The Secrets of Claude Code From the Engineers Who Built It — Every
Transcript of the interview with Cat & Boris (Claude Code engineers) on the Every podcast, published October 29, 2025.
Video Details
- Guest: Cat & Boris (Claude Code Engineers, Anthropic)
- Host: Every
- Published: October 29, 2025
- YouTube: Watch on YouTube
Transcript
0:02 What made it work really well is that quad code has access to everything that an engineer does at the terminal. Everything you can do, quad code can do. There's nothing in between.
0:10 There's actually an increasing number of people internally at anthropic that are using like a lot of credits [music] like spending like over a,000 bucks every month. We see this like power user behavior. This is something that they teach in YC. If you can solve your own problem, it's much more likely you're solving the problem for others. There's this like really old idea in product called latent demand. You build a product in a way that is hackable that is kind of open-ended enough that people can abuse it for other use cases it wasn't really designed for and you build for that cuz you kind of know there's demand for it. Do you think the CLI is the final form [music] factor? Are we going to using cloud code in the CLI primarily in a year or in 3 years or is This podcast is sponsored by Google. Hey folks, I'm Omar, product and design lead at Google DeepMind. We just launched a revamped vibe coding experience in AI [music] Studio that lets you mix and match AI capabilities to turn your ideas into reality faster than ever. Just describe your app and Gemini will automatically wire up the right models and APIs for you. And if you need a spark, hit I'm feeling lucky and we'll help you get started. Head to a.studio/bild. studio/build to create your first app.
1:29 Cat Boris, thank you so much for being here.
1:30 Thanks for having us.
1:32 Yeah. Um, so for people who don't know you, you are the creators of Claude Code. Thank you very much from the bottom of my heart. It's uh I love Cloud Code.
1:42 That's amazing to hear. [laughter] That's what we love to hear. Um I Okay, I think the place I want to start is when I first used it. Um, there was like this moment like I think it was around when uh Sonnet 37 came out where I was like I used it and I was like, "Holy this is like a completely new paradigm. It's a a completely new way of thinking about code." And the the big difference was um you went all the way and just eliminated the text editor and you're just like all you do is like talk to the talk to the terminal and and that's that's it. Um, and you know, previous paradigms of AI programming, pre previous harnesses have been like you have a text editor and you have the AI on the side and it's kind of like or it's a tab complete. So, take me through like that decision process that ar that that process of of architecting this new paradigm. How do you how did you think about that?
2:36 Yeah, I think the the most important thing is it was not intentional at all. [laughter] Okay.
2:42 Uh, we we sort of ended up with it. So at the time when I joined Enthropic um we were still on different teams at the time. Um there was this previous predecessor to quad code. It was called Clyde like CL C cliop. And it was this like research project you know it took like a minute to start up. It was this kind of like really heavy Python thing. It had to like run a bunch of indexing and stuff. And when I joined I wanted to ship my first PR and I hand wrote it like a you know like a noob in a in [laughter] a like I didn't know about any of these tools. U I didn't know any better and then I I put up this PR and um Adam Wolf who was the um manager for our team for a while. He was my ramp up buddy and he just like rejected the PR and he was like you wrote this by hand. What are you what are you [laughter] doing? Use Quide. Um cuz he was also hacking a lot on Quiet at the time. And so I tried Quaid. I gave it the description of the task and it just like one shot at this thing
3:39 and this was like you know sonnet 35. So I still had to fix a thing even for this kind of basic task and the harness was super old. So it took like 5 minutes to turn this thing out and just took forever and um but it but it worked and I was just mind-blown that this this was even possible and they just kind of got the gears turning. maybe you don't actually need an IDE.
4:02 And then later on I was prototyping using the anthropic API and the easiest way to do that was just building a little app in the terminal cuz that way I didn't have to build a UI or anything. And I started just making a little chat app and then I just started thinking maybe we could do something a little bit like Clyde. So let let me build like a little Clyde and it actually ended up being a lot more useful than that without a lot of work. And I think the biggest revelation for me was when we started to give the model tools. It just started using tools and it was just it was this insane moment. Like the model just wants to use tools. Like we gave it bash and it just started using bash writing apple script to like automate stuff uh in response to questions. And I was like this is just the craziest thing. I've never seen anything like this. Cuz at the time I had only used IDE with like you know like text editing a little like oneline autocomplete, multi-line autocomplete, whatever. Um, so that that's where this came from. It was this kind of convergence of like prototyping but also kind of seeing what's possible in kind of like a very um rough way.
5:03 Um, and this thing ended up being surprisingly useful and and I think it was the same for us. I think for me it was like kind of sonnet 4 opus 4. That's where that magic moment was. I was like, "Oh my god, this this thing works."
5:17 That's interesting. So like tell me about that that the tool moment because I think that is one of the special things about cloud code is it just writes bash and it's really good at it. And I think a lot of um previous agent architectures or even anyone building agent today, your first instinct might be okay, we're going to give it a find file tool and then we're going to give it a uh open file tool and you you build all these like custom wrappers for you know uh all the different actions you might want the agent to take, but Cloud Code just uses bash and it's like really good at it. So how do you think about um how do you think about what you learned from that? Yeah, I think we're at this point right now where Quad Code actually has a bunch of tools. I think it's like a dozen or something like this. We we actually like add and remove tools most weeks. So, this changes pretty often. Um, but today there actually is a search uh there's a tool for for searching. Um, and we do this for two reasons. One is the UX, so we can show the result a little bit nicer to the user because there's still a human in the loop right now for most tasks. Uh, and the second one is for permissions. So, if you say in your like cloud code like settings.json JSON on this file you cannot read. We we have to kind of enforce this. Uh we enforce it for bash but we can do it a little bit more efficiently for if we have a specific search tool. Um but definitely we want to like unhip tools and kind of keep it simple for the model. Um like last week or two weeks ago we unchipped the OS tool because in the past we needed it but then we actually built a way to enforce this kind of permission system for bash. Um, so in Bash, if we know that you're not allowed to read a particular directory, Quad's not allowed to OS that directory. And because we can enforce that consistently, we don't need this tool anymore. Um, and this is nice because it's a it's a little less choice for Quad. A little less stuff in context.
7:01 Got it. And how do you guys split responsibility on the team?
7:06 Um, I would say Boris sets the technical direction and has been the product visionary for a lot of the features that we've come out with. I see myself as more of like a supporting role to make sure that um that one that like our pricing and packaging resonates with our users. Um two making sure that we're shephering all our features across the launch process. So from like deciding all right like these are the prototypes that we should definitely ant food to like setting the quality threshold for ant fooding through to communicating that to our end users. And um there's definitely some new initiatives that we're working on that uh I would say historically a lot of quad code has been built bottoms up like Boris and a lot of the core team members have just had these great ideas for to-do list sub agents hooks like all these are bottoms up. As we think about expanding to more services and bring cloud code to our places, I think a lot of those are more like, all right, let's talk to customers. Let's bring engineers into those conversations and prioritize those services and knock them out.
8:08 Got it. What is ant fooding?
8:10 Oh, ant fooding is
8:11 Oh, ant fooding.
8:14 Oh, um it it means dog fooding. [laughter] So,
8:19 anthropic ant. I [laughter] got it.
