that's because they are the best.

Whether you are a seed-stage startup trying to land your first enterprise customer or a unicorn expanding globally.

Work OS is the fastest path to becoming enterprise ready in an unblocking group.

It's essentially striped for enterprise features.

Visit WorkOS.com to get started or just hit up their slack where they have actual engineers waiting to answer your questions.

Work OS allows you to build faster with the lightful APIs, comprehensive docs and a smooth developer experience.

Go to WorkOS.com to make your app enterprise ready today.

Something that you shared actually before we started recording is the fact that you're interviewing hundreds of pms all the time.

If I had a nickel every time someone asked me for an intro, it's a so-and-it-unthrophic to go work at Enthrophic as a PM ID.

I'd have 30 billion ARR.

It's just like the number one place people want to go work at.

It's like an only imagine how many pms you're interviewing.

You told me that you're just seeing people doing it wrong.

The way they're approaching what they think it takes to be a successful AI PM.

Talk about what you're seeing and what people need to understand about what it is.

What it takes to be successful these days.

I think before AI technology shifts were a lot slower so you could plan on these six to 12 months time horizons and because your shipping features at a bit of a slower rate, there was a lot more emphasis on coordinating with all the other partner teams to make sure that their shipping features are unblocked your features because code at that time was very expensive to make.

I think now with AI and with how much that has accelerated engineering and with how quickly the molecule abilities are improving, the timelines for a lot of our product features have gone down from six months to one month and sometimes to one week or even one day.

And with that we actually need to make sure that products ship quite quickly and what that means is as a PM there should be less emphasis on making sure that you're aligning your like multi-quarter roadmaps with your partner teams and more emphasis on okay how can we figure out the fastest way to get something out the door?

How can we figure out how to make like a concept corner of our product suite where we can just and engineer has an idea or a PM has an idea and like by the end of the week we're able to get into our users hands.

I think the PMs who do the best on AI native products are the ones who can figure out how can I like shorten the time from having this idea to actually getting the product in the hands of users and help define what are the most important tasks that need to work out of the box for my product.

So what I love about this is what you're saying is just like people haven't grasped how fast they need to move and what how much of the job now is just moving.

It's helping the team move fast.

What what what helps do that?

What do you what do you do?

What is your PM team due to help them move this fast?

Other than have access to the the most advanced models?

I think the first thing is to set queer goals because all of them are so general that actually creates a lot of ambiguity and who are building for what problems are trying to solve what the top use cases are.

And so I think a great PM is able to say okay our key user is professional developers.

The main problem that we want to solve for this feature is maybe there's like too any permission prompts and people are feeling fatigue and like the the use case is we we want professional developers at enterprises to safely get to zero permission prompts and that actually sets up pretty queer goal because it rules out a lot of potential approaches for reducing permission prompts so that people can get a lot more done with one prompt.

And then I think the second thing that's very important is figuring out some repeatable process for getting these features shipped.

So for call code what we do is we actually ship almost all of our features in research preview.

We clearly brand this when we ship something so that users know that this is an early product.

This is just an idea.

This is just something that we're trying to get feedback on iterating on and that this might not be supported forever.

And what this does is it reduces it reduces our commitment for shipping something.

We can just get something out in a week or two.

And the third thing that a PM should do is help create the framework for the team so that they know when to pull in cross functional partners and what those cross functional partners expectations are.

So for example we have a really tight process between engineering marketing and docs.

So when engineers have a feature that they feel is ready and that we've dog-futed internally, they post it in our evergreen launch room and then Sarah who leads our docs and Alex who leads PMM, Antark and Lydia and Deborah just like jump in and can turn around the marketing announcement for it the very next day.

And because we have this release-type process it lowers the friction for any engineer to ship something.

PM is the role that should be setting this up.

How do PRDs fit into this?

So the fact that you said that goals are really important part of just like being a line on what does success look like who is this for?

Is it now for?

Are you ready PRDs?

Is it just like a couple of points?

How has that evolved in the world of PMM?

So there's two two things that we do.

One is we have very rigorous metrics and we do metrics readouts with the entire team every week.

The goal of this is to make sure that everyone's deeply understand all the facets of our business, what our key goals are, how they're trending and what drives them.

The second thing that we do is we have this list of team principles.

And this includes who are key users are, why those are our key users?

And the reason that we articulate all this is so that everybody on the team feels like they understand how our business works, they understand what's important to us, and what we're willing to trade off.

And it lets people make decisions by themselves without feeling like they're blocked on PM or any other stakeholder.

I love how so much of this is like okay we still need PMs in the future.

And there's so much talk of why do we need PMs?

We're just going to ship and build we need engineers.

Oh, we actually do PRDs sometimes.

So I think for features that are like particularly ambiguous, it does help to write out just a one-pager on what the goals are, what the delightful use cases are, what the failure modes currently are that we need to fix.

And there are occasionally some projects, especially things that require heavy infrastructure that do take many months.

And for those situations, would you write PRD still?

I want to drill a little bit further into just how you're able to move so fast.

I've never seen anything like the pace, folks at Anthropica are shipping at like someone made this calendar of launches across Anthropica.

And it was literally every day that was like a major feature or product.

So one question people had online is you guys just launched this, not launched but built this incredible model, mythos that is still in preview because it's so powerful people are little afraid of what it can do.

Have you guys been using this as a part of the reason you've been able to move so fast?

We've been moving pretty fast for several quarters now.

So I think it's not fully mythos.

Mythos is an incredibly powerful model.

We do use the models internally.

And I think this has increased our rate of shipping a little bit but I don't think it explains the bulk of the increase.

I think a lot of it is the process and the expectation on the team.

So we're very low on process.

We want to remove every single barrier to shipping things.

We want to make sure every single personal team feels empowered to take their idea from just an idea to like out in the world in less than a week, sometimes even in a day.

Cool.

Oh man.

What an advantage to have the best model and also be building product at so cool.

We are very lucky to be able to work with the friends to your models.

What an awesome advantage.

Just like build a thing and then use it and then accelerate faster.

So interesting.

There's a couple like these other side things.

I want to just kind of go on these side quests on this conversation.

There's so much happening with them through topic and I'm so curious to get your insight.

One is a week ago or so the whole source code of cloud code leaked.

Somebody got it out there.

I think it was a mistake.

Is there anything you comment there?

Just like what happened?

What went wrong?

What are people now?

So we immediately looked into this when we saw it.

We realized that this was the result of human error.

There is a human working with cloud to write a PR.

This was just an update to how we release our packages and it actually went through two layers of human review and so this was a result of human error and we've hard in our processes to make sure that it doesn't happen in the future.

This person still had anthropic or they're doing all right.

Yes.

It's a process failure and the most important thing is to just like learn from it and to add more safeguard so that doesn't happen again.

And so that's what we've been focused on and most of those have ships.

Okay.

Another question I had is open claw.

So recently there's been this move to keep people from using clawed subscription with their open claws.

People have got really upset.

They're confused by this happening.

It feels like you're there's like, you know, harm cost to the open source community.

What are people?

What are people in understand about kind of what went into this decision?

So we've been seeing a lot of demand for cloud and we've been working very hard to both scale our infrastructure and also to make our harness more token efficient so that you can get more usage out of it.

