Inside Claude Code With Its Creator Boris Cherny

A very special guest on this episode of the Lightcone! Boris Cherny, the creator of Claude Code, sits down to share the incredible journey of developing one of the most transformative coding tools of the AI era.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  At Anthropic, the way that we thought about it is we don't build for the model of today. We build for the model six months from now. That's actually like still my advice to founders that are building on LLMs. Just try to think about like, what is that frontier where the model is not very good at today? Because it's going to get good at it. All of Claude code has just been written and rewritten and rewritten and rewritten over and over and over. There is no part of Claude code that was around six months ago. You try a thing, you give it to users, you talk to users, you learn. And then eventually you might end up at a good idea. Sometimes you don't.

• 0:27Speaker 01

  Are you also in the back of your mind thinking that maybe like in six months, you won't need to prompt that explicitly, like the model would just be good enough to figure it out on its own?

• 0:34Speaker 00

  Maybe in a month.

• 0:36Speaker 01

  No more need for plan mode in a month?

• 0:38Speaker 02

  Oh, my God.

• 0:46Speaker 02

  Welcome to another episode of The Light Cone. And today we have an extremely special guest, Boris Churney, the creator, engineer of Claude Code. Boris, thanks for joining us.

• 0:58Speaker 00

  Thanks for having me.

• 0:59Speaker 02

  Thanks for creating a thing that has taken away my sleep for about three weeks straight.

• 1:05Speaker 02

  I am very addicted to Claude code and it feels like rocket boosters. Has it felt like this for people like for, you know, months at this point? I think it was like end of November is where a lot of my friends said like something changed.

• 1:19Speaker 00

  I remember for me, I felt this way when I first created Claude code and I didn't yet know if I was on to something. I kind of felt like I was on to something and then that's when I wasn't sleeping. And that was just like

• 1:28Speaker 02

  When was that?

• 1:29Speaker 00

  Three straight months. This was September 2024. Yeah, it was like three straight months. I didn't take a single day of vacation, worked through the weekends, worked every single night. I was just like, oh, my God, this is, I think this is going to be a thing. I don't know if it's useful yet because it couldn't actually code yet.

• 1:45Speaker 02

  If you look back on those moments to now, like what would be like the most surprising thing about this moment right now?

• 1:52Speaker 00

  It's unbelievable that we're still using a terminal. That was supposed to be the starting point. I didn't think that would be the ending point. And then the second one is that it's even useful because, you know, at the beginning it didn't really write code. Even in February, when we created it, it wrote maybe like 10% of my code or something like that. I didn't really use it to write code. It wasn't very good at it. I still wrote most of my code by hand.

• 2:12Speaker 00

  So the fact that it actually like our bets paid off and it got good at the thing that we thought it was gonna get good at because it wasn't obvious. At Anthropic, the way that we thought about it is we don't build for the model of today, we build for the model six months from now. And that's actually like still my advice to founders that are building on L L Ms is, you know, just try to think about like, what is that frontier where the model is not very good at today? Cause it's gonna get good at it and you just have to wait.

• 2:38Speaker 01

  Going back, but when, do you remember when you first got the idea? Can you just talk us through that? Like, was it like a spark or what was even the first version of it in your mind?

• 2:46Speaker 00

  You know, it's funny, it was like, it was so accidental that it just kind of evolved into this. You know, as Anthropic, I think for Ant, the bet has been coding for a long time. And the bet has been the path to save, to save A G I is through coding. And this is, this has kind of always been the idea. And the way you get there is you, you teach the model how to code, then you teach it how to use tools, then you teach it how to use computers. And you can kind of see that because the, the first team that I joined at Anthropic, it was called the Anthropic Labs team. And it produced three products, it was Quadcode, M C P and the Desktop App. So you can kind of see how these like weave together. The particular product that we built, you know, like no one, no one asked me to build a C L I.

• 3:30Speaker 00

  We kind of knew maybe it was time to build some kind of coding product because it seemed like the model was ready. But no one had yet really built a product that harnessed this capability. So like still, there's this insane feeling of product overhang, but at the time it was just like even crazier because like no one had built this yet. And so I, I started like hacking around and I was like, okay, we build a coding product. What do I have to do first? I have to understand how to use the A P I because I hadn't used the Anthropic A P I at that point. And so I just built like a little terminal app to use the A P I. That's all that it did. And it was a little chat app because, you know, like you think about the, you know, A I applications at the time and, you know, for non-coders today, most, what are, what are most people using is just a chat app. So that's what I built. And it was in a terminal. I can ask questions. I give answers.

• 4:15Speaker 00

  Then I think tool use came out. I just want to try out tool use because I don't really understand what this is. I was like, tool use, this is cool. Is this actually useful? Probably not. Let me just try it.

• 4:23Speaker 01

  You built it in terminal just because it was the easiest way to get something up and running?

• 4:27Speaker 00

  Yes, because I didn't have to build a UI.

• 4:29Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 4:30Speaker 00

  It was just me.

• 4:30Speaker 01

  At that point, it was like the IDEs, Cursor, Win Surfer, the things that were really taking off. Were you sort of, under any pressure or getting lots of suggestions of, hey, like, we should build this out as a plugin or as a fully featured IDE itself?

• 4:43Speaker 00

  There was no pressure because we didn't even know what we wanted to build. Like, the team was just in explore mode. You know, like, we didn't, we know vaguely we wanted to do something in coding, but it wasn't obvious what, no one was high confidence enough. That was like my job to figure out. And so I gave the model the Bash tool. That was the first tool that I gave it. Just because I think that was literally the example in our docs.

• 5:03Speaker 00

  It just like took the examples in Python. I just ported it to TypeScript because that's how I wrote it. You know, I didn't know like what the model could do with Bash, so I asked it to like read a file. It could like cat the files. Like, that was cool. And then I was like, okay, like, what can you actually do? And I asked it, what music am I listening to? It wrote some like Apple script to script my Mac and look up the music in my music player.

• 5:23Speaker 02

  Oh, my God.

• 5:24Speaker 00

  And this was Sona 3.5. And, you know, like, I didn't think the model could do that. And that was my first, I think, ever feel the AJI moment, where it's just like, oh, my God, the model, it just wants to use tools. That's all it wants.