8:22 Yeah. Our nickname for um internal employees is ant. And so uh ant fooding is our version of dog fooding. Uh internally over I think 70 or 80% of ants uh technical anthropic employees use cloud code every day. And so every time we are thinking about a new feature, we push it out to people internally and we get so much feedback. We have a feedback channel. I think we get a post every five minutes. And so you get really quick signal on whether people like it, whether it's buggy, um or whether uh it's not good and we should unchip it.
8:57 You can tell um you can tell that someone that is building stuff is using it all the time to build it. Uh because the the like its ergonomics just makes sense if you're trying to build stuff and that that only happens if you're like ant ant fooding. [laughter] Um I Yeah. Yeah. And I I think that that's a really interesting paradigm for building new stuff like that sort of bottoms up I make something for myself. Um tell me about that.
9:23 Yeah. And C cat is also so humble. Um I think cat has a really big role in the product direction also like it comes from everyone on the team and like these specific examples this actually came from everyone on the team like to-do lists and sub aents that was Sid Hooks Dixon shipped that plugins Daisy shipped that.
9:38 So like everyone on the team like these ideas come from everyone. Um, and so I think for us like we build this core agent loop and this kind of core experience and then everyone on the team uses the product all the time. Uh, and so everyone outside the team uses the product all the time. And so there's just all these chances to build things that serve these needs. Like for example, like bash mode, you know, like the exclamation mark and you can type in bash commands. This was just like many months ago. I was using quad code and I I was going back and forth between two terminals and just thought it was kind of annoying. Uh, and just on a whim, my asked squad to kind of think of ideas, the thought of this like exclamation mark bash mode. And then I was like, great, make it pink and then ship it. [laughter] It just did it. And like that that's the thing that still kind of persisted. And you know, now you see kind of others also kind of catching on to that.
10:24 That's funny. I actually didn't know that. And that's extremely useful because I always have to open up a new tab to like run any bash commands. So you just you just do an exclamation point and then it just like runs it directly instead of filtering it through all all the cloud stuff.
10:38 Yeah. And quad code sees the full output too.
10:40 Interesting. That's perfect. [laughter]
10:42 So anything you see in the cloud code view, cloud code also sees.
10:44 Okay, that's really interesting.
10:46 And this is kind of a UX thing that we're thinking about. Like in the past tools were built for engineers, but now it's equal parts engineers and model.
10:53 And so like as an engineer, you can see the output, but it's actually quite useful for the model also. And this is part of the philosophy also like everything is dual use. Um so for example, the model can also call slash commands. So like you know I have a slash command for slashcomit where I run through kind of a few different steps like diffing and generating a reasonable commit message and and this kind of stuff. I run it manually but also Claude can run this for me. Uh and this is pretty useful because we get to share this logic. We get to kind of define this tool and then we we both get to use it.
11:24 Yeah. What are the differences in uh designing tools that are dual use from designing tools that are you know used by one or the other? Surprisingly, it's the same.
11:32 Okay.
11:34 So far.
11:36 Yeah. I I I sort of feel like this kind of elegant design for humans translates really well to the models.
11:41 So, you're just thinking about what would make sense to you and the model generally, it makes sense to the model, too, if it makes sense to you.
11:49 Yeah. I think one of the really cool things about Cloud Code being um a terminal UI and what made it work really well is that Cloud Code has access to everything that an engineer does at the terminal. And I think when it comes to whether the tool should be dual use or not, I think making them dual use actually makes the tools a lot easier to understand. It just means that okay, everything you can do, cloud code can do. There's nothing in between.
12:14 Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, there there are a couple of those decisions. So, um no no code editor, it's in the terminal, so it has access to your files. Um, and it's it's on your computer versus like in the cloud in a virtual machine. So you get like repeated you you get to use it in a repeated way where you can like you know build up your cloud MD file or you know like all all like build slash commands and all that kind of stuff where it becomes very composable um and extensible [snorts] from a very simple starting point. And I'm curious about how you think about, you know, for for people who are thinking about, okay, I want to build an agent, I want to build probably not cloud code, but like something else, how you get that that simple package that then can extend and be really powerful over time.
13:07 For me, I I start by just thinking about it like developing any kind of product where you have to solve the problem for yourself before you can solve it for others. And like this is something that they teach in YC is you have to start with yourself. So like if you if you can solve your own problem, it's much more likely you're solving the problem for others. And I I think for coding starting locally is the reasonable thing and you know now we have cloud code on the web. So you can also use it with a virtual machine and um you know you can use it in a remote setting and this is super useful when you're on the go you want to take that from your phone
13:37 and and this is sort of we we started proving this out kind of a step bat a time
13:43 where you can do atcloud in GitHub and uh I use this every day like on the way to work I'm like at a red light I probably shouldn't be doing this but I'm like you know on GitHub at a red light and then I'm like at claude you know fix this issue or whatever and so it's it's just real useful to be able to control it from your phone um and this kind proves out this experience. I I don't know if this necessarily makes sense for every kind of use case. For coding, I think starting local is right. Um I don't know if this is true for everything, though.
14:07 Got it. What are the slash commands you guys use?
14:11 Slashprit. [laughter]
14:12 Yeah.
14:15 Um yeah, it it's I I think the pritcomand makes it a lot faster for claw to know exactly what bash commands to run in order to make a commit.
14:24 And what does the prit slash command do for people who are unfamiliar? Oh, it it just tells it like exactly how to make a commit. Okay.
14:33 Um and you can like dynam you can say like, okay, these are the three bash commands that need to be run.
14:37 Got it. And and what's pretty cool is also we have um this kind of templating system built into slash commands. So we actually run the bash commands ahead of time. They're like embedded into the slash command. Um and you can also pre-allow certain tool invocations. So for that slash command we say allow um you know get commit get push gh and so you don't get asked for permission after you run the slash command because we have like a permission uh based security system. Um and then also it uses haik coup which is pretty cool. Um so it's kind of a cheaper model and faster. Um yeah and for me I I use like commit uh commit PR uh feature dev we use a lot. So like sid created this one. It's kind of cool. So it kind of like walks you through step by step um building something. So we prompt quad to like first ask me how to what exactly I want like build the specification
15:27 and then um you know kind of like build like a detailed plan and then make a to-do list walk through step by step. So it's kind of like more structured feature development
15:35 and then I think the last one that we probably use a lot so we use like security review for all of our PRs and then also code review. Um so like quad does all of our code review internally at anthropic. Um, you know, there's still a human approving it, but quad does kind of the first step in code review. That's just a slashcode review command.
15:51 Got it. Yeah. What are the things I would love to go deeper into like the how do you make a good plan? So, the sort of the feature dev thing because I think there's a lot of like little tricks that um I'm starting to find or people at every start starting to find that work and I'm curious like what what are things that that we're missing. So for example, one um step in the one unintuitive step of the of the you know plan development process is even if I don't exactly know what the thing that needs to be built is I just have like a little sentence in my mind like I want feature X I have Claude just like implement it just without giving it anything else and I see what it does and that helps me understand like okay here's actually what I mean because it made all these different mistakes or like it it did something that I didn't expect that might be And then I use that like the learning from the sort of throwaway development. I just clear it out. And then that helps me write a better plan spec for the actual feature development, which is something that you would never do before because it'd be too expensive to just like yolo send an engineer on a feature that you hadn't actually speced out. But because you have cloud going through your codebase and doing stuff, you can like learn stuff from it. Um that helps inform the actual plan that you make.
17:04 Yeah. I feel maybe I I can start and I'm curious how you use it too.