It wasn't designed for third-party products which have different usage patterns that are first-party ones.

We spent a bunch of time trying to figure out what is the most seamless transition that we can offer.

And so I was very happy to be able to say that everyone gets some credits alongside their subscription.

But yeah, we did have to make the hard decision that we needed to prioritize our first-party products and our API.

And so this is the decision that resulted from that.

Yeah, to me it makes so much sense.

Like you guys are subsidizing this usage at like 200 bucks a month.

It's like basically unlimited use of this.

And I think people don't understand.

This is trying to make money.

We're trying to be profitably.

We can just give away a compute when it's so in demand.

So I get it.

Coming back to the PM team, what is just like the PM team look like at anthropic.

How many PMs are there?

How are they kind of organized?

Yeah, so we have a few PM teams.

I think we're maybe around 30 or 40 PMs right now.

So we have the research PM team who Diane leads.

And this team is responsible for understanding all of the feedback from our customers for models.

And then feeding that to the best research team to act on it.

And they also shepherd the model launch.

There's the call developer platform team that maintains the APIs that call code is built on top of.

And they also release things like managed agents, which is a way for you to build your agents.

And we can host it on your behalf.

And then there's called code that works on both called code and the co-work core products.

There's enterprise that helps make call code and co-work easier to adopt for all of our enterprise customers.

And so this is everything from like cost controls, our back security controls.

And just making sure that these enterprises feel very confident and comfortable using our tools.

And then we also have our growth team that is responsible for growing across our entire product suite.

So we work very closely with them on call code and co-work growth.

And I know they also work with our other teams on CDP growth.

So growth of people who use the call API.

So speaking of growth.

So a mall is just on the podcast.

This is really interesting insight that most people haven't been sharing.

There's always the sense that we need to do your PMs in the future.

What's the what do we need PMs engineers can to ship.

His take is that because engineers are moving so fast.

PMs and designers are squeezed.

There's less time to stand top of everything that is happening.

There's a feature shipping every day.

So his take as he needs more PMs because it's hard to keep up.

What's your take there?

Do you feel like there's be an increase in hiring of PMs?

What do you think is going on with the PM profession long term?

I think all of the roles are merging.

PMs are doing some engineering work, engineers are doing PM work, designers are PMing and also landing code.

You can either hire a lot more engineers who have great product taste or you can keep your engineering high in the same and higher a lot more PMs to help guide some of their work.

On our team we're pretty focused on hiring engineers with great product taste.

This this way we can reduce the amount of overhead for shipping any product.

Like there are many engineers on our team who are fully able to end to end go from see user feedback on Twitter through to like ship a product at the end of the week with almost no product involvement.

And this I think is actually like the most efficient way to ship something.

So I think like engineer and PM are kind of overlapping and you will get a lot of benefit from having more of either I think product taste is still a very rare skill to have and we'll pretty much hire anyone who we feel has demonstrated this strongly.

And your background was an engineering right?

Yeah I was an engineer for many years.

I was in a VC very briefly before joining anthropic and actually almost all the PMs on our team have either been engineers or ship code here on call code.

And so that that's one of the things that I think helps build trust with the team and also just enables us to move a lot faster.

And then actually our designers also have been front and engineers before.

Wow because that's that's the big question like there's definitely this emerging that's happening the venn diagrams are combining.

I think the big question for a lot of people is if you're coming from engineering or product or design, which of those core skills is going to be most valuable.

I could see it anthropic in on cloud code engineering is very valuable.

I'm curious if other companies if you have a design background becoming a PM is more valuable or just a PM PM.

I still think it comes back to product taste like as code becomes much cheaper to write.

The thing that becomes more valuable is deciding what to write.

Like what is the right UX for this feature?

What is the most delightful way that a user can experience it?

We get tens of thousands of GitHub issues asking for every single thing under the sun and it takes a lot of care and taste to figure out okay which of these is worth building and what is the right way to build it?

And I think that that skillset can come from any background but I think that's the most important thing.

I think the reason why an engineering background is particularly useful at least for the next few months is if you have an engineering background you have a better sense for how hard something should be and that's often a factor in what you choose to build.

So like if something is very easy to build then maybe instead of debating it you just spend an hour doing it but if something is harder to build and you know that up front that you know that okay this will just like cost a lot more for our team to get the self-dure.

So it helps a bit with the prioritization.

You said in the next for the next few months is that just like because the models will get so good potentially in the next few months you may not even need to know that as much.

I think the value skill sets does change quite frequently and so it's really hard to predict more than a few months out.

So it's less a commentary on what shift I think will happen and more of a commentary that I think large shifts will happen.

So you're not saying that's what mythos comes out and will change everything and know we don't need to know anything about engineering.

No I'm just saying that every every few months it seems like there's a there's a large increase in coding capability which then changes what other roles are valuable.

I think the most important thing is to be able to to have this like first principles thinking where you can figure out how the tech landscape is changing what the team really needs from you and to like jump in and fix that hole because I think the work is becoming more amorphous which means that a great PM is able to understand what all the gaps are to figure out what the highest priority ones are and then to just like figure out okay how do I learn that skill set or what is like the skill set that I have that I can like apply to this challenge.

So I think this is a current environment values people who are who are able to wear a lot of hats are able to swap them and are like very low ego about what work they do to help the team move faster.

I love this answer.

There's this question I've been asking people in your in your shoes folks that are kind of the bleeding edge of what AI's capable of and building what the latest tool is which is just like where will human brains continue to be useful and necessary for a while until we get to super intelligence.

What I'm hearing here is essentially picking the things to work on knowing where the market's going and figuring out where to prioritize essentially and then it's knowing if the thing you've built is good and right and getting it out there in some early version at least because that sound right is there anything else of just like where human brains will continue to be useful for at least the next few months.

I think human still provide a level of common sense at the model ston't and there's like a thousand moving pieces to any product launch some of them are very small but there's always a lot that could potentially go wrong.

I think the model doesn't always have a great sense of who all the stakeholders are, how they relate to each other, what their preferences are, what are the right venues to communicate with them to keep them on board.

I think a lot of this like more tacit common sense like EQ kind of knowledge is still very valuable.

Of course we want the models to get better at this and I think they will be but right now I think they're still gaps.

How do you just kind of deal as a human going through so much constant change just like just being on the inside of the tornado maybe it's common there but just like how do you how do you stay on top of what's going on how do you stay saying through all this craziness that we're moving through.

I think our team is so people who lean into the chaos so we try to face every challenge with a smile because there's always so much going on.

There's always so many risks and tricky situations that you know if you get too stressed about anything you'll burn out and so we really look for people who can kind of like look at a challenge be like woof that's going to be hard but I'm excited to tackle it and I'm going to do the best that I possibly can and I know I won't be perfect but I'll be able to see at night knowing that I did my best.

That's an interesting answer to just like what skills will be important in this future because it's I forget who said this maybe been man that this is the most normal this is the world will ever be.