• 5:38Speaker 03

  That's kind of fascinating. I mean, it's very kind of contrarian that Clockwork works so well in such an elegant, simple form factor. I mean, terminals have been around for a really long time, and that seemed to be like a good design constraint that allowed a lot of interesting developer experiences. It doesn't feel like working. It just feels fun as a developer. I don't think about files, where everything is. And that came by accident, almost?

• 6:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, it was an accident. I remember, so after the terminal started to take off internally, and honestly, like, after building this thing, I think like two days after the first prototype, I started giving it to my team, just for dog fooding. Because, you know, like, you know, if you come up with an idea and it seems useful, the first thing you want to do is you want to give it to people to see how they use it. And then I came in the next day and then Robert, who sits across from me, he's another engineer. He just like had Quadcode on his computer and he was like using it to code. I was like, what? What are you doing? Like this thing isn't ready. It's just a prototype. But yeah, it was already useful in that form factor. And I remember when we did our launch review to kind of launch Quadcode externally, this was in December, November, or something like that in 2024.

• 6:49Speaker 00

  Dario asked and he was like, the use case chart internally, like the Dow chart is like vertical. Are you like forcing engineers to use it? Like, why are you mandating them? And I was just like, no, no, we didn't. I just like posted about it and they'd just been like telling each other about it. Honestly, it was, it was just accidental. We started with the CLI because it was the cheapest thing and it just kind of stayed there for a bit.

• 7:09Speaker 01

  So in that 2024 period, what, how were the engineers using it? Were they shipping code with it yet or were they using it in a different way?

• 7:18Speaker 00

  The model is not very good at coding yet. I was using it personally for automating Git. I think at this point, I probably forgotten most of my Git because Quadcode has just been doing it for so long. But yeah, like automating bash commands, that was a very early use case and like operating like Kubernetes and kind of things like this. People were using it for coding. So there were some early signs of this. I think the first use case was actually writing unit tests. Cause it's a little bit lower risk and the model was still pretty bad at it. But people were kind of figuring it out and they were figuring out how to use this thing. And one thing that we saw is people started writing these markdown files for themselves. And then having the model read that markdown file. And this is where QuadMD came from. Probably the single, for me, biggest principle in product is wait and demand.

• 8:02Speaker 00

  And just every bit of this product is built through wait and demand after their initial CLI. And so QuadMD is an example of that. There's this other general principle that I think is maybe interesting where you can build for the model and then you can build scaffolding around the model in order to improve performance a little bit. And depending on the domain, you can improve performance maybe 10, 20%, something like that. And then essentially the gain is wiped out with the next model. So either you can build the scaffolding and then get some performance gain and then rebuild it again, or you just wait for the next model and then you kind of get it for free. The Claude MD and the scaffolding is an example of that. And really, I think that's why we stayed in the CLI is because we felt there is no UI we could build that would still be relevant in six months because the model was improving

• 8:47Speaker 00

  so quickly.

• 8:48Speaker 02

  Earlier, we were saying we should compare Claude MDs, but you said something very profound, which is yours is actually very short, which is almost like the opposite of what people might expect. Why is that? What's in your Claude MD?

• 9:01Speaker 00

  Okay, so I checked this before we came. So my Claude MD has two things. One is it's just two lines. So the first line is whenever you put up a PR, enable auto-merge. So as soon as someone accepts it, it's merged. That's just so I can code and I don't have to go back and forth with CR or whatever. And then the second one is whenever I put up a PR, post it in our internal team stamps channel, just so someone can stamp it and I can get unblocked. And the idea is every other instruction is in our Claude MD that's checked into the codebase. And it's something our entire team contributes to multiple times a week. And very often, I'll see someone's PR and they make some mistake that's totally preventable and I'll just literally tag Claude on the PR.

• 9:46Speaker 00

  I'll just do like @Claude, add this to the Claude MD and I'll do this many times a week.

• 9:51Speaker 02

  Do you have to compact the Claude MD? I've definitely reached a point where I got the message at the top saying, your Claude MD is thousands of tokens now. What do you do when you guys hit that?

• 10:01Speaker 00

  So our Claude MD is actually pretty short. I think it's a couple thousand tokens, something like that. If you hit this, my recommendation would be delete your Claude MD and just start fresh.

• 10:10Speaker 02

  Interesting.

• 10:11Speaker 00

  I think a lot of people, they try to over-engineer this. And really, the capability changes with every model. And so the thing that you want is do the minimal possible thing in order to get the model on track. And so if you delete your quad MD and then, you know, the model is getting off track, it does the wrong thing, that's when you kind of add back a little bit at a time. And what you're probably going to find is with every model, you have to add less and less. For me, I consider myself a pretty average engineer, to be honest. Like, I don't use a lot of fancy tools, like, I don't use Vim, I use VS Code because it's somewhere. I don't really-

• 10:42Speaker 04

  Wait, really? I would have assumed that because you built this in the terminal, that you were sort of like a diehard terminal Vim, Vim-only person, you know? Screw those VS Code people.

• 10:52Speaker 00

  Well, we have people like that on the team. There's, you know, like Adam Wolf, for example, he's on the team. He's like, "You will never take Vim for my cold, dead hands." Yeah, so there's definitely a lot of people like that on the team. And this is one of the things that I learned early on, is every engineer likes to hold their dev tools differently. They like to use different tools. There's just no one tool that works for everyone. But I think also, this is one of the things that makes it possible for Quad Code to be so good. Because I kind of think about it as, what is the product that I would use that makes sense to me? And so to use Quad Code, you don't have to understand Vim, you don't have to understand T-Maxx, you don't have to know how to, like, SSH, you don't have to know all the stuff. You just have to open up the tool and it'll guide you. It'll do all the stuff.

• 11:28Speaker 02

  How do you decide how verbose you want, like, sort of the terminal to be? Like, sometimes you have to go, you know, Ctrl O and check it out. And is it like internal bike shed battles around, like, longer, shorter? I mean, every user probably has a different opinion. Like, how do you make those sorts of decisions?

• 11:45Speaker 00

  What's your opinion? Is it too verbose right now?

• 11:47Speaker 02

  Oh, I love the verboity, because basically, sometimes it just, like, goes off the deep end and I'm watching. And then I can just read very quickly and it's like, "Oh, no, no, it's not that." And then I escape and then just stop it. And then it just, like, stops an entire bug farm, like, as it's happening. I mean, that's usually when I didn't do plan mode properly.

• 12:05Speaker 00

  This is something that we probably change pretty often.