17:07 I think there's like a few different modes maybe for me like one one is prototyping mode.
17:12 So like traditional engineering prototyping you want to kind of build the simplest possible thing that touches all the systems just so you can kind of get a vague sense of like what are the systems there's unknowns and just to kind of trace through everything.
17:24 Um and so I I do the exact same thing as you Dan like Claude just does the thing and then I see where it messes up and then I'll ask it to just throw it away and do it again. So just hit escape twice, go back to the old checkpoint and then try again. I think there's also maybe two other kinds of tasks. So one is just things that quad can one-shot and I feel pretty confident it can do it. So I'll just tell it and then I'll just go to a different tab and I'll I'll shift tap to auto accept and then just go do something else or go to another one of my quads and tend to that while it does this.
17:54 Um but also there's this kind of like harder feature development. So these are you know things are maybe in the past it would have taken like a few hours of engineering time and for this usually I would I'll shift tap into plan mode and then align on the plan first before it even writes any code. Um and and I think what's really hard about this is the boundary changes with every model and it in kind of a surprising way where the newer models they're more intelligent so the boundary of what you need plan mode for got pushed out like a little bit
18:21 like before you used to need to plan now now you don't. And I think it's this general trend of like stuff that used to be scaffolding with a more advanced model, it gets pushed into the model itself and the model kind of tends to subsume everything over time. Yeah. How do you think about like building a agent harness that isn't just going to like you're you're not spending a bunch of time um building stuff that is just going to be subsumed into the model in 3 months when the new cloud comes out? like, yeah, how do you how do you know what to build versus what to just say it doesn't work quite yet, but next time it's going to work, so we're not going to spend time on it.
18:57 I think we build most things that we think would improve Cloud Code's capabilities, even if that means we'll have to get rid of it in 3 months. If anything, we hope that we will get rid of it in three months.
19:09 I think for now, we just want to offer the most premium experience possible and so we're not too worried about throwaway work. H
19:17 interesting. Yeah. And an example of this is something like even like plan mode itself. I think we'll probably un ship it at some point when Quad can just figure out from your intent that you probably want to plan first. Um or you know, for example, I just deleted like 2,000 tokens or something from the system prompt yesterday just cuz like Sonnet 45 doesn't need it anymore. Um but Opus Opus 41 did need it. What about um you know in the case where uh the the latest frontier you know model doesn't need it but you know you're trying to figure out how to make it more efficient because you have so many users that you know you're maybe you you're not going to use Opus or Sonnet 45 for everything. Maybe you're going to use Haiku. So there's a trade-off between having a more um elaborate harness for Haiku versus just like not spending time on it using Sonnet eating the cost and working on more Frontier type stuff. In general, we've positioned Quad Code to be a very premium offering. So, our north star is making sure that it works incredibly well with the absolutely most powerful model we have, which is Sonnet 45 right now.
20:20 Um, we are investigating how to make it work really well for like future generations of smaller models, but it's um it's not the top priority for us.
20:29 Okay. What do you think about um you know one thing that I notice is we get models um often and thank you very much for this. We get models a lot before they come out and it's our job to kind of figure out is it any good and over the last six months when I'm testing claude for example in the claude app with a new frontier model it's actually very hard to tell whether it's how whether it's better immediately. Um, but it's really easy to tell in cloud code because the the harness matters a lot for the performance that you get out of the model. And you guys have the benefit of building cla or building cloud code inside of the um inside of enthropic. So there's like a much tighter integration between um the fundamental like model training and the harness that you're building and and they seem to kind of like really impact each other. So how does that how does that work internally and and um what are the benefits you get from having that like tight integration?
21:25 Yeah, I think the biggest thing is like researchers just use this and so you know as they see what's working, what's not, they can they can improve stuff. Um we do like a lot of eval to kind of communicate back and forth and understand where exactly the model's at. Um, but yeah, there's this frontier where you need to give the model a hard enough task to really push the limit of the model. And if you don't do this, then all models are kind of equal. But if you give it a pretty hard task, you can you can tell the difference.
21:55 What sub aents do you use?
21:57 Um, I I have a few. I have like a planner sub agent that I use. I have a code review sub aent. Code review is actually something where sometimes I use a sub agent, sometimes I use a slash command. So usually in CI to slash command, but in synchronous use I use a sub aent for the same thing.
22:14 um it's a good question. Yeah, maybe it's like a matter of taste. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. Um I think it's maybe when you're running synchronously, it's kind of nice to fork off the the context window a little bit because all the stuff that's going on in the code review, it's not relevant to what I'm doing next. But in CI, it just doesn't matter.
22:32 Are you ever spawning like 10 sub agents at once? And for what?
22:36 For me, I do it mostly for like big migrations. Okay,
22:40 this like the big thing. Um, actually we have so this like coder slash command that we use there's a bunch of sub aents there and so one of the steps is like find all the issues and so there's one sub agent that's like checking for quadmd compliance. There's another sub agent that's looking through git history to see what's going on. Another sub aent that's looking for kind of obvious bugs and then we do this like kind of dduping quality step after. So they find a bunch of stuff. A lot of these are false positives and so then then we spawn like five more sub aents and these are all just like checking for false positives. And in the end, the result is awesome. It finds like all the real issues without the false issues.
23:13 That's great. I actually do that. Um, so one of my non-technical cloud code use cases is um expense filing. So like when I'm I'm in SF right now, so like I have all these expenses. And so I built this little cloud project that uh in in cloud code that um it uses uh one of these, you know, finance APIs to just download all my credit card transactions. And then it uh decides like these are probably the expenses that I'm going to have to like file. And then I have two sub agents, one that represents me and one that represents the company. And they like do battle to like figure out like what's the proper um like actual set of expenses. [laughter] uh it's like an auditor sub agent and like you know pro Dan sub agent. So um yeah that kind of thing the the sort of like opponent processor uh pattern seems to be like an interesting one.
24:00 Yeah. Yeah. It's it's it's it's cool. I I feel like when sub aents were first becoming a thing actually what inspired us there's like a Reddit thread a while back where someone made sub agents for like there was like a front end dev and a backend dev and like a think it was like a designer
24:11 testing dev
24:13 testing dev like there was like a PM sub agent and this is like you know it's cute like it feels like a little maybe too anthropomorphic um maybe maybe there's something to this but I I think like the value is actually like the uncorrelated context windows where you have like these two context windows that don't know about each other and this is kind of interesting um and you tend to get better results this way. What about you? Do you have any interesting sub agents you use?
24:35 So, I've been tinkering with one um that is really good at front-end testing. So, it uses Playright to like see all right, what are like all the errors that are client side and pull them in and try to test more steps of the app. Um, it's not totally there yet, but I'm seeing signs of life and I think it's the kind of thing that we could potentially um, bundle in one of our plugins marketplaces.
25:02 Yeah. Um, definitely. I I' I've used something like that just with Puppeteer and just like watching it build something and then open up the browser and then be like, "Oh, I need to change this." It's like this is like, "Oh my god."
25:12 Yeah. It's really cool.
25:13 It's really cool. I think I think we're starting to see the beginnings of this like massive like multi- massive sub aents. I I don't know what they call this like swarms or something like that. There's a bunch of people there's actually an increasing number of people internally at anthropic that are using like a lot of credits every month like you know like spending like over a thousand bucks every month. Um and this like this percent of people is growing actually pretty fast. And I think the common use case is like code migration. And so what they're doing is like framework A to framework B. uh there's like the main agent, it makes a big to-do list for everything and then just kind of map produce over a bunch of sub agents. So you instruct quad like yeah like start 10 agents and then just go like you know 10 at a time and just migrate all all the stuff over.