Yeah it definitely gets harder like I feel like there are a lot of weeks where maybe Sunday night there's some like P0 and then by Monday there's like a P0 zero and by Monday afternoon there's a P0 zero zero and you're like wow I can't we've also worried about that P0 from Sunday but I think you just have to you know I said there's only so much that you can do that you need to sleep well so that you can make good decisions next day and just like brutally prioritize where you spend your time what's the most important thing to get right and be okay letting things go like there's there's products that we ship that aren't as polished as I wish they were but you know our our top goal is to help empower professional developers and if a product isn't successful as long as it's not blocking the core use case it's okay because we'll hear the feedback and we'll fix in the next release launching a feature that is buggy is the kind of thing that would have kept me up at night but it is something that I am now able to like live with knowing that okay we're gonna get that quick feedback and we're going to fix it in the next release.

What I'm imagining is there's that gift I think it's maybe from prior to the Caribbean where it says guy walking down a pair of stairs on a ship and the whole ship is just being demolished around him and he's so chill just strolling down his turkeys is everything's well in a part and that's interesting because everyone I've met from anthropic is just so chill and just so like obviously yeah that's I think that's a really interesting insight is just like having this calmness and optimism versus just like oh my god everything's crazy and going going nuts yeah I think if you don't have it you'll get pretty burnt out I think we also tend to hire people who have been in industry for a while and have experienced lots of ups and downs and have a good sense for what gives them energy and how to maintain their energy over time and I think that helps us a lot.

It's so interesting something that I wanted to ask about it so there's these roles blurring engineers are becoming PMs everyone's codogs are cats everyone's what do we lose in that in that world do we lose like career ladders and clear career paths do we lose design consistency code quality you know there's probably some downsides what are some things you find or just like okay that's something we're sacrificing for the greater good.

We're sacrificing product consistency historically when code was expensive to write you would carefully plan out everything your product suite how every product relates to each other what the use case for every single one is how they integrate and you would pretty much have one product for each use case and now with AI moving so quickly and with so many ideas that we need to test out we do sometimes have features that overlap with each other a lot of the times it's because there's two form factors that we love internally and we want to we want the external audience to tell us which one is better what that means for someone who's a new user though is a new user might not know okay what is the best path to accomplish X there is more education we need to do to help people understand what the core features are and what the best practices are for using them I think this is the this is the cost of launching a lot of features I think users also feel like it's hard to keep up with the latest usually in traditional PM you ship a feature every month or quarter and so it's really easy for a user to to understand okay I just need to check it on this once a month and I'll learn some new things and if I ignore it for six months it's fine I don't feel like I'm missing out I think with these agentic tools not just call code and code but like across the whole ecosystem people feel it's need to like check Twitter every single day to see what the absolute latest thing is and I think there's more we can do to help people feel less like they're on this ever increasingly fast treadmill and that they feel like I would love people to feel like they can just open these tools the tools will educate them or like teach them what they want to know and that they can just feel more bought along yeah I saw you lunch this really interesting feature the other day I think it's slash power up where basically walks you through all the cool ways and all basically all the best practices these cloud code is that kind of all in these lines yeah exactly so in the past we didn't actually want to do something like power up because we felt like the product should begin to it if enough that you can that you don't actually need to go through any tutorial and over time we've just realized that there's just so many features and there's so much demands for a built-in onboarding experience that we we diverged a bit from our original principle saying no no onboarding flow and added this because there's just so many users who wanted to know there's a hundred features what are the 10 that I absolutely need to use and so we put that together yeah such a bizarre world so anthropic has been really successful be to be in enterprises where traditionally you don't launch a bunch of stuff you just kind of have a quarterly release maybe and it's like the opposite of every day we got some new so just maybe following that thread the run anthropic has been honest just otherworldly andthropic was way behind when it started it was a mull share this just like one of the least funded companies didn't have distribution was it the first to go open I was way ahead and it's just like no way anthropic is any chance to compete significantly longer now it's just killing it just beating the biggest companies teams so much just like the growth is just like 11 billion dollars in AR in one month per cent growth by the time this comes out it'd probably be even higher just being on the inside what what are some ingredients that have allowed anthropic to be this successful and kind of come for behind and do this well.

The two most important things are one, this unifying mission.

It's hard to state how important this is.

We hire people who care most about bringing safe AGI to all humanity.

And this is actually something that we reference frequently in our decisions about what our entire product work should focus on shipping.

And because we put this mission above any individual product line, we're able to make very fast decisions that across the entire org and execute on them in a unified way.

So I think this is something that I've never seen at a company of our scale.

And so just to make sure that's clear.

So essentially, the number one mission is safety, alignment, making sure AGI is good for the world.

And you're saying, just having that as a clear mission makes decisions a lot easier to make.

If there's two competing priorities, we'll talk about which one is more important for anthropics mission.

And it makes it a lot easier to decide which of the two we prioritize.

And then everyone will stand behind the one that we decide.

And so sometimes that means that, like, hey, we want to ship something on Cloud Code.

But this other thing is more important.

And so we do prioritize shipping this.

And we just wait until later.

What's really interesting about that is that explains, I think, versus another company, maybe in terms of open AI, did a lot of different things.

And what I'm hearing here essentially is, like, okay, we're not going to launch social network.

We're not going to launch a feed of interesting information because it's not aligned to this mission.

And that has kept anthropic focused, which just seems to be a core ingredient to the success.

Well, when I think about mission, I think about putting anthropic schools ahead of any individual org or any individual product.

And so for me, it's, I think the second thing that we're very good at is focus.

I think mission to me is slightly different.

Mission means that teams are willing to make sacrifices that hurt their own goals and their own KRs in service of anthropic schools and anthropics KRs.

And people are very happy to make those trade-offs.

So like, an extreme example is, if Cloud Code failed, but anthropics succeeded, I would be extremely happy.

And like, we're, like, the whole team is very willing to make decisions that follow that chain of thought.

I don't know if you can talk about this in depth, but you feel like the open Cloud decision as a part of this just like, okay, this is not furthering the mission of anthropic.

We need to stop this because it's not working in the way we want it to work.

I think one of the most important things for anthropic is to grow the number of users that were able to reach.

One of the ways that we're able to do this is with the cloud subscriptions for their first product products.

And so we need just very much want to double down on that, but that does come at the expense of third product sometimes.

So we've been talking about CloudCower, call these things, something that I want to make sure people get, and I'm curious just how I use these tools.

So there's CloudCode, there's CloudDestops, slash web, there's Cower.

What's the best way to understand when to use which, when do you use each of these three?

So I tend to use CloudCode in the terminal when I'm just kicking off like a one-off coding task, and I want all of the latest features.

The CLI is our initial product surface, and it's also the one where our features often land first.

And so it's the most powerful of all the tools.

So that's what I tend to use when I'm just like, trying to kick off one or maybe like a handful of tasks at a time.

I think desktop really shines when you're doing something that requires front-end work.

And so one thing that I love to do is to use our preview feature.

So if I'm building a web app, I'll often use CloudCode and desktop.

I'll have the preview pane open on the right hand side, so that I can actually see the web app that I'm making in real time as I'm chatting with Cloud.

It's also really great for people who want something a bit more graphical.

A terminal can feel very unfamiliar to someone who is non-technical.

You get a bunch of these scary pulpuffs on your machine, and you can't click around the way that you're used to and pretty much every other product that you use.

So there's a lot of people who just don't feel comfortable in terminal.

And if that's you, I would highly recommend checking out CloudCode on desktop.