• 12:09Speaker 00

  I remember early on, this is maybe six months ago, I tried to get rid of bash output, just internally, just to, like, summarize it. Because I was like, these giant, long bash commands, I don't actually care. And then I gave it to Anthropic employees for a day and everyone just revolted.

• 12:22Speaker 00

  "I want to see my bash." Because it actually is quite useful for- You know, like for something like Git output, maybe it's not useful. But if you're running, you know, like Kubernetes jobs or something like this, you actually do want to see it. We recently hid the file reads and file searches. So you'll notice instead of saying, you know, like read foo.md said, you know, like read one file, search one pattern. And this is something I think we could not have shipped six months ago because the model just was not ready. You would have, you know, it still read the wrong thing pretty often. As a user, you still had to be there and kind of catch it and debug it. But nowadays, I just noticed it's on the right track almost every time. And because it's using tools so much, it's actually a lot better just to summarize it. But then we shipped it, we dogfooted it for like a month, and then people on GitHub didn't like it.

• 13:05Speaker 00

  So there was a big issue where people were like, no, like I want to see the details. And that was really great feedback. And so we added a new verbose mode. And so that's just like in slash config, you can enable verbose mode. And if you want to see all the file outputs, you can continue to do that. And then I posted on the issue and people still didn't like it, which is again awesome because like my favorite thing in the world is just hearing people's feedback and hearing how they actually want to use it. And so we just like iterated more and more and more to get that really good and to make it the thing that people want.

• 13:32Speaker 02

  I'm amazed like how much I enjoy fixing bugs now. And then all you have to do is have really good logging. And then even just say like, hey, check out that, you know, this particular object messed up in this way. And it like searches the log, it figures everything out. It can like go into your, you can make a production tunnel and look at your production DB for you. It's like, this is insane. Bug fixing is just going to century copy markdown, you know, pretty soon it's just going to be straight MCP. It's like an auto bug fixing, like and test making sort of, what's the new term they call it? Like a making a startup factory.

• 14:08Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 14:08Speaker 02

  Right? There's like all these concepts now of rather than having to review the code, you know, I'm, I'm old school. So I like the verboasty. I like to say, oh, well, you're doing this, but I want you to do that. Right? But there's a totally different school of thought now that says like anytime a real human being has to look at code, that's bad.

• 14:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 14:30Speaker 02

  Which is fascinating.

• 14:31Speaker 00

  I think like Dan Schipper talks about this a lot as kind of whenever you see the model make a mistake, try to put in the quad MD, try to put it in like skills or something like this, so it's reusable. But I think there's this meta point that I actually struggle with a lot. And people talk about like agents can do this, agents can do that. But actually, what agents can do, it changes with every single model. And so sometimes there's a new person that joins the team and they actually use Quadcode more than I would have used it. And I'm just constantly surprised by this. Like, for example, there was a, we had like a memory leak and we were trying to debug it. And by the way, like Jared Sumner has just been on this crusade, killing all the memory leaks. And it's just been amazing. But before Jared was on the team, I had to do this. And there was this memory leak, I was trying to debug it.

• 15:13Speaker 00

  And so I took a heap dump, I opened it in DevTools, I was looking through the profile, then I was looking through the code. And I was just trying to figure this out. And then another engineer on the team, Chris, he just like asked Quadcode. He was like, hey, I think there's a memory leak, can you like clean this? And then like try to figure it out. And Quadcode like took the heap dump, it wrote a little tool for itself to like analyze the heap dump. And then it found the leak faster than I did. And this is just something I have to constantly relearn because my brain is still stuck somewhere six months ago at times.

• 15:43Speaker 03

  So what would be some advice for technical founders to really become maximalist at the latest model release? It sounds like people off of, fresh off of school or that don't have any assumptions might be better suited than maybe sometimes engineers who have been working at it for a long time. And how do the experts get better?

• 16:05Speaker 00

  I think for yourself, it's kind of beginner mindset and I don't know, maybe just like humility. Like I feel like engineers as a discipline, we've learned to have very strong opinions and senior engineers are kind of rewarded for this. In my old job at a big company, when I hired like architects and this kind of a type of engineer, you look for people that have a lot of experience and really strong opinions. But it actually turns out a lot of this stuff just isn't relevant anymore. And a lot of these opinions should change because the model is getting better.

• 16:33Speaker 00

  So I think actually the biggest skill is people that can think scientifically and can just think from first principles.

• 16:38Speaker 03

  How do you screen for that when you try to hire someone now for your team?

• 16:42Speaker 00

  I sometimes ask about what's an example of when you're wrong? It's a really good one. You know, some of these like classic behavioral questions, like not even coding questions, I think are quite useful because you can see if people can recognize their mistake in hindsight, if they can claim credit for the mistake and if they learn something from it. And I think a lot of these like very senior people, especially there are some founder types like this, but I think founders in particular are actually quite good at it. But other people sometimes will never really take, they'll never take the blame for a mistake. But I don't know, like for me personally, I'm wrong probably half the time, like half my ideas are bad and you just have to try stuff and you know, you try a thing, you give it to users, you talk to users, you learn and then eventually you might end up at a good idea, sometimes you don't.

• 17:25Speaker 00

  And this is the skill that I think in the past was very important for founders, but now I think it's very important for every engineer.

• 17:32Speaker 02

  Do you think you would ever hire someone based on the Claude code transcript of them working with the agent? Because we're actively doing that right now. We just added, just as a test, like you can upload a transcript of you coding a feature with Claude code or Codex or whatever it is. Personally, I think that like it's going to work. I mean, you can figure out how someone thinks, like whether they're looking at the logs or not, like can they correct the agent if it goes off the rails? Like, do they use plan mode? You know, when they use plan mode, do they make sure that there are tests or, you know, all of these different things that, you know, do they think about systems? Do they even understand systems? Like, there's just so much that's sort of embedded in that that I imagine.

• 18:16Speaker 02

  I just want like a spider, a spider web graph, you know, like in those video games like NBA 2K. It's like, oh, this person's really good at shooting or defense. It's like, you can imagine a spider web graph of like, you know, someone's Claude code skill level.

• 18:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, what would the skills be? What would be those?

• 18:32Speaker 02

  I mean, I think it's like systems, testing, must be like user behavior. I mean, there's got to be a design part, for sure.

• 18:39Speaker 00

  Like product sense, maybe also just like automating stuff?