25:53 That's interesting. What would be like a concrete example of the kind of migration that you're talking about?
25:58 I think the most classic is like lint rules.
26:00 So there's like you know there's some kind of lint rule you're rolling out. There's no autofixer because it's like you know like as an analysis can't really it's kind of too simplistic for it. Um I think other stuff is like framework migrations like um we just migrated from like one testing framework to a different one. That's a pretty common one where it's super easy to verify the output.
26:19 One of the things I found is and this is both for project projects inside of every and then just open source projects. It's like if you're someone building a product and you want to build a feature that's um been done before. So maybe like an an example that people might need to implement a bunch is like memory. How do you do memory? Um because we have a bunch of different products internally, you can just like spawn cloud sub agents to be like how do these three other products do it? And there's like possibility for just like tacit code sharing where you don't need to like have an API or you don't need to like ask ask anyone. You can just be like how does how do we do this already? And then use the best practices to um uh to uh build your own. And you can also do that with open source because there's like tons of open source projects where people are like you know they've been working on memory for like a year and it's like really really good. You be like what are the patterns that um people have figured out and which ones do I want to implement?
27:10 Totally. You can also connect your version control system. If you've built a similar feature in the past, cloud code can use those APIs like query GitHub directly and find how people implemented a similar feature in the past and read that code and um copy the relevant parts.
27:27 Yeah. Is there um have you found any use for like log files of okay you know here's here's the full history of like how I implemented it and like is that important to give to claude and and and how are you how are you um implementing that or making it useful for it?
27:44 Some people swear by it. Uh there are some people at anthropic where for every task they do, they tell cloud code to write a diary entry in a specific format that just documents like what did it do, what did it try, why didn't it work, and then they even have these agents that like look over the past memory and synthesize it into observations.
28:02 I think this is like the starting budding
28:06 like there's like something interesting here that we could productize.
28:10 Um but it's a new emerging pattern that we're seeing that works well. I think the hard thing about like oneshotting memory from just one transcript is that it's hard to know how relevant a specific instruction is to all future tasks. Like our canonical example is if I say make the button pink, I don't want you to remember to make all buttons pink in the future. And so I think um synthesizing memory from a lot of logs is a is a way to um find these patterns more um consistently. It seems like you probably need like there's some things where you're going to know um you'll be able to summar like synthesize or summarize in this sort of like top down way like this this will be useful later and and you'll you'll know the right level of abstraction at which it might be useful but then there's also a lot of stuff where it's like you actually you know any given like commit log like make the button pink it could be useful for kind of an infinite number of different reasons um that you're not going to know beforehand. So you also need the the model to be able to look up all similar past, you know, commits and surface that at the right time. Is that something that you're also thinking about? Yeah, I think I think there could there could be something like that. And maybe I think one way to see it is this kind of like traditional memory storage work like like mex like kind of stuff where you just want to like put all the information into the system and then it's kind of a retrieval problem problem after that. Um, yeah. I think as the model also gets smarter, it naturally I've seen it start to naturally do this also with Sonnet 45 where if it's stuck on something, it'll just naturally start looking like we talked about before like using bash spontaneously. So just like look through git history and be like, "Oh, okay. Yeah, this is kind of an interesting way to do it."
29:56 Yeah. One of the things that like we were talking before we started recording, one of the um things that we're doing inside of every like I feel like it has really um change the way that we do engineering because everyone is cloud code build like CLI build and um we have this engineering paradigm that we call compounding engineering where in normal engineering every feature you add it makes it harder to add the next feature and in compounding engineering your goal is to make the next feature easier to build um from the feature that you just added. And the the way that we do that is we try to um codify all the learnings from um from everything that we've done to build the feature. So like you know how did we make the plan and and what parts of the plan needed to be changed or like when we started testing it like what what issues did we find? What are the things that we missed? Um and then we codify them back into all the prompts and all the sub agents and all the slash commands so that the next time when someone does something like this uh it catches it and that makes it easier. And that's why for me, for example, I can like hop into one of our code bases and start like being productive even though I'm I don't know anything about how the code works because we have this like builtup memory system of um of all the stuff that we've learned as we've implemented stuff, but we've had to build that ourselves. I'm curious, are you working on that kind of loop so it the cloud code does that automatically?
31:15 Yeah, we're we're starting to think about it. Uh it's funny. We we're just uh we we heard the same thing from Fiona. She just joined the team. And you know, she she's our she's our manager. She hasn't coded in like 10 years, something like that. And she was landing PRs on her first day. And she was like, "Yeah, like not only did I kind of I forgot how to code and quad code kind of made it super easy to just get back into it,
31:39 but also I didn't need to ramp up on any context because I kind of knew all this." And I think a lot of it is about like when people put up poll requests for quad code itself and I think our customers tell us that they do like similar stuff pretty often. Um if you see a mistake I'll just be like add quad add this to quad MD so that the next time it just knows this automatically and you you can kind of like instill this memory in kind of a variety of ways. So you can say like at quad add it to quadmd. You can also say add quad write a test. You know, that's like easy way to make sure this doesn't regress. And I don't feel bad asking anyone to write tests anymore, right? It's just like super easy. And like I think probably close to 100% of our tests are just written by Quad. And if they're bad, we just won't commit it. And then the good ones stay committed. Um, and then also I think lint rules are a big one. So for stuff that's enforced pretty often, we actually have a bunch of internal lint rules. Claude writes 100% of these. Um, and this is mostly just like at Claude in a PR write write this lint rule. And yeah, there's sort of this problem right now about like how how do you do this automatically? And I think generally how like Cat and I think about it is we see this like power user behavior and the first step is how do you enable that by making the product hackable so the best users can figure out how to do this cool new thing
32:53 but then really the hard work starts of like how do you take this and bring it to everyone else. Um, and for me, I I kept myself in the everyone else bucket. Like, you know, I don't really know how to use Vim. Like, I don't have this like crazy like T-box setup. So, I have like a pretty vanilla setup. So, if you can make a feature that I'll use, it's a pretty good indicator that like other kind of average engineers will use it. That is interesting. Like, tell me about that because like that's something I think about all the time is um making something that is extensible and flexible enough that power users can find like novel ways to use it that you would not have even dreamed of. But it's also simple enough that anyone can use it and it's and they can be productive with it and you can you can kind of pull what the power users find back into like the basic experience. Like how do you think about making those design and product decisions so that you enable that?
33:41 In general we think that like every engine environment is a little bit different from the others and so it's really important that every part of our system is extensible. Um so everything from your status line to adding your own slash commands through to hooks which let you um insert a bit of determinism at pretty much any step in quad code. So we think these are the these are like the basic building blocks that we give to every engineer that they can play with. um for plugins. Plugins is actually our um so it was built by Daisy on our team and this is this is our attempt to make it a lot easier for the average user like us um to bring these slashcomands and hooks into our workflows. And so what plugins does is it lets you browse existing MCP servers, existing hooks, existing plugins and just like or sorry existing like sash commands and just let you write one command in quad code to pull pull that in for yourself.