Desktop is also great for getting an out of glance view of everything that's happening.

So you can see your CLI terminal sessions in desktop.

You can see your other desktop sessions.

You can see your sessions that you kicked off on web and mobile.

So it's a one-stop control plane where you can see all of your tasks.

I think the benefit of web and mobile is that it's really great for kicking things off on the go.

So CLI and desktop both require you to be on your local laptop.

And this is constraining because sometimes you're out and about you're like touching grass.

You're going on a walk.

And you don't have your laugh self open.

And you can't count the number of people who I've seen holding the laugh self open like tethered to their phone while they're outside.

And this just means that we're missing a product that solves that need.

And so for me, what mobile that's you do is kick all these tasks on the go so that you don't need to bring your laptop everywhere and make sure that your laptop's open wherever you are.

I love that.

I've seen people on plane, like it's just such a meme now.

Just I need to finish, let this agent finish, I can't shut this to him.

Exactly.

And then I think for co-work, the role at this fills is there's a lot of work that everyone does where the output isn't code.

So whether that's like getting to Slack zero or inbox zero or whether that's creating a slide deck for some customer meeting that's coming up or whether that's ready a quick dock on what the goal is of a feature or what the launch plan for a feature is.

All these tasks produce outputs that are non-code and co-work is best position for that.

So the way that I split the products in my mind is if I'm building something where the output is code, I'll use cloud code or desktop or cloud code on mobile.

And if the output is anything that's not code, I'll use co-work for it.

People are just like sleeping on the success that co-work is having it's just like growing incredibly fast.

And I think people still don't understand maybe what it's for.

And so what if you give us a couple of use cases just in your work as a PM?

What are some really interesting, maybe unexpected ways you use co-work to save your time?

Get more work done.

If you're getting started on co-work, the first thing that you really need to do is connect all the data sources that are relevant to your role.

Because co-work can only do a great job if it has access to all the contexts that it needs to be able to create the output for you.

So what that means for me is I connected to my Google Calendar, I connected to my Slack, to my Gmail, to my Google Drive.

So that it just knows it has the flexibility to find relevant context to ask questions, to pull and threads.

And this, this, like, substantiate, improves the quality of the result.

The kinds of things I use it for are, like last night, I was where we have this code with co-work conference coming up.

And there's a few talks that I'm giving there.

And one of the talks that we're doing talks about the transition of co-work code from an assistant to a full-on agent.

And one of the things that I wanted to do in this talk was to showcase all of the products that we've been shipping that enable this transition.

And also to figure out, okay, what are the, what are the success stories that people have had internally that we can use as demos?

And so I have my Google Drive connected, I have Slack connected, Alex, who's our product marketer, put together, like, a draft of what the points that he thinks we should cover are.

And so I just, like, fed us all into co-work.

I told co-work the narrative that I wanted to tell.

And it actually just worked for an hour.

It walked through Twitter to see what we launched.

It looked through our Evergreen Launchroom.

It looks in our Cloud Code announced channel, which is where our team posts demos of how they've been getting the most value out of Cloud Code.

And it synthesized all this together to this 20-page deck that I woke up to this morning.

And I read through it, and it was, like, pretty good.

There were a few tweaks.

So I did have to give it around a feedback.

I like my slides to have extremely minimal words.

And it was a little too wordy.

But, you know, it was far faster than what I would be able to produce.

And because co-work has access to our whole design system, it actually looks like an anthropic designer put it together.

Like, when you visually see it, you're like, oh, this is, like, incredibly polished.

So these are the kinds of things that are so much faster.

Like, this making this slide deck would have taken me hours.

But instead, it like turns out a draft that is actually quite good, so that I could focus on making sure that the demos are amazing that we plug into it.

The sounds like a dream come true to PMs that putting decks together, so annoying.

It's so slow.

And I love people will see this deck whenever you present this.

This will be out in the world.

This, like, obviously, it's not the one-shot version, but you've iterated on it.

So just to help people try this for themselves.

So step one is connect there.

What did you say, Slack?

What else do you suggest they connect?

Slack, Google Calendar, Gmail, G Drive.

You should connect your communications tools and where you store your source of truth data for what your team cares about, what you care about, and what you're working on.

Okay.

And then what was the prompt roughly that you put in there to generate this deck?

So I just wrote, make me a slide deck for the code with Cloud Conference.

This is what our PMM suggested it should cover.

This is the current draft that I made that I don't like.

This is one that I made manually that I don't like.

And I linked it.

Can you start by creating and propose outline with details?

Also, make sure it doesn't overlap too much with a keynote talk, which is more important.

And then, called red a bunch of the links that I sent to it and created a proposed outline.

So then, I read through its proposal and all the different ideas that I had generated for what we could cover.

And I just made a decision on what I wanted to actually be in the final deck.

And I think this is like an example of what the role of the PM still is today.

It's like, Cloud is a great brainstorming partner.

It's able to synthesize an massive amount of information really quickly and present all of the possibilities to you.

But the role of PM is still to make the end decision of what should belong in the final product.

So for this, what I ended up deciding was that I wanted the talks to cover the progression from making local tasks successful to making every PR green to like helping engineers land more PRs.

And for each of these, which demo would be in the most compelling.

And then, after this decision about the outline, cowork just went off for a few hours and built the whole side deck.

This is so awesome.

What an awesome part of the job to not have to do anymore.

And it feels like you're talking to essentially a deck designer that also has like actual knowledge about what you've worked on and can like make it actually the content, but you wanted to be not just make it look really nice.

How did you design system piece?

How does that work?

How does it know the design system of anthropic?

So what I did for this is we actually already have like a standardized deck that we use across all of our external engagements.

And so I just gave code access to that.

And so it's able to see what colors we use, a font suite use, the different kinds of what's it called like slide formats that are possible.

And so it has like 20 of these example slides.

So given example, I've got it.

See like upload, here's our template, work from this.

Yeah.

You know, it's the kind of like your Figma, MCP, if you have your slide format saved there, then it can pull that in.

Along those lines, something I'm always curious about is what's kind of in your stack of tools as a PM and anthropic?

Obviously, cloud code and co-work and all the anthropic tools.

What else are you using?

What are their Slack you mentioned?

Is there anything else?

So my stack is pretty heavily called code, co-work, and Slack, anthropic, largely runs on Slack.

I feel like it's like the core OS of our company.

And day-to-day, like a lot of, I would say maybe 30% of my time is pushing the boundaries of what co-work and cloud code can do so that I have a very strong sense of what we're not good at.

And I spend a lot of time talking with the model to understand why it makes mistakes that it does.

We actually have a lot of internal tools that we make.

I think one of the things that cloud code has really unlocked for our entire company is it really lowers the barrier to making any custom app that you want.

And so we've seen this surge in personalized works software that people are building for custom use cases instead of using tools that don't perfectly fit the use case.

I got to hear more.

What are some examples?

What are things you've built other people built that are really popular and useful?

One of the sales folks on cloud code, he realized he was making these repetitive decks over and over and over again.

And so he actually has this web app that he built with the examples of the core cloud code decks that we know work well.

So like a 101201 and mastering cloud code.

And then he has a way to input specific customer context that pulls from sales force that pulls from going that pulls from other notes so that we can customize the decks for specific customers.