• 18:42Speaker 02

  My favorite thing in Claude MD for me is I have a thing that says for every plan. Decide whether it's over engineered, under engineered, or perfectly engineered and why.

• 18:53Speaker 00

  I think this is something that we're trying to figure out too, because I think when I look at engineers on the team that I think are the most effective, there's essentially two, it's very bimodal. There's one side where it's extreme specialists. And so like I named Jared before, like he's a really good example of this and kind of the BUN team is a really good example. Just hyper specialists, they understand DevTools better than anyone else. They understand JavaScript runtime systems better than anyone else. And then there's the flip side of kind of hyper generalists and that's kind of the rest of the team. And a lot of people, they span like product and infra or product and design. Or you know, like product and user research, product and business. I really like to see people that just do weird stuff. I think that's one of these things that was kind of a warning sign in the past. Because it's like, can these people actually build something useful?

• 19:38Speaker 02

  That's the limits test.

• 19:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's the limits test. But nowadays, like for example, an engineer on the team Daisy, she was on a different team and then she transferred on to our team. And the reason that I wanted her to transfer is she put up a PR for Quad Code like a couple of weeks after she joined or something. And the PR was to add a new feature to Quad Code. And then instead of just adding the feature, what she did is first she put up a PR to give Quad Code a tool. So that it can test an arbitrary tool and verify that that works. And then she put up that PR. And then she had Quad write its own tool instead of herself implementing it. And I think it's this kind of out of the box thinking that is just so interesting because not a lot of people get it yet. You know, like we use the Quad Agent SDK to automate pretty much every part of development.

• 20:22Speaker 00

  It automates code review, security review, it labels all of our issues, it shepherds things to production. It does pretty much everything for us. But I think externally, I'm seeing a lot of people start to figure this out. But it's actually taken a while to figure out how do you use LMS in this way? How do you use this new kind of automation? So it's kind of a new skill.

• 20:40Speaker 02

  I guess one of the funnier things that I've been having office hours with various founders about is you have like sort of the visionary founder who has like the idea. They've like built this like crystal palace of the product that they want to build. They've totally loaded in their brain. You know, who the user is and what they feel and what they're motivated by. And then they're sitting in Claude code and they can do like, you know, 50x work. And then, but they have engineers who work for them who like, don't have the, you know, crystal memory palace of like, the platonic ideal of the product that the founder has. And they can only do like 5x work. Are you hearing stories like that? There's usually a person who's like, the core, like designer of a thing.

• 21:23Speaker 02

  And they're just like, you know, trying to blast it out of their brain. What's the nature of like, teams like that? You know, it seems like that's almost a stable configuration. Like, you're gonna have the visionary who like, now is unleashed. But, you know, maybe going back to the top of it, like, I'm experiencing this right now. It's like, oh, well, I'm only a solo person. And, you know, I need to eat and sleep and I have, you know, a whole job. And it's like, how am I gonna do this, you know?

• 21:51Speaker 00

  You know, like, we just launch Quad Teams. And, you know, this is a way to do it, but you can also just build your own way to do it. It's pretty easy.

• 21:57Speaker 02

  What's the vision for Quad Teams?

• 21:59Speaker 00

  Just collaboration. It's like, there's this whole new field of like, agent topologies that people are exploring. Like, what are the ways they can configure agents? There's this one sub idea, which is uncorrelated context windows. And the idea is just multiple agents, they have fresh context windows that aren't necessarily polluted with each other's context or their own previous context. And if you throw more context at a problem, that's like a form of test and compute. And so you just get more capability that way. And then if you have the right topology on top of it, so the agents can communicate in the right way, they're laid out in the right way, then they can just build bigger stuff. And so Teams is kind of like one idea. There's a few more that are coming pretty soon. And the idea is just, maybe it can build a little bit more.

• 22:38Speaker 00

  I think the first kind of big example where it worked is, our plugins feature was entirely built by a swarm over a weekend. It just ran for like, a few days. There wasn't really human intervention. And plugins is pretty much in the form that it was when it came out.

• 22:52Speaker 02

  How did you set that up? Like, did you spec out sort of the outcome that you were hoping for? And then let it sort of figure out the details and then like, let it run?

• 23:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, an engineer on the team just gave Quad a spec and told Quad to use a Asana board. And then Quad just put up a bunch of tickets on Asana and then spawned a bunch of agents. And the agents started picking up tasks. The main Quad just gave it instructions and they all just figured it out.

• 23:19Speaker 03

  The independent. Agents that didn't have the context of the bigger spec, right?

• 23:23Speaker 00

  Right. If you, if you think about the way that, uh, you know, like how our agents actually started nowadays. And, you know, I haven't pulled the data on this, but I would bet the majority of agents are actually prompted by Claude today in the form of subagents. Cause like a subagent is just like a recursive Claude code. That's all it is in the code. And it's just prompted by, we call her Mama Claude.

• 23:43Speaker 00

  And that's all it is. And I, I think probably if you look at most agents, they're launched in this way.

• 23:47Speaker 01

  My Claude insights just told me to do this more for debugging. So that I get like, I spend a lot of time on debugging and it would just be better to have like multiple subagents spin up and like debug something in parallel. And so then I just like added that to my Claude MD to just be like, hey, like next time you try and fix a bug, like have one agent that like looks in the log, like one that looks in the code path. That just seems sort of inevitable.

• 24:08Speaker 02

  For weird scary bugs, I try to fix bugs in plan mode. And then it seems to use the agents to sort of

• 24:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:15Speaker 02

  search everything. Whereas like when you're just trying to do it in line, it's like, okay, I'm going to do like this one task instead of search wide.

• 24:22Speaker 00

  This is something I do all the time too. I just say, if the, if the task seems kind of hard, this kind of research task, I'll calibrate the number of subagents I ask it to use based on the difficulty of the task. So if it's like really hard, I'll say like use three or maybe five or even 10 subagents. Research in parallel and then see what they come up with.

• 24:38Speaker 01

  I'm curious, so then why don't you put that in your Claude MD file?

• 24:42Speaker 00

  It's kind of case by case, you know, like Claude MD, like what is it? It's just a, it's a shortcut. Like if you find yourself repeating the same thing over and over, you put in the Claude MD. But otherwise you don't have to put everything there. You can just prompt Claude.

• 24:54Speaker 01

  Are you also in the back of your mind thinking that maybe like in six months, you won't need to prompt that explicitly, like the model would just be good enough to trigger out on its own?

• 25:02Speaker 00

  Maybe in a month.