34:38 There's this like really old idea in product called latent demand which I think is probably the main way that I personally think about product and like thinking about what to build next is it's a super simple idea. It's you build a product in a way that is hackable that is kind of open-ended enough that people can abuse it for other use cases it wasn't really designed for. Then you see how people abuse it and then you build for that cuz like you you kind of know there was demand for it,
35:00 right?
35:02 Um and like you know when I when I was at Meta, this is how we built kind of all the big products. I think almost every single big product had this nugget of latent demand in it. um you know like for example something like Facebook dating it came from this idea that when uh we looked at who looks at people's profiles I think 60% of views were between people of opposite gender so kind of like traditional setup that were not friends with each other and so we're like oh man okay maybe there's like maybe if we like launch a dating product we can kind of harness this demand that exists
35:32 that's interesting
35:34 and for you know marketplace it was pretty similar I think it was like 40% of posts in Facebook groups at the time were by sell posts and so I Okay, people are trying to use this product to buy themselves. We just build a product around it that's probably going to work. And so we think about it kind of similarly, but also we have the luxury of building for developers and developers love hacking stuff and they love customizing stuff and it's like as a user of our own product, it makes it so fun to build and and use this thing. Um, and so yeah, like like I said, we just build the right extension points. We see how people use it and that kind of tells us what to build next. Like for example, we got all these user requests where people were like, "Dude, Quad Code is asking me for all these permissions and I'm out here getting coffee. I don't know that it's asking me for permissions. How could I just get it to like ping me on Slack?" And so we built hooks. Uh Dixon built hooks um so that people could get pinged on Slack and you could get pinged on Slack for anything that you want to get pinged on Slack for. Um, and so it was very much like people really wanted the ability to do something. We didn't want to build the integration ourselves. And so we we exposed hooks for people to do that.
36:41 The thing that makes me think of is um you you recently um released you kind of moved or rebranded how you talk about cloud code to be this like more general purpose agent SDK. Is that was that driven by some latent demand where you you sort of saw there's like a more general purpose use case for what you built?
37:00 We realized that similar to how you were talking about using cloud code for things outside of coding, we saw this happen a lot like um we get a ton of stories of people who are using cloud code to like help them write a blog and like manage all the like data inputs and take a first pass in their own tone. Um we find people building like email assistants on this. Um I use it for a lot of just like market research. Um because at the core it's like an agent that can just go on for an infinite amount of time as long as you give it a concrete task and it's able to fetch the right underlying data. So one of the things I was working on was I wanted to look at all the companies in the world and how many engineers they had and to create a ranking. And this is something that quad code can do even though it's not a traditional coding use case. So we realized that like the underlying primitives were really general as long as you give as long as you have like an agent loop that can continue running for a long period of time and you're able to like access the internet and write code and run code pretty much you can if you squint you can kind of build anything on it. Mhm.
38:09 And and I think like by at the point where we like rebranded it so like from the quad code SDK to the quad Asian SDK, there was already like many thousands of companies using this thing and a lot of those use cases were not about coding. So it's like both both internally and externally. We kind of saw that
38:26 like health assistants, like financial analysts, legal assistance. Um it was pretty broad.
38:33 Yeah. What are the coolest ones? I feel like actually you you had Noah Brier on the the podcast recently. I thought like the obsidian like kind of mind mapping notekeeping use case is really cool. It's funny. It's insane how many people use it for this [laughter]
38:47 particular combination. Uh I think some other like some coding or kind of coding adjacent use cases that are kind of cool is um we have this like issue tracker for quad code. The team's just like constantly underwater like trying to keep up with all the issues coming in. There's just so many. And so I quad ddupes the issues and it automatically finds duplicates and it's extremely good at it. It also does first pass resolution. So usually when there's an issue it'll um proactively put up a PR internally and this is a new uh thing that Enigo on the team built. Um so this is pretty cool. Uh there's also like on call and kind of collecting signals from other places like getting like sentry logs and getting like logs from BigQuery and kind of collating all this. um plus just really good at doing this because it's all just bash in the end, right?
39:29 And so these are all kind of these internal use cases that that I saw.
39:34 Is it um so when it's you know collating logs or um you doing issues is that like you have clouds like continually running in the background and is that something that you're building for?
39:43 Um it gets triggered for that particular one. It gets triggered whenever a new issue is filed. So it runs once but it can choose to run for as long as it needs.
39:52 Got it. What about the idea of clouds always running? Oo, proactive quads. I think it's definitely where we want to get to. U I would say right now we're very focused on making quad code incredibly reliable for like individual tasks. And you know, if you think about like if you think about like multi-line autocomplete and then like single turn agents and then now we're working on like quad code that can complete tasks. I feel like if you trace this curve eventually you go to even higher levels of abstraction like even more complicated tasks and then hopefully the next step after that is a lot more productivity. So just understanding what your team's goals are what your goals are being able to say hey I think you probably want to try this feature and here's a first pass at the code and here are the assumptions I made and are these correct?
40:41 I can't wait. Um and I think probably right after that is um Claude is now Um,
40:50 that's not in the plan. [laughter]
40:52 So, everyone on the team was like super excited that uh we were we were talking today and they gave me a bunch of questions and I want to make sure I I hit all the questions. Um, uh, oh, here's a good one. Why did you choose agentic rag over vector search in your architecture? And are like vector embeddings uh still relevant? Um so actually initially we did use vector embeddings. Um they're just a really tricky to maintain because you have to continuously reindex the code and they might get out of date and you have local changes. So those need to make it in. And then as we thought about what does it feel like for an external enterprise to adopt it, we realized that this exposes a lot more surface area and like security risk. Um we also found that actually cloud code is really good and cloud models are really good at agentic search. So um you can get to the same accuracy level with agentic search and it's just a much cleaner deployment story.
41:51 H that's really interesting.
41:53 Um if you do want to bring semantic search to quad code, you can do so via an MCP tool. So if you want to manage your own index and expose an MCP tool that lets Quad Code call that, that that would work. What do you think are the top MCPS to use with cloud code?
42:09 Puppeteer and Playright are pretty high up there.
42:11 Definitely. Yeah.
42:13 Century has a really good one. Asana has a really good one. Hm. Do you think that there are um any any power user tips that you see people inside of anthropic or you know other people who are you know big power you know inside of organizations that are big cloud code power users that people don't know about but they should. Um, one thing that QuadCo doesn't naturally like to do, but that I personally find very useful is, um, QuadCo doesn't naturally like to ask questions, but you know, if you're brainstorming with a thought partner, a collaborator, usually you do ask questions back and forth to each other. And so, this is one of the things that, um, I like to do, especially in plan mode. I'll just tell Cloud Code like, "Hey, we're just brainstorming this thing. Um, please ask me questions if there's anything you're unsure about." um I want you to ask questions and it'll do it. And I think that actually helps you arrive at a better answer
43:11 there. There's like there's also like so many tips that we can share. I think like there there's a few really common mistakes I see people make. One is like like you said like not using plan mode enough. This is this is just super important. And I think this is people that are kind of new to a coding. They kind of assume this thing can do anything and it can't. It's like not that good today and it's going to get better but today it can oneshot some tests. can't one-shot most things. Um, and so you kind of have to understand the limits and you have to understand like where you get in the loop. And so [snorts] like something like plan mode, it can like two 3x success rates pretty easily if you like land on the plan first. Um, other stuff that I've seen power users do really well is companies that have really big deployments of quad code and now um, you know, luckily there's a lot of these companies so we can kind of learn from them. Uh having settings JSON that you check into the codebase is really important because you can use this to pre-allow certain commands so you don't get permission prompted every time and also to block certain commands. Let's say you don't want web fetch or whatever and this way as an engineer I don't get prompted and um I can check this in and share it with the whole team so everyone gets to use it.