And so we'll pull out things like, OK, this customer is using like bedrock or call for enterprise or console, which affects what features are available to them.

It will pull out things like, OK, this customer is concerned about the code review stage of the SLC.

And so we'll add a slide about our code review features there.

It will pull out things like, OK, this customer needs to be like, HIPAA compliant or needs XYZ security controls.

And so we'll make sure to add a slider to and their deck about that.

And then, for example, if this is a customer that's on vertex or bedrock and doesn't want to use cloud for enterprise, then we'll just take out some of the slides that are cloud for enterprise only features.

And so normally, this is like manual work that could take 20, 30 minutes or so people either spend that time doing it or they'll just decide not to do it and use it general deck.

With this, it takes like a few seconds and you get a tailored deck.

What's interesting about this, like Slack is like the tool that nobody's, it's just like nobody's trying to create their own.

Slack just continues to win.

And this is just like the way you describe it is kind of the OS of so many companies.

It's so interesting.

Like people talk about Salesforce as just like SaaS.

We don't need to have software anywhere.

We're going to build it on.

There's like Slack is adorable tool that nobody wants to try to compete with and build a better version.

I think it's pretty important communications in infrastructure.

And I think they do the core task of helping everyone get real-time updates incredibly well.

Yeah, like people hate on Slack, but it's really great at what it's trying to do.

And like the most cutting-edge teams are hooked on it.

So interesting.

Yeah, and I also love how easy they've made to customize it.

And so we love making Slack bots.

And this kind of like hackability means that we're able to integrate with Slack the way that we want to.

So really appreciate Slack's work on that.

Thanks, time to buy some CRM stock.

I am so excited to tell you about this season supporting sponsor Vanta.

Vanta helps over 15,000 companies like cursor, ramp, do a lingo, snowflake, and it last year.

Earn and prove trust with their customers.

Teams are building and shipping products faster than ever things to AI.

But as a result, the amount of risk being introduced into your product and your business is higher than it's ever been.

Every security leader that I talk to is feeling the increasing weight of protecting their organization, their business, and not to mention their customer data.

Because things are moving so fast, they are constantly reacting, having to guess at priorities and having to make do without data solutions.

Vanta automates compliance and risk management with over 35 security and privacy frameworks, including SOC 2, ISO 27,000, 1, and HIPAA.

This helps companies get compliant fast and stay compliant.

More than ever before, trust has the power to make or break your business.

Learn more at Vanta.com slash Lenny.

And as a listener of this podcast, you get $1,000 off Vanta.

That's Vanta.com slash Lenny.

OK, so you talked about all these different teams and how they use Cloud Code and Coloric to operate, which teams do you find other than engineering?

Imagine engineering is the biggest token spender, but if not, that'd be really interesting.

What's the second place function right now for tokens?

Oh, Applied AI is amazing.

I'm pushing the boundaries of what Cloud Code and Coloric can do.

A lot of our Applied AI team spends time with our customers, helping them adopt our API.

And so sometimes our Applied AI team, for example, make prototypes on behalf of these customers, which Cloud Code makes so much faster than it used to be.

They also have the dual goal of needing to manage a lot of customer comms, a lot of customer inbound and historical context call notes.

And so they're both extremely heavy on co-work and on Cloud Code.

And to send us down to Applied AI, is that like, does that like forward to play engineering, sort of, for all, how would most people describe what Applied Day Applied AI team is doing?

Yeah, it's helping our customers adopt the latest API and model features across their company, both for powering their company's products and also for internal acceleration.

Got it, it says like customer success, go to marketing, kind of like forward to play engineering, sort of.

Exactly, it's like a very technical, go to market person.

Got it, okay, awesome.

So that's, so you're saying that might be the second or that uses the most tokens.

Yeah, and then we also see them pushing the boundaries of what core can do.

So for example, if, so a lot of these folks cover multiple customers and any given day can have like five to 10 customer engagements on a high day.

And so what they often use core to do is the night before, they'll ask it to summarize, okay, what are all my customer meetings that are coming up the next day?

What are all the things that this customer has asked me for?

What's top of mind for them?

What are the action items for the past meetings?

And core will just put together this like dossier, this like brief of what they should be aware of going into the next meeting.

And core can also research answers.

So if a customer asked, okay, when is feature X going to launch, core can help the PIDAI person research through Slack to get the latest ETA, add that to the notes so that during the customer call, the PIDAI person has the absolute latest.

And these are just workflows that people are building for themselves and sharing with other people on their team.

So cool.

Something that kind of this question, this trend, I don't know, question, topic comes up a lot recently, which is token spend exceeding people salary where people just use AI and it costs more than how much they're making.

Are there any numbers floating around in topic if just like how much token spend say engineers spend, I don't know, a month a day, PMs, anything like that?

It is clear to us that as the models get better, people don't get four more tasks to it.

And they spend a lot more hours in tools like Cloud Code and Corek.

And so we do see the token cost per engineer or like per any knowledge worker increase every time that there is a model jump or like a substantial product improvement.

I think it's still much lower than what the average engineer salary is, but we see the percentage increasing over time.

It's such an interesting, like we talked about how you've access to the most cutting-edge models in another advantage of working anthropic, I believe you guys have basically unlimited tokens.

You can use as much as you want, is that right?

We can use a lot of tokens.

Some people do run into limits.

So, okay, there's a limit.

Varus, shut it down.

Okay, so like it's so interesting how many advantage just come from having the most advanced model, such an interesting like flywheel that starts to kick in.

I think we also believe a lot in empowering our internal teams to build as fast as possible.

And we also trust that everyone understands how much capacity that serving these models truly costs and we trust our team to use the tokens responsibly.

So, it's very frowned upon to waste tokens, but we do trust individuals to make that judgment call.

Awesome.

Coming back to the PM role, you've talked to, we talked a little bit about this, but I think this will be really interesting for people to hear.

Just what I want to understand is, what do you think are the kind of the emerging skills that PMs need to develop slash you most look for?

AI companies most look for when they're hiring PMs these days?

I think the hardest skill is being able to define what the product should look like a month from now.

I think there's a lot of ambiguity in what models are capable of in that timeline and how user behavior will change.

But I think there are patterns that the best PMs can see based on how users are abusing the limits of the existing product.

And the best PMs can sense that can set a direction and can steadily execute towards it and change the path if the model capabilities are much better than or worse than what they're originally expected.

I think it is very hard to be the right amount of API build.

So I think everyone can see this like this future where the models are extremely smart and can do almost everything in which case you actually don't need that complicated product, you can actually just have a text box again where you tell the model what you want.

And it's so smart that it can add any tool or add any integration that it needs to like get the job done.

It knows when it's uncertain, it can ask clarifying questions.

Like it's kind of very easy to build the product for the super-AGI strong model.

I think the hard thing is figuring out for the current model.

How do you omiss it the maximum capability?

How do you help users?

Go get onto the golden path.

How do you guide users to interact with the model strengths and like patch its weaknesses?

This skill is like pretty rare.

And how do you build that skill?

Is it just using basically understanding the limits of each model having like, you're talking about taste, understanding, having taste into what the model maybe is capable of but it's great and not great to add where it's changed.

I think it's funny a ton of time talking and using the model.