• 25:05Speaker 03

  No more need for plan mode in a month?

• 25:07Speaker 02

  Oh my God.

• 25:08Speaker 00

  I think plan mode probably has a limited lifespan.

• 25:10Speaker 02

  Interesting.

• 25:10Speaker 03

  That's some alpha for everyone here. What would the world look like without plan mode? Do you just describe it at the prompt level and it would just do it, one shot it?

• 25:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, we've, uh, we've started experimenting with this because Claude code can now enter plan mode by itself. I don't know if you've, you guys have seen that.

• 25:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:26Speaker 00

  So we're, we're trying to kind of get this experience really good. So it would enter plan mode the same point where a human would have wanted to enter it. So I think it's like, I think it's something like this. But actually plan mode, there's no, there's no big secret to it. All it does is it adds one sentence to the prompt. That's like, please don't code. That's all it is. You can actually just say that.

• 25:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:45Speaker 03

  So it sounds like a lot of the feature development for Claude is very much what we talk about at YC. Talk to your users and then you come and implement it. It wasn't the other way that you had this master plan and then implemented all the features.

• 25:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's all it was. Like Plan Mode was, we saw users that were like, hey Claude, come up with an idea. Plan this out, but don't write any code yet. And there was kind of various versions of this. Sometimes it was just talking through an idea. Sometimes it was these very sophisticated specs that they were asking Claude to write. But the common dimension was do a thing without coding yet. And so literally like, this was like Sunday night at 10pm. I was just like looking at GitHub issues and kind of seeing what people were talking about and looking at our internal Slack feedback channel. And I just wrote this thing in like 30 minutes and then shipped it that night. It went out Monday morning. That was Plan Mode.

• 26:31Speaker 01

  So do you mean that there will be no need for Plan Mode? In the sense of, I'm worried that the model's gonna do like, it's gonna do like the wrong thing or head off in the wrong direction, but there will still be a need for that? You need to think through the idea and figure out exactly what it is that you want? And you have to do that somewhere.

• 26:47Speaker 00

  I kind of think about it in terms of like kind of increasing model capabilities. So maybe six months ago, a plan was insufficient. So you get Claude to make a plan, let's say even with Plan Mode, you still have to kind of sit there and babysit because it can go off track. Nowadays, what I do is probably 80% of my sessions, I say Plan Mode has a limited lifespan, but I'm a heavy Plan Mode user. Probably 80% of my sessions, I start in Plan Mode. And Claude will, you know, it'll start, he'll start making a plan. I'll move on to my second terminal tab and then I'll have it make another plan. And then when I run out of tabs, I open the desktop app. And then I go to the code tab and then I just start a bunch of tabs there. And they all start in Plan Mode, probably like 80% of the time. Once the plan is good, and sometimes it takes a little back and forth, I just get Claude to execute.

• 27:30Speaker 00

  And nowadays, what I find with Opus 4.5, I think it started with 4.6, it got really good. Once the plan is good, it just stays on track and it'll just do the thing exactly right almost every time. And so, you know, before you had to babysit after the plan and before the plan. Now it's just before the plan. So maybe the next thing is you just won't have to babysit. You can just kind of give a prompt and Claude will figure it out.

• 27:51Speaker 01

  The next step is Claude just speaks to your users directly. Yeah, it just bypasses you entirely.

• 27:58Speaker 00

  It's funny, this is actually the current stuff for us. Our quads actually like, they talk to each other, they talk to our users on Slack, at least internally, pretty often. My quad will like tweet once in a while. No way. But I actually like delete it. It's just like, it's a little like cheesy. Like, I don't love the tone. What does it want to tweet about? Sometimes it'll just like respond to someone, because I always have like coworking running in the background. And it's like, it's the coworker quad that really loves to do that, because it likes using a browser. That's funny. A really common pattern is I ask Quad to build something, it'll look in the codebase, it'll see some engineer touch something in the Git flame, and then it'll message that engineer on Slack, just like asking a clarifying question. And then, once it gets an answer back, it'll keep going.

• 28:37Speaker 03

  What are some tips for founders now on how to build for the future? It sounds like everything is really changing. What are like some principles that we'll stay on and what will change?

• 28:47Speaker 00

  So I think some of these are pretty, are pretty basic, but I think they're even more important now than they were before. So one example is latent demand. Like, I mentioned it a thousand times. For me, it's just like the single biggest idea in product. It's a, it's a thing that no one understands. It's a thing I certainly did not understand my first few startups. And, and the idea is like, people will only do a thing that they already do. You can't get people to do a new thing. If people are trying to do a thing and you make it easier, that's a good idea. But if, if people are doing a thing and you try to make them do a different thing, they're not going to do that. And so you just have to make the thing that they're trying to do easier. And I think Quad is going to get increasingly good at kind of figuring out these kind of product ideas for you, just because it can look at feedback, it can look at debug logs, like kind of figure this out.

• 29:28Speaker 01

  That's what I mean by plan mode was latent demand, that people already like, and had their Claude chat window open in the browser and were like, talking to it to figure out like the spec and, and what it should do. And now that like plan mode just became that, you just do it in Claude code.

• 29:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, that's it. Sometimes what I'll do is I'll just walk around the office on, on our floor and I'll just kind of stand behind people. I'll say like hi, so it's not great. And then I'll just see kind of like how they're using Quotcode. And this is also just something I saw a lot. But it also came up in GitHub issues, like people were talking about it.

• 30:01Speaker 01

  It seems like you're surprised how far the terminal has gone and how far it's been pushed. Like, how far do you think it has left to go? Just given with this world of swarm, multiple agents, like, do you think there's going to be a new, a need for a different UI on top of it?

• 30:17Speaker 00

  It's funny, if you asked me this a year ago, I would have said the terminal has like a three month lifespan, and then we're going to move on to the next thing. And you can see us experimenting with this, right? Because Quotcode started in a terminal, but now it's in, you know, it's on web. You can like Quotays hashcode, it's in the desktop app. You know, we've had that for, you know, like three months or six months or something, just in the code tab. It's in the iOS and Android apps, just like in the code tab. It's in Slack, it's in GitHub, there's VS Code extensions, there's JetBrains extensions. So we're just like, we're always experimenting with different form factors for this thing to figure out what's the next thing. I've been wrong so far about the lifespan of the CLI, so I'm probably not the person to forecast.

