Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:47:19 · Lenny Rachitsky
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00:48:33 · Simon Willison
[00:48:33] S0: So right now, I'm mostly Claude. I do a huge amount of work using Claude code. Well, I'm mainly still a Claude Code person, but there are two sides of Claude Code that I use. There's the Claude Code that runs on your computer, and then there's Claude Code for web, which is their hosted version of Claude Code. And I use that one more than the one on my own computer, partly because that's the one you can access through your phone. If you've got the Anthropic Claude app installed on the iPhone, there's a code tab and you can go in there and you can tell it to write you things. And that, it's running on their servers. You need to give it a GitHub repository of yours that it can work within. But it's also great from a security point of view because if you're running Claude code on your laptop, there's risks that bad things can happen. It might accidentally delete things. If I'm running on an Anthropic servers, I couldn't care less. It's their computer, it's not my computer. Go wild. So this means that you can run these things in YOLO mode. Claude calls it dangerously skip permissions. OpenAI actually do call it YOLO. They've got an option for that, and that's the mode where the agent doesn't ask you if it should do something all the time. And that is a different product. I think a lot of people who haven't got on board with coding agents yet haven't tried them in the unsafe mode. They're using the coding agent where it's like, "Oh, can I run this piece of code? Can I edit this file?" And that means you have to pay complete attention to it the whole time, and it's like working with a really frustrating toddler that's constantly nagging you about what... Really frustrating toddler that's constantly nagging you about what it wants to do. The moment you take the safeties off, now I can run four of them and go and have a cup of tea and come back and they've achieved something useful for me, but it's inherently unsafe. If it's running in Claude Code for web, the only bad thing that could happen is maybe it accidentally leaks your private source code. And my code is all open source, so I don't care. That's a useful trick there. But yeah, so I use that on my phone. I often have two or three of those running. A lot of my major projects are done mostly prompting on my phone.
00:50:38 · Simon Willison
If it's security adjacent or super important, I might pull it down to my laptop to do a thorough review later on. But most of the review you can do through GitHub. These things will file pull requests and then you use the same tools you'd use to review code from other people to review the code from the agents. That said, OpenAI came out with GPT 5.4 about three weeks ago. It's very, very, very good. I think it's on par with Claude Opus 4.6, and possibly even better. These companies are constantly leapfrogging each other. So I have been leaning ... It's also cheaper. So I've been leaning on GPT 5.4 a lot more this month, and OpenAI Codex, and OpenAI Codex and Claude Code are almost, almost indistinguishable from each other now. They're both very, very good pieces of software. And I kind of expect this to happen. The next Gemini model comes out might become the best coding model for a couple of months, in which case I might switch myself into that ecosystem. Partly because I write about this stuff as well. I like to stay familiar with as many of the offerings as possible. But I keep on coming back to Claude Code, mainly because it fits my taste. There's this weird thing where I've got a very specific taste in how I like code to work, which coincidentally happens to map to how Claude Code likes to work, which is kind of interesting. And GPT 5.4, it almost matches my taste, but not quite. And maybe that's because I've just spent more time with Claude, so my prompting style has evolved more to fit the Claude way of thinking. I don't know. This stuff's all so weird. It's vibes all the way down.
00:52:07 · Lenny Rachitsky, Simon Willison
[00:52:07] S1: That is so interesting. So, the taste is the code, the quality of the code it puts out is what you're talking about, not like the conversation and the UX. [00:52:14] S0: Absolutely. Don't care about how they talk to me. I'm using them to get stuff done. Yeah. [00:52:19] S1: Yeah. Because I was thinking as you're talking, what is the thing that will get someone to stick with a model? And it could be what you're describing, the way it writes code. It could be the UX, it could be the conversation vibes.
00:52:19 · Lenny Rachitsky, Simon Willison
[00:52:19] S1: Yeah. Because I was thinking as you're talking, what is the thing that will get someone to stick with a model? And it could be what you're describing, the way it writes code. It could be the UX, it could be the conversation vibes. [00:52:33] S0: Well, the stickiest thing is meant to be memory. They all have these features where they will remember things about you. And I hate those features and I turn them off wherever I can, because mainly because as an AI researcher, I need to see what everyone else sees when I'm prompting. I don't want to say to the world, "Oh, my goodness, look, this thing works now." And it sounds like it only works for me, because it's based on previous conversations that I've had. And maybe I'm missing out on something really important there. But the memory feature is that thing that all of the labs are trying to be more [inaudible 00:53:08]. That said, when the OpenAI military stuff happened a few weeks ago, Anthropic took advantage by saying, "Hey, why don't you move to Claude?" And the way they did that is they had a Claude onboarding page that said, "Transfer your memories from ChatGPT by clicking this button and then pasting it into ChatGPT." And it was just a prompt. They had a prompt, which was, "Hey, ChatGPT, tell me everything that you've remembered about me." And so you paste that prompt into ChatGPT and it gives you all of their memories, and then you paste them into Claude. And I thought that was hilarious. A whole export move from one to the other just by prompting it to give you the information you needed.
00:53:48 · Lenny Rachitsky, Simon Willison
[00:53:48] S1: Yeah. It always felt like that was hard to extract, and they made it so easy. And that was such a moment for Anthropic. They were like the number one app in the App Store, such a interesting, not what you'd expect when they were being banned by the government, essentially. Is there any other AI tools that you find really useful just along the side like Wispr Flow, anything along those lines? [00:54:10] S0: I use Claude for the code stuff. The other thing that I use a lot of is for research. And this is this thing where a couple of years ago, if you told me that you were replacing user Google with ChatGPT, I'd assume that you just didn't understand how this technology worked in its limitations, because that was a terrible idea. Now that all of the major models have really good search integration, they're just better at searching than I am. I can ask them a question and watch them fire off five searches in parallel for aspects of answering that question, pull the data back. And if it's something I'm going to publish, I always double check, make sure it didn't hallucinate a detail, because that would be embarrassing. But honestly, I hardly use Google search directly at all. I'm always using it via ... I'm doing searches via Claude or via ChatGPT, or sometimes via the Gemini app, that's a good option as well. And then I mean, for image generation, I'm using Gemini because of Nano Banana, but I only use that for fun. I don't publish images I generate, I use them for pranks, and that's great. That's deeply entertaining.