One of the things I really like to do is to ask the model to introspect on its own behaviors.

So sometimes when I notice that the model does something unexpected like for example, there's like situations where the model will make a front end change and run tests but not actually use the UI.

It's actually pretty useful to ask the model to reflect on why I did this.

And sometimes you'll say that hey, there was like something confusing in the system prompt or I didn't realize that the front end verification was like part of the task or hey, I delegated the verification to the sub agent and the sub agent didn't do the test and I didn't check its work.

A lot of times just like being very curious about why the model made the decision that it did will show you what misled it so that you can fix the harness in order to close this gap.

The other thing that helps is to figure out who are the users who you trust the most to give you accurate feedback about the model.

Usually there's like a handful of people who are much better than others at articulating what makes a specific model or model harness combination good.

And there's a lot of people who will give you feedback not everyone's feedback is as qualified.

And so finding a group of those like five people you trust is really important for getting very fast feedback.

I think the third thing that is useful but not everyone loves doing is building emails.

You don't need to build hundreds of emails for them to be useful.

Just building 10 great emails is important for helping the team quantify what the goal is and what their progress towards it is and what they're missing.

And so I think emails is this like under-appreciated thing that more PMs, more engineers should be working on.

We've covered emails a bunch.

There's this trend of just like that as the future of product management's writing emails because essentially it's what a success look like okay cool and we actually completely define it and then we'll now how much of your time are you spending writing emails which you say?

I think the importance of emails varies a bit based on the feature that you're working on and or like what the problem you're trying to solve is.

So there are a lot of folks on our team who do spend a lot of time working on emails.

We have a small pod of folks who collaborate very closely with research to more precisely understand our call code behaviors and what the more just areas of improvement are and trying to measure those pretty concretely.

I personally jump into emails when there's a feature that I think needs a bit more product definition and often the output of this is okay here are like five emails that I made.

This is how you run them.

These are the ones that succeed and these are the ones that don'ts and this is like the prompts that I've used to increase the success rate.

It varies a lot though based on the exact feature.

Not every feature needs it but I think features such as memory benefit a lot from it.

This point you made about people being very good at developing model so interesting.

It's almost like a human email.

I've just like okay they understand where it's spiking or it's maybe lacking.

Is there anyone specific that you want to shout out?

That's very good at this.

Two people who I think are incredible at this are one Amanda who molds calls character.

It's just such a hard role because the task is so ambiguous.

Even coding is easier because you can verify the success whereas crafting the character requires a very strong sense of conviction and what who Claude should be.

And I think she has like an incredible ability to not only mold the character but also to like articulate what the goals are, what the character, what's successful and what's not.

The other group of people who I really trust is just like the Claude Code team.

So we often have team lunches and whenever there's a new model we're testing.

One of the fastest ways for us to get feedback is to just like at these team lunches just like go to every single person and just feel like hey, what is your vibe on the model?

And oftentimes we'll get feedback like okay this model is like not fully explaining it's thinking it's like too abrupt or like hey this model's like just like loaves writing a ton of memories but like we're not sure if the memories are high quality or not or like some people will notice that okay this this model loves to test itself which is great or like this model is testing itself enough.

So that informs what data we look at to verify okay is this a larger pattern.

So we have a ton of data but it is very hard to extract insights and so the the feedback from this group helps us inform okay what are the hypotheses we want to test and then we're able to extract data to test that.

This point you made about the character of Claude I had been man in the podcast co-founder and he talked about this just like the character the constitution of Claude is such an important part of of Claude and I didn't realize until afterwards just like people like with open Claude actually one of the examples one of the reasons people are set is like the personality of your Claude is like because Claude's personality is so good and fun and interesting unlike other models and the way he put it is the personality is what makes Claude so good at so many things it feels like this like trivial sight thing okay it's going to be funny and interesting and talking in a fun way but it's like so court to the success of Claude is there anything to get sure there about just like what people may not understand about why the character as you described in the personality so key.

When you reflect on everyone you've worked with there's just some people where you're like I really like their energy like I really like their vibe and when people think about Claude and Claude code this is one of the things that people bring up the most where they just really love that Claude is like it's like lighthearted and fun but it also is extremely competent at your task.

People really like that Claude's low ego and so if you tell it hey you did this thing wrong it's like truly sorry it's like oh shoot like thanks for telling me like let me fix it let's work together it's also very positive so if you're feeling like oh this is like an insurmountable task I don't know how to get started Claude is like okay it's okay these are like the steps that I think we should take like do you want me to get started on it for you?

I think part of what makes a great co-worker is this positivity that's like bias towards action this ability to give you like earnest feedback not just agreeing with every single thing that you say and so we try to and view this into Claude because we think it makes it a lot more enjoyable to work with there's something I want to come back to you talked about how when new models come out you often have to kind of revisit things you've built that's so interesting and so like frustrating maybe just like oh god damn it appreciate this thing and I like to rethink it talk about just like how often you have to come back within you model and they're like okay we have to redo this product a lot of the changes that we make with a new model is removing features that are no longer needed so a lot of times we add features to the product as a crunch for the model because it's not naturally doing it itself so the classic example for this is the 2D list when we first launched Claude code people would ask it to do these large refactors and Claude code would say okay cool I need to change these like 20 and it would go and change five of them and then stop and then we were like okay how do we like force it to remember to get every single one of these 20 and so sit on our team was like okay what if we just like think about what a human would do a human would like make a list of everything that they need to change somewhere to how in VS code you would look up all the call sites and we have this on left side and you would like go through them one by one and replace all how do we give this kind of like a tool to call and so he added it to do this and then that found that with that Claude was actually able to fix all these 20 call sites.

But then with open before and later models, we realized that we didn't need to force it to use this to do this.

It would like naturally use itself for the earlier models we had to keep a mind to get hey, did you finish everything on to do this?

You can't finish until you are done with everything on to do this.

For the later models without prompting, it's just like is still nice to have as like a user because then you can more clearly see what caught his working on.

But honestly, it's such a deep and precise part of the product right now that the model may use it, the model may not use it.

It's like really not necessary for it to make thorough changes anymore.

I figured it was said this on the podcast that the model will eat your harness for breakfast and what I'm hearing here is essentially you you remove things over time that you've had to add on top of the model where it was not operating the way you wanted and essentially as the model gets smarter, it just becomes simpler for it's just to do the thing you wanted to do.

Yeah, we can remove remove a lot of prompting interventions every time the model gets smarter and we actually do this every time we launch a model we've read through the entire system prompt and we reflect on okay for each of these sections does the model really need this reminder anymore and if not we'll remove it.

The most exciting thing that new models on locks though, it's just like entirely new features.

So there's all the features that we've been testing out with prior models and the accuracy wasn't high enough for us to want to launch them.

And so one example of this is code review.

We tried to build a code review product a few times and we've launched like simple versions of code review with just the slash code review command in the past and it was only with the most recent models that we felt like okay this code review is so good that our engineering team relies on this code review to pass before we merge PRs.

And we found that this was we've always dreamed of called being able to be a reliable code reviewer that can actually that we can like confidently feel catches the majority of bugs and it was only with like Opus 4.5 or 6 that we and Sonic 4 6 that we felt like okay we are now able to like run multiple code review agents simultaneously to traverse, traverse the entire of the code base and to synthesize a set of like real issues that engineered to each address before merge and so this is like a new capability that the newest models have unlocked.