• 30:56Speaker 01

  What about like your advice to DevTools founders? Like, someone's building a DevTools company today. Should they just like be building for engineers and humans? Or should they be thinking more about like what Claude is going to think and want and build for sort of like the agent?

• 31:11Speaker 00

  The way I would frame it is think about the thing that the model wants to do and figure out how do you make that easier? And that's something that we saw, you know, like when I first started hacking on Quotcode, I realized like this thing just wants to use tools. It just wants to interact with the world. And how do you, how do you enable that? Well, the way you don't do it is you put it in a box. And you're like, here's the API, here's how you interact with me, and here's how you interact with the world. The way you do it is you see what tools it wants to use, you see what it's trying to do, and you enable that, the same way that you do for your users. And so like for, if you're building a DevTools startup, I would think about like, what is the problem you want to solve for the user? And then when you use, when you apply the model to solving this problem, what is the thing the model wants to do? And then what is the technical and product solution that serves the latent demand of both?

• 31:56Speaker 02

  YC's next batch is now taking applications. Got a startup in you? Apply at ycombinator.com/apply. It's never too early, and filling out the app will level up your idea. Okay, back to the video.

• 32:10Speaker 03

  Back in the day, more than 10 years ago, you were a very heavy, heavy user, and you wrote a book about TypeScript, right? Before TypeScript was cool. This is when everyone was deep in JavaScript. This is back in early 2010s, right?

• 32:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, something like that.

• 32:26Speaker 03

  Before TypeScript was a thing because back then is a very weird language. It's not supposed to do a lot of things with being typed in JavaScript. And now is the right thing. And it feels like Claude Code in the terminal has a lot of parallels with TypeScript at the beginning.

• 32:44Speaker 00

  TypeScript makes a lot of really weird language decisions. So if you look at the type system, pretty much anything can be a literal type. For example, and this is like, this is super weird because like even like Haskell doesn't even do this. It's just like, it's too extreme. Or it has like conditional types, which I don't think any language thought of at all.

• 33:05Speaker 03

  It was like very strongly typed.

• 33:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, it was very strongly that. And the idea was like when, you know, like when Joe Pomer and Anders and the early team was like building this thing. The way they built it is that we, okay, we have these teams with these big untyped JavaScript code bases. We have to get types in there, but we're not going to get engineers to change that the way that they code. You're not going to get JavaScript people to have like, you know, 15 layers of class inheritance like you would a Java programmer.

• 33:28Speaker 03

  Right.

• 33:28Speaker 00

  They're going to write code the way they're going to write it. They're, they're going to use a reflection and they're going to use a mutation. And they're going to use all these features that traditionally are very, very difficult to type.

• 33:36Speaker 03

  They're a very unsafe type to any strong functional programmer, really.

• 33:40Speaker 00

  That's all right. That's all right. That's all right. And so the thing that they did, instead of getting people to kind of change the way that they code, they, they built a type system around this. And it was just, it's brilliant because there's all of these ideas that no one was thinking about. Even in academia, like no one thought of a bunch of these ideas. It purely came out of the practice of observing people and seeing how JavaScript programmers want to write code. And so, you know, for, for Claude Code, there, there are some ideas that are kind of similar in that, you know, like you can use it like a Unix utility. You can pipe into it, you can pipe out of it. In some ways it is kind of rigorous in this way, but in, in almost every other way, it's just the tool that we wanted. Like I, I built a tool for myself and then the team built the tool for themselves. And then for Anthropic employees and then for users. And it just ends up being really useful.

• 34:24Speaker 00

  It's not, it's not this like principled and academic thing.

• 34:27Speaker 03

  Which I think the, the proof is actually in the results now. Fast forward more than 15 years later. Not many codebases are in Haskell, which is more academic. And there's tons of them now in TypeScript because it's way more practical.

• 34:41Speaker 00

  Right.

• 34:42Speaker 03

  Which is interesting.

• 34:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, it is interesting, right? It's like TypeScript solves a problem.

• 34:45Speaker 03

  I guess one thing that's cool, I don't know how many people know, but the terminal is actually one of the most beautiful terminal apps out there and is actually written with React terminal.

• 34:57Speaker 00

  When I first started building it, you know, like I did front-end engineering for a while. So, and I was also like, you know, I'm sort of like a hybrid, like I do like design and user research and, you know, write code and all this stuff. And we love hiring engineers that are like this. So we just, we love generalists. So for me, it's like, okay, I'm building a thing for the terminal. I'm actually kind of a shitty Vim user. So like, how do I build a thing for people like me that, you know, are going to be working in a terminal? And I think just the delight is so important. And I feel like at YC, this is something you talk about a lot, right? It's like build a thing that people love. If the product is useful, but you don't fall in love with it, that's not great. So it kind of has to do both. Designing for the terminal honestly has been hard, right? It's like, it's like 80 by 100 characters or whatever.

• 35:39Speaker 00

  You have like 256 colors, you have one font size, you don't have like mouse interactions. There's all this stuff you can't do and there's all these very hard trade-offs. So like a little known thing, for example, is you can actually enable mouse interactions in a terminal. So you can enable like clicking and stuff. Oh, how do you do that in Claude code? I've been trying to figure out how to do this. We don't, we don't have it in Claude code because we actually prototyped it a few times and it felt really bad because the trade-off is you have to virtualize scrolling. And so there's all these weird trade-offs because like the way terminals work is like there's no DOM, right? It's like, there's like anti-escape codes and these kind of weird organically evolved specs since like the 1960s or whatever.

• 36:14Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, it feels like BBSs. It's like a BBS door game.

• 36:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 36:17Speaker 02

  Oh my gosh.

• 36:18Speaker 00

  That's like, that's like a great compliment.

• 36:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, it should feel like you're discovering.

• 36:22Speaker 02

  Lord of the Red Dragon, it's fantastic. Oh my God.

• 36:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, but we have, we've had to just like discover all these kind of UX principles for building the terminal because no one really writes about this stuff. And if you look at the big terminal apps of, you know, like the 80s or 90s or 2000s or whatever, they use like ed curses and they have all these like windows and things like this. And it just looks kind of like janky by modern standards. It just looks too heavy and complicated. And so we had to like reinvent a lot. And you know, for example, something like the terminal spinner, like just like the spinner words, it's gone through probably. I want to say like 50, maybe 100 iterations at this point. And probably 80% of those didn't ship. So we tried it, it didn't feel good, move on to the next one, try it, didn't feel good, move on to the next one. And this was like sort of one of the amazing things about Claude Code, right? It's like you can write these prototypes and you can just do like 20 prototypes back to back.