44:16 I I get around that by just using dangerous they skip permissions. [laughter]
44:21 Yeah, we kind of we kind of have this here but we don't you know we don't recommend it. It's like it's a model, you know, it can do it can do weird stuff. Um, I think another kind of cool use case that we've seen is people using stop hooks for interesting stuff. So stop hook runs whenever the turn is complete. So like the assistant did some tool calls back and forth with you know whatever and uh it's done and it returns control back to the user then we run the stop hook and so you can define a stop hook that's like um if the tests don't pass return the text keep going and essentially it's like you can just like make the model like keep going until the thing is done and this is just like insane when you combine it with the SDK and this kind of programmatic usage
45:00 you can you know this is a stochcastic thing it's a nondeterministic thing but with scaffolding you can get these determin deterministic outcomes.
45:09 So you guys started this sort of CLI, this CLI paradigm shift. Um, do you think the CLI is the final form factor? Are we are we going to using cloud code in the CLI primarily in a year or in three years, or is there something else that's better?
45:23 I mean, it's not the final form factor, but we are very focused on making sure the CLI is like the most intelligent that we can make it and that's as customizable as possible. you can talk about the next form factors.
45:38 Yeah, I mean [laughter] cat C's asking me to talk about because no one knows like this this stuff's like it's just moving like so fast, right? Like no no one knows what these form factors are. Like right now I think our team is in experimentation mode. So we have uh CLI then we came out with the ID extension. Now we have a new ID extension that's like a guey. It's a little more accessible. Um we have add quad and github so you can just add quad anywhere. Um, now there's at quad, there's quad on web and on mobile, so you can use it on any of these places. Um, and we're just in experimentation mode, so we're trying to figure out what's next. I think like if we kind of zoom out and see where this stuff is headed. I think one of the big trends is longer periods of autonomy. And so with every model, we kind of time how long can the model just keep going and do tasks autonomously and just, you know, in dangerous mode in a container, keep autocompacting until the task is done. And now we're on the order of like double digit hours. I think it's like the last model is like 30 hours, something like this. And I, you know, the next model is going to be days. And as you think about kind of parallelizing models, um there's kind of a bunch of problems that come out of this. So one is what is the container this thing runs in because you don't want to have to like close your laptop. I have that right now because I'm doing a lot of uh disb I don't know I've only heard I've only read it but DSPY or disb prompt optimization and like it's on my laptop and it's like I don't want to close I'm like in the way [laughter] middle like with my laptop open because I'm like I don't want to close it. Yeah.
47:03 Yeah. That's right. Yeah. We've like visited companies before like like customers that everyone's just like walking around with their like quad codes. [laughter]
47:11 Is this running? So, I think like one is kind of getting getting away from this mode and then I also think pretty soon we're going to be in this mode of like quads monitoring quads.
47:17 Yeah.
47:19 Um and kind of I I don't know what the right form factor for this is because as as a human you need to be able to inspect this and kind of see what's going on. Um but also it needs to be quad optimized where um you're optimizing for kind of bandwidth between like the quad to quad communication. Um so my prediction is terminal is not the final form factor. My prediction is there's going to be a few more form factors in the coming months, you know, maybe like year or something like that. And it's going to keep changing very quickly.
47:48 What do you think about, you know, I teach a lot of cloud code to a lot of every subscribers and
47:52 thank you.
47:54 You're welcome. Doing doing your work for you. [laughter] Um uh and I think the like one of the big things is just the terminal is intimidating and uh just like being on a call with subscribers being like here's how you open the terminal and you're allowed to do this even if you're non-technical is like a big deal. [laughter] How do you think about that? Yeah, I um one of the people on our marketing team uh started using cloud code because she was writing some content that touched on cloud code and I was like you should really experience it and she got like 30 popups on her screen where she had to accept various permissions because she'd never used a terminal before. So I completely see eye to eye with you on that. It's definitely um hard for non-engineers and there's even some engineers we've found who aren't fully comfortable with working day-to-day in the terminal. Um, our VS Code GUI extension is our first step in that direction because you don't have to think about the terminal at all. It's like a traditional interface with a bunch of buttons. Um, I think we are working on more um graphical interfaces. Uh, so quad code on the web is a guey. I think that actually might be a good starting point for people who are less technical.
49:05 Yeah. Yeah. There there was this like magic moment maybe like a few months ago where like I walked into the office and the some of the data scientists at Anthropic like sit right next to the quad code team and the data scientist just had like quad code running on their computers and I was like what what is this like how did you figure this out? I think it was like Brandon uh was like the first one to do it and he was like, "Oh yeah, I just like installed it. Like I work on this product so like I should use it." And I was like, "Oh my god." So he like he figured out how to like use a terminal and JS like you know he hasn't really done this kind of workflow before. Obviously like very technical. Um so I think now we're we're starting to see all these kind of like code adjacent uh like functions. people you use quad code and um yeah it's kind of interesting like from a latent demand point of view these are people hacking the product so there's like demand to use it for this and so we want to make it a little bit easier with more accessible interfaces but at the same time for us for quad code we're laser focused on building the best product for the best engineers and so um we're focused on software engineering and we want to make this like really good but we want to make it a thing that other people can can hack
50:11 some sometimes cloud code will write code that's a bit verbose post. Um, but you can just tell it to simplify it and it does a really good job.
50:20 Interesting. And so, and how are how and when are you doing that? So, you're you're using a slash command or you're
50:26 I just say it. I just
50:27 Sometimes you're like, "Hey, this should be a oneline change and I'll write five lines and you're like, simplify it and it understands immediately what you mean and it'll fix it."
50:35 Yeah. I think a lot of people on our team do that, too. Um, that's that's interesting. Why do you like why not then if you're saying that all the time why not then you know push that into like a slash command or the harness or something like that to yeah make it just happen automatically.
50:51 We do have instructions for this in the cloud MD. I think it impacts such a low percentage of conversations that we don't want it to like over rotate in the other direction.
51:03 Um and then the reason why not a slash command is because you actually don't need that much context. I think slash command's really good for situations where you would otherwise need to write two three lines but for simp like even for plan mode you actually can use a few words but sometime but it actually takes two or three lines to capture the entirety of what you want in plan mode. Um for simplify it you can just write simplify it and it gets it.
51:28 Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. Cool.
51:29 Yeah.
51:33 Um okay, now we're we can [laughter] um that's interesting. Yeah, but but this stuff like you know it still feels just so early.
51:39 Yeah.
51:41 You know, like we we were talking before before the recording about like kind of where are we on the adoption curve and it still
51:47 the hian curve or whatever [laughter] whatever that term was.