This is another trend that is very common on this podcast of build something that will possibly be possible in the next six months.

You kind of have the edge of its working sort of and then it'll catch up and then it'll be an amazing product and you'll be ahead of everyone.

Yeah exactly it's pretty important to build products that don't necessarily work yet so that you know okay what is missing for this product to work and then with the newest model you can just swap it into the prototype you've already made and see okay does this new model close that go?

How much are you able to speak to just kind of where things are going with clotting cork as kind of the vision of it?

I imagine you don't want to give away too much about the goal but it feels like there's all these awesome features being added on top dispatch control from phone and all these mobile app all these things.

What's kind of just like a way to understand the vision for all these things long-term?

We think about this in terms of building blocks so for both clot-coding cork the core building block is making individual tasks successful so you you want to produce some output you give it a queer prompt description is it able to consistently produce acceptable output that you're able to either merge or share with your colleagues or external audience so the task is the core building block.

As the models get smarter the task success rate gets a lot higher and then we see people moving towards doing multiple tasks at the same time so multi-coding was a big thing in towards end of 2025 and it's only increased since then and so we see this that's okay great one task works and now you can do like six tasks at a time as the models get even smarter the way that we're extrapolating this is okay next maybe you're gonna run like 50 calls at a time or hundreds of calls at a time and so what is the infrastructure we need to build to enable that?