• 37:09Speaker 00

  See which one you like and then ship that and the whole thing takes maybe a couple of hours. Whereas in the past, what you would have had to do is like weren't to use Origami or Framer or something like this. You built like maybe three prototypes, it took like two weeks. It just took much, much longer. And so we have this luxury of we have to discover this new thing. We have to build a thing. We don't know what the right endpoint is, but we can iterate there so quickly. And that's what makes it really easy. And that's what lets us build a product that's like joyous and that people like to use.

• 37:36Speaker 04

  Boris, you had other advice for builders and we kept interrupting you because we have so many questions.

• 37:43Speaker 00

  I would say, so, okay, so maybe two pieces of advice that are kind of weird because it's like about building for the model. So one is don't build for the model of today, build for the model of six months from now. This is like sort of weird, right? Because like you can't find PMF if the product doesn't work. But actually, this is the thing that you should do because otherwise what will happen is you spend a bunch of work. You find PMF for the product right now and then you're just going to get leapfrogged by someone else. Because they're building for the next model and a new model comes out every few months. Use the model, feel out the boundary of what it can do and then build for the model that you think will be the model maybe six months from now. I think the second thing is, you know, actually in the Claude Code, we're in the Claude Code area where we sit. We have a framed copy of the bitter lesson on the wall.

• 38:24Speaker 00

  And this is this like Rich Sutton, like everyone should read it if you haven't. And the idea is the more general model will always beat the more specific model. And there's a lot of corollaries to this, but essentially what it boils down to is never bet against the model. And so this is just like a thing to that we always think about. Where we could build a feature into Claude Code, we could make it better as a product. And we call this scaffolding. It's all this code that's not the model itself. But we could also just wait like a couple of months and the model can probably just do the thing instead. And there's a way to straight off, right? It's like engineering work now and you can kind of extend the capability a little bit, maybe 10, 20% or whatever, in whatever domain. On this like, you know, like the spider chart of what you're trying to extend. Or you can just wait and the next model will do it.

• 39:09Speaker 00

  So just always, always think in terms of this trade off. Where, where do you actually want to invest? And assume that whatever the scaffolding is, it's just tech debt.

• 39:16Speaker 03

  How often do you rewrite the codebase of Claude Code? Is this every six months with this first physical?

• 39:23Speaker 04

  Is there scaffolding that you've deleted because you don't need it anymore? Because the model's just improved?

• 39:26Speaker 00

  Oh, so much. Yeah, like all of Quad Code has just been written and rewritten and rewritten and rewritten over and over and over. We unship tools every couple of weeks. We add new tools every couple of weeks. There is no part of Quad Code that was around six months ago. It's just constantly rewritten.

• 39:41Speaker 03

  Would you say that most of the code base for our current Quad Code is only, say, 80% of it is only less than a couple of months old?

• 39:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, definitely. It might even be like less than, yeah, maybe like a couple of months. That feels about right.

• 39:53Speaker 03

  So it's like the lifecycle of code now, that's another alpha is expecting it to be the shelf life to be just a couple of months.

• 39:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 39:59Speaker 03

  For the best founders.

• 40:00Speaker 02

  Did you see Steve Yegi's post about how awesome working at Anthropic is? And I think there's a line in there that says that an Anthropic engineer currently averages 1,000x more productivity than a Google engineer at Google's peak, which is really an insane number, honestly. Like 1,000x, like, you know, we're, three years ago, we were still talking about 10x engineers. Now we're talking about 1,000x on top of a Google engineer in the prime? Like, this is unbelievable, honestly.

• 40:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, internally, if you look at like technical employees, they all use Quad Code every day. And even non-technical employees, I think like half the sales team uses Quad Code. They've started switching to cowork because it's a little easier to use. It has like a VM, so it's a little bit safer. But yeah, we actually, we just pulled the stat and I think the team doubled in size last year, but productivity per engineer grew something like 70%.

• 40:53Speaker 04

  As measured by?

• 40:54Speaker 00

  Just like the simplest, stupidest measure, pull requests. But we also kind of cross-checked that against like commits and like the lifetime of commits and things like this. And since Quad Code came out, productivity per engineer at Anthropic has grown 150%.

• 41:06Speaker 02

  Oh, my God.

• 41:07Speaker 00

  And this is crazy because I, in my old life, I was responsible for code quality at Meta. And I was responsible for the quality of all of our code bases across every product, across like, you know, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, whatever. And one of the things that the team worked on was improving productivity. And back then, seeing a gain of something like 2% in productivity, that was like a year of work by hundreds of people. And so this like 100%, this is just like unheard of, just completely unheard of.

• 41:35Speaker 02

  What drew you to come over to Anthropic? I mean, basically, as a builder, you could go anywhere. What was the moment that made you say like, actually, this is the set of people or this is the approach?

• 41:45Speaker 00

  I was living in rural Japan and I was opening up Hacker News every morning and I was reading the news. And it was all, it just started to be like AI stuff at some point. And I started to use some of these early products. And I remember like the first couple of times that I used it, I was just like, it just took my breath away. That was like very cheesy to say, but that was actually, that was actually the feeling like it was just like, it was amazing. Like as a, as a builder, I've just never kind of felt, felt this feeling like using these very, very early products. That was like in the quad two days or, you know, something like that. And so I just started talking to friends at labs just to kind of see what was going on. And I met Ben Mann, who's one of the founders at Anthropic. And he just immediately won me over.

• 42:31Speaker 00

  And as soon as I met kind of the rest of the team at Ant, it just won me over. And I think, I think probably in two ways. So one is it operates as a research lab. So the product work was teeny, teeny tiny. It's really all about building a safe model. That's all that matters. And so this idea of just being very close to the model and being very close to development and being not the most important thing, because the product isn't anymore. It's just the model is the thing that's the most important. That really resonated with me after building product for many years. And then the second thing was just how mission driven it is. Like I'm, I'm a huge sci-fi reader. My bookshelf was just like filled with sci-fi. And so like, I just know how bad this can go. And when I kind of think about what's going to happen this year, you know, it's going to be totally insane.