51:50 Exactly. And it just feels it just feels like we're you know like first 10% still like the stuff is going to change so fast it's going to keep changing. Even when I talk to researchers outside of enthropic who who abuse quad code um they also get stuck on things like this like not realizing that they can just tell the LLM to simplify it and I think that just goes to show that even for people who are like working in this industry they don't always realize that you can just talk to the model. That's the thing is like I I think that there's this underlying expectation that using AI shouldn't have to be a skill like because it just does whatever you say and you're like well I mean whatever you say is going to matter for what it does. So if you can say things better it's going to do better. [laughter]
52:33 Yeah. I mean it it changes with every model though. That's the that's the hard part. like you know prompt engineer was a job and now famously it's not a job anymore and there's going to be more jobs that are then like not not jobs anymore of these kind of like little micro skills that you have to learn to use this thing and as the model gets better it can just like interpret it better
52:50 but I think that's also like for us this is part of this kind of humility that we have to have building a product like this that we just really don't know what's next and we're just trying to figure it out kind of along with everyone else we're just here for the ride
53:00 and that's why it's cool that you're building it for yourself cuz I think that's the that's the best way to know that is just like you're and this is what we do too is like you're sort of living in the future. You're using it all the time. And uh it's pretty clear what's missing. You're like I just want this thing and you can just do the next thing rather than being like hm let me ask like some enterprise product manager at like some gigantic company like what kind of AI feature do you want? And they're like I don't know like you know put a little chatbot on the side of my you know IDE and you're like okay. [laughter]
53:28 Yeah.
53:30 Yeah. This is like the luxurious thing about building dev tools right you're your own customer. I think it's also really um a unique thing about AI because um it sort of reset the game board for all software. So um you know we have Kora this like email assistant and we have like Sparkle which organizes your files and it's like anything that you do for something that you want to use on your computer if you're if you're building it with AI there's a good chance that hasn't been done before because like the whole whole landscape has been reset. And so it's a it's a uniquely exciting time to build stuff for yourself.
54:06 Totally. I think it totally opens the playing field, too. It's like any individual can now build an app to fill their need and then distribute it to everyone else.
54:14 Yeah,
54:15 it's really cool.
54:17 I've been prototyping all these like random pet projects. Um
54:23 um I just moved into a new apartment and it's empty. And so I've been um I've been building this like shopping advisor assistant on like the Cloud Agent SDK cuz who has time to like read all the reviews and like look at all the options and find their pricing and everything's like really hard to discover. And so it just like asks me a bunch of questions and I tell it what I want and it shows me a bunch of Yeah, exactly. and it shows me a bunch of photos of like different sofas and options and what people say online
54:49 and then I tell it what I don't like and it's literally feels like working with a shopping assistant
54:55 and it it's been really cool.
54:56 That's really cool.
54:58 Um I also have my little email response agent that like drafts responses for me but I don't use email that much so
55:05 Oh, and I knew it wasn't you responding. [laughter] The agent's just take doing a very thorough job. [laughter]
55:16 Yeah,
55:18 agent SDK is cool though.
55:20 Yeah, agent SDK is cool.
55:22 Yeah, it's it always just feels amazing like how much we're able to build with such a small team.
55:24 Yeah.
55:25 So, I feel like
55:26 the other thing that's really cool is that I think people are just shifting their mindset from docs to demos. Like internally, our currency is actually demos. It's like you want people to be excited about your thing. Yeah,
55:38 show us like show us 15 seconds of what it can do.
55:42 And we find that everyone on the team now has this kind of indoctrinated
55:45 demo culture for sure. And I think that's better because
55:49 there's a lot of things that you might have in your head that if you're a great writer, maybe you could figure out how to explain it, but it's just even then it's just really hard to explain. But if someone can see it, they like get it immediately. And I think that's happening for product building, but it's also happening for like all sorts of other types of creative endeavors like making a movie for example. Like you had to pitch it, but now you can just be like I made this Sora video and like you know check like you can kind of see like like the glimmer of the thing you're trying to make for very cheap. And so that means you don't have to spend time convincing people as much. You can just be like here I made it.
56:24 Yeah. And and also as a builder like you can just make it and then like make it again and then make it again [laughter] until you're happy. Like
56:31 I I feel like that like the flip side is like you used to make a dock or you know like whiteboard something or you know like I I would draw stuff in like Sketch or Figma or whatever and now we'll just like build it until until I like how it feels.
56:42 And it's just like so easy to get that feeling out of it now. And I I think it's like you could see it visually before or you could describe it in words but it's like you could never get the vibe. And now like the vibe is really easy.
56:53 Yeah. And you built plan mode like three times.
56:55 Yeah. Yeah.
56:56 Because of this.
56:57 Like you you built it and then you threw it out and rebuilt it and then threw it out and rebuilt it.
57:02 Yeah. Or like Tudos's uh like Sid built the original version like also like three or four he built like three or four prototypes and then I prototype maybe like 20 versions after that like in like a day. Yeah. I think this is like a lot of pretty much everything we released there was at least a few prototypes behind it. How do you like um keep track of and carry forward the things you learn from prototype to prototype? And especially if it's like, you know, some one person is prototyping it and then you're like, I'm going to take it over. I'm going to do 20 more. Like how do you how do you maximize what you get out of that? You know, it's it's like there there's maybe a few elements of it. One is the style guide. So there's like some elements of style that we discover. And I think a lot of this is like building for the terminal or like we're kind of discovering a new design language for for the terminal and kind of building it as we go. Um, and I think some of this you can codify in a style guide. So this is our quad MD, but then there's this other part of it that's like kind of product sense where I don't think the model totally gets it yet. And I think maybe we should be trying to find ways to like teach the model this this kind of product sense about like this works and this doesn't, right? Because in in product, you want to solve the person's problem in the simplest way possible and then delete everything else that's not that and just get everything out of the way. So you kind of you you align the product to the intent as cleanly as possible. And maybe the model doesn't totally get that yet.
58:24 Yeah. It's never it doesn't really feel what it's like to use quad code. Like the model doesn't use quad code.
58:31 Yeah. Yeah. And so I think like when you know like quad code can like test itself and it can kind of use itself. Um and like we we do this when developing and it can see like UI bugs and things like that. I don't know maybe we should just try prompting it though. It could like honestly a lot of the stuff is as simple as that. Like when there's some new idea usually you just prompt it and often it just works. Maybe we should just try that.
58:57 A lot of the prototypes are actually the UX interactions. Um, and so I think once we discover a new UX interaction like shift tab for auto accept, I think uh Boris figured out. Um, then
59:11 that was Eigor actually.
59:12 Oh, Eigor.
59:13 Yeah, we went back and forth can like fit into that.
59:16 We did like dueling prototypes for like a week. [laughter]
59:20 Yeah, shift tab felt really nice. And then one of the the now current plan mode iteration um uses shift tab because it's actually just like another way to tell the model how agentic it should be.
59:35 And so I think as as more features use the same uh interaction, you form like a stronger mental model for what should go where.
59:42 Yeah. Or like thinking I think is another really good one. Like first we were like before we released quad code or maybe it was like the first thinking model was it like 37? I forget what the first one was.
59:51 Yeah.
59:54 But yeah and it it was like it was able to think and we're like brainstorming like how do we like toggle thinking? And then someone was just like what if you just like ask the model to think in natural language and it knows how to think and we're like okay sweet let's do that. [laughter] And so like we we did that for a while and then um we realized that people were accidentally toggling it. So they were like don't think and then the model was like oh I should think. it just started thinking
1:00:15 and so we had to kind of like tune it out so you know don't think didn't trigger it but then it still wasn't obvious but then we made a UX improvement to like highlight the thinking that
1:00:23 and that was like that was so fun and it felt really magical
1:00:25 when you do ultra think it's like rainbow or whatever exactly [laughter] and then with uh with sonet 45 we actually find like a really really big performance improvement when you turn on extended thinking um and so uh we made it really easy to toggle it because sometimes you want it sometimes you because you you kind of for a really simple task, you don't want the model to think for like five minutes. You want it to just do the thing. And so we used tab as the interaction to toggle it. And then we unchipped a bunch of the thinking words. Although I I think we kept ultra think just for like sentimental reasons. [laughter] It was such a cool UX.