At that point you're probably not going to run everything locally on your machine anymore there's just like non enough ramp to do it and so we're we're thinking about how do we make it easier for you to manage all these these will probably run remotely how do we build the interface so that you as a human know which tasks you need to look into how do we make sure that the agent is fully verifying works so that when you look at a task and it says it's done you like can very quickly verify and fully trust that it is done to your spec and how do you make sure that this like process is self-improving so that when you do see a task that isn't done to your liking you can give it feedback and the model will know for every future run to incorporate that feedback so never makes that mistake again so this is the progression that we're bringing our users along there's a lot of people listening a lot of product managers a lot of maybe founders a lot of other cross-functional folks listening there's a lot of worry about just how they're role that's the future of their careers what advice would you have for just people to not just survive this transition to this very age of in world but to be really successful to essentially just to thrive in this future but are just like things people need to hear need to be doing I think AI gives everybody a ton more leverage than they used to and so I would push you towards anytime you realize that you're doing some manual task multiple times think about how you can use cloud code, code or other AI tools to automate that for you most people have like creative parts of their job that they absolutely love and then like tedious parts of their job that they really hate doing I think the beauty of AI is that it can do those tedious parts for you it can learn from every time that you've done that manual task and generalize and then run it automatically and so that you can focus on the creative parts and that means you can do a lot more than you used to be able to do so I think by like immediate pusher people is figure out the repetitive parts that you can pass to cloud iterate on those automations until the success rate is very high and then focus on okay what more can you be doing for your team for your product for your company that like people haven't had the bandwidth to pick up so far or like what is that like pet project that you always thought the company should do that like you've never had bandwidth to do if AI can take care of the like front work then you have you have this extra 20% time now that you might not have before so so my pushes to lean into these tools hand off the work that you're not excited to do figure out how it can accelerate you and then as a result you'll be able to do so much more something core to which you just shared which I fully agree with is fine problems to solve with AI there's all this potential of what all these tools can do some of the hard like for a lot of people artists part is just like what should I actually do and what you're saying here is just pay attention to things that you are doing constantly you can automate pay attention to just like ideas that have been floating around the oven at time to do it's basically it's like solve a problem for yourself is kind of the core advice there exactly I would also push the centers towards focusing on bringing your automations from okay this is a cool concept to like hey this actually works a hundred percent of the time like sometimes I see users trying to automate something get it to like ninety ninety five percent accuracy and then giving up on it and this if an automation doesn't work a hundred percent of the time it's not really an automation and that last five to ten percent does take more time also building the automation is often a lot slower than you doing it yourself I would encourage listeners to put in that time to scope some automation that you really want to get to a hundred percent put in the elbow grease to teach quad your preferences to like give it feedback so that it can improve its skill so that it can get to that hundred percent and then like really then you'll be able to rely on it there there's just not much value in a ninety five percent there automation I am super guilty of that this is really get advice for me I haven't killed to I've been teaching it I've been teaching core to try to get me to invoke zero for Gmail and it has not been it has been very time consuming and it is definitely not there as you probably realize yeah I funny enough that's exactly where my mind goes I have this workflow I set up where every email I get it looks for things that are spammy which is just like all these like hey can I come on your podcast or what about this one like all these things I'm just like I don't have time for these sorts of things and I have a categorized it into a folder called spammy and it's just like it's ninety five percent great but then there's like oh man I missed an email because I went in there so this is a good pressure me to like I'm gonna work on this I'm gonna get it to perfect yeah we also are working on making the flow for customizing these commands a lot easier because right now I think you have to like know to any concepts you have to know to define a skill you have to know to like use this skill and give it feedback and then you have to know to tell core to update the skill based on all the feedback that you gave and then you always have to know where to read the skill to like make sure the feedback was incorporated the way that you want that it's also our job to make this flow really seamless so that doesn't feel painful to do amazing there's anything else cat you want it to share anything else you want it to leave listeners with anything you want to double down on that we haven't already touched on before we get to a very exciting lightning round I see a lot of people playing around with AI and building like prototype apps and tinkering with building workflows I would really push people towards building apps that you're actually using every single day because I think only through that usage are you actually getting the value like if you build a prototype app that isn't helping you get more done then the AI isn't really adding value to your to your day and there's only so much you learn from that when it's like okay I just did one shot at something else cool and then you never come back to it like you're not learning a lot and you're not getting like much leverage from it and actual leverage yeah that's such a point I also think there's a lot of fuel we saw in a lot of time like customizing their workflow so there's like I think there's like two ends of the spectrum one is like people who never customize and never build automations but there's like this polar offset end of people who like obsess around customizing their tool like adding a ton of skills and MCPs and these like workflow improvements and I think sometimes I can even distract from your core goal of like launching some products or building some feature I think there's a lot of fun in customizing and we definitely want to make our products very hackable so that you you can make it work really well for you but there is a limit to how much it's useful and I think there there's a cap of people who may be spent so much time customizing that they're like not sleeping and not doing the like core task that they originally set out to do I see a lot of that on Twitter just like look at my setup it's at a control it's so optimized then what would you what would you actually building now but my setup is so awesome I could get so much done I think the simple setup's actually work better slash power up get to level up a little bit yeah yeah there's this corpothy to that just to came out on yesterday where you talked about this divide that's interesting between people that tried to be to clawed back in the day it was like okay and they're like that's this terrible and they kind of gave up what like what I could do for them and they just like so cynical like no way it's not actually that big of a deal and then there's people that are using it to code essentially who see the full intense power of it and how good it is and people on both sides don't understand the other side and why they like how much they how they see the world and so your advice is really good here just like actually use it for real things and see how good it actually is done yeah I think the big shift is that the 2024 generation of products were a chat based and the clawed code generation of products is action based and the like big all how moment people have is when clawed can just like do things on your behalf it is it is an amazing feeling to know that the agent is capable of doing so much more than telling you what to do like the agent can actually just do it itself and when people feel that I think that's the eye opening moment shout out a chrome extension the clawed chrome extension which you can just watch it doing stuff it you'd be like fill out this form for me not all right here I go exactly okay anything else before we get to a very exciting lightning round no it's good let's do it cat I've got five questions for you welcome to the lightning round there's an animation that place after make sure to say it are you ready I'm ready first question what are two or three books that you find yourself recommending most other people I really like how Asia works it's a story about economic development and what are the like the policies and governments that make long lasting successful economies the other books that I'm really into are the technology trope so this is actually about the past few technology revolutions so the industrial revolution and the computer revolution and how this has affected workers the the reason that I really like this is because I think we there's a lot we can learn from history to make sure that this transition goes well and maybe on like a fun note I really like paper monogery it's just like a book of short stories about like coming of age and AI and just like self discovery paper recent movie or tv shout you have really enjoyed I really like drive to survive there's no like D for meaning to it I just they're just something very satisfying about people being so obsessed with like a singular engineering goal and just like the purity of the pursuit but I also really love free solo which is about Alex Holland climbing al Capiton without a harness and I think similarly it's just such a pure achievement to be able to climb this extremely challenging dangerous route and to be able to have the mental focus to do it knowing that if you make a single mistake you die it's insane yeah that movie is out of control it's interesting how these relate in some way to the work you do I actually have a rock climber um I first watched free solo before I climbed rocks and so I thought it was impressive I didn't understand how impressive it was it's one of my rare movies were like the more you know about it the more you're you're blown away by how insane this is like the kinds the kinds of movies doing the wall or things that like I don't think I will ever be able to do in my lifetime if you were set in a gym like one feet off the ground with a rope was a rope did you see the documentary that other guy the younger one that went on like ice I did that one was very sad but that was well okay uh favorite product you've just discovered that you really love the product that is like most changed my life outside of cloud products is probably waymo like I'm a die hard waymo user use it twice a day get to and from work so the two things that I really like about it are one I don't feel bad if a waymo is waiting for me and so I feel like I feel less pressure to be right at the curbside the moment it arrives and the second thing is I feel like it let's maybe a bit more productive when when I'm in the car with another human I typically try not to like do any work calls I feel a little rude if I'm like on my laptop the whole time but one thing I really appreciate about the waymo is I can call into a work call I'm not worried about someone overhearing me I'm not worried about hey is this like rude am I talking too loud when you tell someone to like change the music and so this spin like I feel like this has given me back like 30 minutes every day all these second order effects of technology it's not interesting yeah I always saw waymo needs it be priced lower than Uber and Lyft to succeed but actually I'm like very happy to pay a two x premium for it I love waymo it's just like like you went see see it you're just like this is insane and then you get used to it like you get in there you're like this is crazy and then you forget about it totally and I think it's also changed the vernacular like a lot of people at anthropic love waymo and I think in the past you'd be like hey like what's called like blah blah right your app and now like everyone's just like okay is the waymo here okay two more questions do you have a favor like motto that you often come back to in work or in life just do things that's what I think there's a lot of value in like first principles thinking and if if you like you know what you're optimizing for and you have like strong principles then you can normally to do what the right like course of action is and be able to clearly articulate that to all the stakeholders and then you should just like do it like I think jobs are fake if you understand the constraints you can figure out what you can do and then just like try to do it quickly learn from the mistakes and apologize or fix them if you did something wrong you and you could just do things or ever said that I need liberating actually to like tell people this I think a lot of companies like roles are very strictly defined like okay this is what the PM does is what the designer does is what engineer does and then even team scopes are very rigidly defined so hey like this corner of the code base we touch and this corner like we're not allowed to touch and I think what just do things let's people do is they feel like empowered to make these decisions and power to operate across team boundaries just to like get something done that feels like a big important skill to be good at people call it agency just like do the things that you need done by a start action all these ways of describing just like yeah wait for permission yeah I think this is my favorite reason to work at a startup at some point in your life because like one thing that was like very life changing for me was actually working at scale when we're a 20 people and so there was just no process and we have like really big problems that we needed to and it was like I really appreciate Alex and the rest of the team for like empowering me and the rest of the team to just like figure things out without any boundaries for what sales supposed to do what engineer is supposed to do just like you have all the tools at your disposal you have some like ambitious hearing problem statement and you can do whatever you need to like get to a good solution like you almost need that experience to build that skill to feel comfortable doing that because a lot of people you know they go through school or in college and all these like do the thing we tell you to do and then you will get a good grade and you have to kind of unlearn that of like okay I'm just going to do the thing that needs to be done and even if people think it's dumb I think it's the right thing to do yeah exactly okay actually if two more quick questions two more final questions one is when cloud thinks there's all these I don't know if you call verbs what's the term for these things thank you words thinking words and interestingly these all leaked in my source code uh is it you have a favorite thinking word um I really like manifesting it's also like the sticker that I have I have I clearly the winner okay final question asked for us this too with a GI potentially arriving in our lifetime when you don't potentially have to work what are you going to do what are you going to do with all your time I think it it was take a long time for a GI says a fuse across society so I think the immediate thing is actually just like helping bring the world along I think by like non-serious answer for after this happens is I'll probably just do a lot of rock climbing I'll probably just like live in some I'll probably move to like fountain blue and just like live amongst 10,000 boulders and climb for a bit there's also so many books I want to read that my my goal is to be able to read one or two books a week and I'm currently at probably like 0.5 the backlog is pretty big I think there's just like so much we can learn from history and so much that I don't understand as well as I would love to like I don't know anything about physics and or like robotics or like any hardware or like aerospace or there's just so many interesting topics so I'm excited to learn even even knowing that the HGI will already know it cat this was amazing you're awesome two-volocations where can folks find you online if they want to reach out and just follow what you're up to and how can listeners be useful to you the best way to reach out is I am under school cat Wu on Twitter feel free to like tag me in things feel free to DM me I read all all my DMs I don't always respond to every single one but I will read them all and then the thing that is most helpful is tell us where cloud code and core aren't working well for you we we are very grateful for the amount of positive feedback but the thing that we thrive on is edge cases errors like specific tasks that we can reproduce where cloud code or core fail because if you're able to share that with us and we're able to reproduce it then this is something that we're able to actively improve for our next generations of models and for our next harnesses extremely cool everyone on people on Twitter not shy was sharing this feedback so yeah sure sure please please share the problems that you're having yeah it's really cool to see all you your team being on so active on Twitter and responding to people and so so like what I'm hearing like this is actually stuff you guys actually see and react to so yeah we appreciate everyone being so engaged with us it gives a team it's on a energy we we have this channel of like user love and so whenever you guys share a success story we posted there and whenever you guys share like issues with our product we put it in our feedback channel that way our broader team is able to act on it data so cool to know thanks for sharing that well cat thank you so much for being here thanks for having me bye everyone thank you so much for listening if you found this valuable you can subscribe to the show on Apple podcasts Spotify or your favorite podcast app also please consider giving us a rating or leaving review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast you can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny's podcast dot com see you in the next episode