• 43:15Speaker 00

  And in the worst case, it can go very, very bad. And so I just wanted to be at a place that really understood that and kind of really internalize that. And at Ant, you know, like if you overhear conversations in the lunchroom or in the hallway, people are talking about AI safety. This is really the thing that everyone cares about more than anything. And so I just wanted to be in a place like that. I know, I know for me personally, the mission is just so important.

• 43:37Speaker 02

  What is going to happen this year?

• 43:40Speaker 00

  Okay, so if you think back like six months ago, and kind of what are the predictions that people are making? So Dario predicted that 90% of the code at Anthropic would be written by quad. This is true. For me personally, it's been 100% for like since Opus 4.5. I uninstalled my IDE. I don't edit a single line of code by hand. It's just 100% quad code in Opus. And you know, I land like 20 PRs a day every day. If you look at Anthropic overall, it ranges between like 70 to 90%, depending on the team. For a lot of teams, it's also like 100%. For a lot of people, it's 100%. And I remember making this prediction back in May when we GA'd quad code, that you wouldn't need an IDE to code anymore. And it was totally crazy to say.

• 44:24Speaker 00

  I feel like people in the audience gasped because it was such like a silly prediction at the time. But really, all it is, is like you just like trace the exponential. And this is just like so deep in the DNA at hand because like, you know, three of our founders were co-authors of the Scaling Laws paper. They kind of, they saw this very early. And so this is just like tracing the exponential. This is what's going to happen. And yes, that happened. So continuing to trace the exponential, I think what will happen is coding will be generally solved for everyone. And I think today, coding is practically solved for me. And I think it'll be the case for everyone, regardless of domain. I think we're gonna start to see the title of software engineer go away. And I think it's just gonna be maybe builder, maybe product manager. Maybe we'll keep the title as kind of a vestigial thing. But the work that people do, it's not just gonna be coding.

• 45:09Speaker 00

  It's software engineers are also gonna be writing specs. They're gonna be talking to users. Like this thing that we're starting to see right now in our team, where engineers are very much generalists and every single function on our team codes, like our PM's code, our designer's code, our EM codes, our finance guy codes, like everyone on our team codes. We're gonna start to see this everywhere. So this is sort of, this is kind of like the lower bound if we just continue with the trend. The upper bound, I think, is a lot scarier. And this is something like, you know, we hit ASL four. And, you know, at Anthropic, we talked about these safety levels. ASL three is where the models are right now. ASL four is the model is recursively self-improving. And so if this happens, essentially, we have to meet a bunch of criteria before we can release a model.

• 45:54Speaker 00

  And so the the extreme is that, you know, this happens. Or there's some kind of catastrophic misuse. Like, people are using the model to design bioviruses, design zero days, stuff like this. And this is something that we're really, really actively working on so that doesn't happen. I think it's just been, honestly, it's just been like so exciting and humbling, like seeing how people are using Claude Code. Like, you know, I just wanted to build a cool thing and it ended up being really useful. And that was so surprising and so exciting.

• 46:21Speaker 01

  My impression from Twitter or just the outside is basically everyone went away over the holidays and then like found out about Claude Code. And it's just been crazy ever since. But is that how it was for you at, like, Interna? Did you, were you having like a nice Christmas break and then came back here? Like, what happened?

• 46:37Speaker 00

  Well, actually, for all of December, I was traveling around and I took a coding vacation. So we were kind of traveling around and I was just like coding every day. So that was really nice. And then I also started to use Twitter at the time because like I worked on threads back then, way back when. So I've been a threads user for a while. So I just like tried to see kind of like other platforms where people are. Yeah, I think for a lot of people, they kind of discover, that was the moment where they discovered Opus 4.5. I kind of already knew. And internally, Claude Code's just been on this like exponential tear for many, many months now. So that just like it became even more steep. That's what we saw. And if you look at Claude Code now, you know, there was some stat from Mercury that like 70% of startups are, you know, choosing Claude as their model of choice.

• 47:18Speaker 00

  There were some other stat from like semi-analysis that 4% of all public commits are made by Claude Code. Like of all code written everywhere. All the companies, you know, use Claude Code from like the biggest companies to kind of, you know, smaller startups. You know, like it wrote, it plotted the course for perseverance, like for like the Mars rover. This is just like, this is the coolest thing for me. And we like, we even printed posters because the team was like, wow, this is just like so cool. The NASA chooses to use this thing. So, yeah, it's just like, it's humbling, but it also feels like the very beginning.

• 47:47Speaker 02

  What's the sort of interaction between Claude Code and then CoWork? Like, was it a fork of Claude Code? Was it like you had Claude Code look at the Claude Code code and say, "Let's make a new spec for non-technical people that keeps all the lessons." And then it sort of went off for a couple of days and did that? What's the genesis of that? And where do you think that goes?

• 48:11Speaker 00

  This is gonna be like my fifth time using the word wait and demand.

• 48:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:15Speaker 00

  It was just that. I mean, like, we were looking at Twitter and there was like that one guy that was using Claude Code to like monitor his tomato plants. There was like this other person that was using it to like recover wedding photos off of a corrupted hard drive. There are people that are using it for like for finance. When we looked internally at Anthropic, every designer is using it. All the entire finance team at this point is using it. The entire data science team is using it not for coding. People are jumping over hoops to install a thing in the terminal so that they can use this. So we knew for a while that we wanted to build something. And so we're experimenting with a bunch of different ideas. And the thing that kind of took off was just, you know, a little Claude Code wrapper in a GUI in the desktop app. And that's all it is. It's just Claude Code under the hood. It's the same agent.

• 48:54Speaker 02

  Oh, wow.

• 48:55Speaker 00

  And Felix and the team. And Felix was an early Electron contributor. He kind of knows that stack really well. And he was hacking on various ideas. And they built it in, I think, something like 10 days. It was just like 100% written by Claude Code. And it just felt ready to release. There was a lot of stuff that we had to build for non-technical users. So it's a little bit different than technical audience. It runs in a-- all the code runs in a virtual machine. There's a lot of protections for deletion and things like this. There's a lot of permission prompting and kind of other guardrails for users. But yeah, it was honestly pretty obvious.

• 49:32Speaker 02

  Boris, thank you so much for making something that is taking away all my sleep. But in return, it's making me feel creator mode again, sort of founder mode again. It's been an exhilarating three weeks. I can't believe I waited that long since November to actually get into it. Thank you so much for being with us. Thank you for building what you're building.

• 49:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, thanks for having me. And send bugs.

• 49:56Speaker 02

  Sounds good.