1:01:02 Interesting. Do you think there's some there's some new metric that's about what you deleted? And I I think programmers have always felt like, you know, deleting a bunch of code feels really good, but there's something about because you can build stuff so fast, it becomes more important to like also delete stuff. I think my favorite kind of diff to see is a red diff. [laughter] This is the best whenever I'm like, "Yeah, bring it on. Another one. Another one." Um, but it, you know, but it's hard because like anything you ship, people are using it. And so you got to keep people happy. And so I think generally our principle is if we un ship something, we need to ship something even better. um that can kind of um that people can can take advantage of that that kind of matches that intent uh even better. Um and yeah, I think this is kind of back to like how do you measure like quad code and the impact of it and this is something like every company every customer asks us about and I think like in so internally at anthropic I think we like doubled in size since January or something like that but then productivity per engineer has increased like almost 70% in that time. um
1:02:01 measured by
1:02:03 uh I think we actually measured it yeah in a few ways but kind of PRs are the the simplest one and the main one um but like you said like this doesn't capture the full extent of it because a lot of this is like making it easier to prototype making it easier to try new things making it easier to these things that you never would have tried because they're way below the cut line. Um you're launching a feature and there's this kind of like wish list of stuff now you just do all it because it's so easy
1:02:25 and you just wouldn't have done it.
1:02:27 So yeah, it's really hard to talk about it. And then there's this flip side of it where more code is written. So you have to delete more code. You have to code review more carefully and you know automate automate code review as much as you can. There's also like an interesting like new product management challenge because you can ship so much that you end up it it ends up not feeling as cohesive because you could just like add button here and like a tab there and like a little thing here. Like it's just it's much easier to build a product that has all the features you want but doesn't have any sort of organizing principle because you're just shipping lots of stuff all the time. I think we try to be pretty disciplined about this and making sure that all the abstractions are really easy to understand for someone even if they just hear the name of the feature. We have this principle that I believe Boris brought to the team that I really like where we don't want a new user experience. Everything should be so intuitive that you just drop in and it just works. And I think that's that's really set the bar really high for making sure every feature is really intuitive. How do you do that with um a conversational UI? Because um you know when there's not a bunch of but buttons and knobs and it's just a blank text box to start, how do you think about making it intuitive?
1:03:37 Um there's a lot of like little things that we do like um we teach people that they can use the question mark to see tips. Um we show tips as quad code is working. We have like the change log on the side. um we tell you about like oh there's a new model that's out or like we show you at the bottom we have a notification section for thinking. I think there's just like subtle ways in which we tell users about features. I think the other thing that's really important is to just make sure that all the primitives are very clearly defined like hooks have a common meaning um in the developer ecosystem. plugins have a very common meaning in the developer ecosystem and just making sure that what we build matches what like the you know the average developer would immediately think of when they hear that
1:04:25 there there's this also this like progressive disclosure thing like you know to to any anytime in quad code when you run it you can hit control O to see like the full raw transcript the same thing the model sees and we don't like show you this until it's actually relevant so when there's a tool result that's collapsed then we'll say use control O to see it so we kind of we don't want to put too much complexity on you at the start because this thing can do you know anything. Um I think there's this other kind of new principle which we've just started exploring which is like the model teaches you how to use the thing and so you can ask quad code about itself and it it kind of knows to look up its own documentation to tell you about it but we can also go even deeper like for example slash commands are a thing that people can use but also the model can call slash commands and maybe you see the model calling it and then you'll be like oh yeah I guess I can do that too.
1:05:13 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. How has it changed like you know when you first started doing this cloud code was this sort of like singular thing this singular way of thinking about you know using AI through a CLI other people had stuff like this but it it felt like this shift and now there's a whole landscape of everyone is like going CLI CLI CLI like how has that changed how you think about building how it feels to build and how are you dealing with the sort of pressure of the race that you're in? I
1:05:39 think for for me like imitation is the greatest flattery. Mhm. Um, so it's like it, you know, it's it's awesome and it's just like it's cool to see all this other stuff that everyone else is building like inspired by this. And I think this is ultimately the goal is to kind of inspire people to build this next thing for this just incredible technology that's that's coming. And that that's just really exciting. Personally, I don't really use a lot of other tools. So, usually when something new comes out, I'll I'll maybe just try it to get a vibe. Um, but otherwise [snorts] I think we're pretty focused on just solving problems that we have and our customers have and kind of building the next thing.
1:06:15 Cool. Sweet. Um, I I loved this part of the interview, too. [laughter]
1:06:22 Did we answer all of your team's questions?
1:06:23 Questions?
1:06:25 Do Oh, did we get through all my team's questions? Let's see. Uh, I think we did. Um, uh, I'm curious also how you would answer like the unshipping question cuz also like if you're doing this kind of like AIdriven development, you ship a lot. You have a small team, so it's a lot of operational load.
1:06:43 The reason I asked that is because I don't think we do a good job of that. Um, and I have this feeling that some of the products are like a little bit messy because of that. And I think particularly for Kora, um there's just a big product surface area and it can do a lot of different things like it we have an email assistant so you can ask it like you know uh tell me about the trip I'm taking and it'll go through all your emails and you know summarize the the trip. Um or we have this feature that it automatically archives any email that you don't need to respond to immediately. Um, and then twice a day you get a brief that summarizes all the stuff that you probably need to see but you don't need to like actually do anything with and you just scroll through it and you're done. Um, and there's just like all this there's all this complexity that around you know for example how are emails categorized? So now we have a whole view of we have all these categorization rules and you can order them and whatever, but like it's just complicated and hard to communicate and and uh and I want to retain a lot of the like all the power and flexibility, but also you can't look at a screen and be like I have no idea what's going on. This is like way too complicated. So that's I'm just like I'm processing all that stuff. So the the kind of like deletion, you know, un unshipping idea feels like an interesting um cultural principle that we haven't really explored.
1:08:14 Yeah, it's really hard. I think there's like a social cost to it, too, where like you kind of want to be the person who tells your coworker to unship their thing. [laughter]
1:08:24 It's definitely tricky. It's more than just the code. Yeah, I I definitely learned this at Instagram honestly cuz I I think Facebook does a terrible job at unshipping and we had this problem where
1:08:34 every time we I think even like unshipping pokes was like really spicy cuz there's a bunch of these like old-timers. They're like, "No pokes, you're never going to take it away." But like if you look at the data, no one really uses it anymore.
1:08:44 But for sentimental reasons, they were kind of tied to it.
1:08:47 And so like for Facebook, it always maybe nothing ever got unchipped. It always got moved to like a secondary place like a, you know, like an overflow menu somewhere that no one looks at, like a graveyard.
1:08:55 Yeah.
1:08:57 And I think Instagram was just very principled. There was like, you know, very strong in a product and design point of view that was like, if this thing isn't used by like half of people, you know, 50% of WOW or whatever, we're just going to delete it and deal with it and then we'll figure out some next thing that's used by more people.
1:09:13 I love it. Um, well, thank you. This was amazing. I'm really uh glad I got to talk to you and uh keep building.
1:09:18 Thank you for having us.
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