Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:35:08 · Lenny Rachitsky, Fiona Fung
[00:35:08] S0: Yeah. Coming back to the way that your teams operate, you guys are so at the edge of what's possible and the role of just engineering has changed so much. I'm curious what you think is the next kind of frontier of how engineering in particular is going to change. Is it like fleets of agents? Is it something else? Just what's the next big shift to how engineers operate that either you're already working on or implementing or just is starting to happen? [00:35:36] S1: I would say we're shifting more towards async, like asynchronous. And so to your point, the fleets of agent, like that's why routines is so interesting because it's almost like I used to be doing a prompt and synchronously and then I would maybe kick off different props asynchronously, but now I can actually have a routine that actually generates these prompts for me. So it's almost like the level of abstraction keeps pulling up a little bit. And so yeah, I wish I have a crystal ball to see what this is going to look like. It'd be fun actually for you and me to revisit a year from now. [00:36:09] S0: No, I want to hear more about this. So help us understand what is routines and then when you say synchronous, you're writing a prompt and it just kind of goes off and is it writing it immediately? Talk about what this actually looks like.
00:36:09 · Lenny Rachitsky, Fiona Fung
[00:36:09] S0: No, I want to hear more about this. So help us understand what is routines and then when you say synchronous, you're writing a prompt and it just kind of goes off and is it writing it immediately? Talk about what this actually looks like. [00:36:21] S1: Ah. Yeah. So routines is like how you can... So if you remember, I was chatting about my... What I used to do is always wake up with my morning cup of coffee and, "Hey, look through this Slack channel for me." But then now I have a routine that I set to run every morning at a certain time. [00:36:21] S0: It's like a chronic job. [00:36:37] S1: To say hey. That's right. But then it's able to actually go and kick off agents on your behalf because even before it would be, oh, you could, yeah, do a chronic job to automate, but now it's, "Hey, look at these feedback." And then if you're seeing some of these bugs, that what are some polish fixes that you might be able to knock out? And then it would go kickoff and then I wake up and I end up having PRs that I could review versus before, which is still more of AI can have different agents. And then I'm still thinking about, okay, now what do I do with this information? So it's like that higher level abstraction of, okay, now how can I actually write a routine that also basically does prompts for me for spawning different agents? So I think we'll move more towards that kind of asynchronous style of working.
00:36:37 · Fiona Fung, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:36:37] S1: To say hey. That's right. But then it's able to actually go and kick off agents on your behalf because even before it would be, oh, you could, yeah, do a chronic job to automate, but now it's, "Hey, look at these feedback." And then if you're seeing some of these bugs, that what are some polish fixes that you might be able to knock out? And then it would go kickoff and then I wake up and I end up having PRs that I could review versus before, which is still more of AI can have different agents. And then I'm still thinking about, okay, now what do I do with this information? So it's like that higher level abstraction of, okay, now how can I actually write a routine that also basically does prompts for me for spawning different agents? So I think we'll move more towards that kind of asynchronous style of working. [00:37:23] S0: So interesting. So in a sense as a manager, you have these kind of things you do daily and what you're saying here is you can set up these prompts that kind of check in every day on the things you would be doing. Like how are the projects going? What's falling behind? What should I unblock? Who's struggling? And how do I improve some polish? And so the idea here, what you're describing here is write these things that you almost do as a manager daily and have Claude essentially do them for you and then show you, here's what I'm doing, here's what there is to review. [00:37:54] S1: And then it's even like, then giving even more autonomy at some point of, you know what, go for it. For example, a verification-
00:37:54 · Fiona Fung, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:37:54] S1: And then it's even like, then giving even more autonomy at some point of, you know what, go for it. For example, a verification- [00:38:01] S0: [inaudible 00:38:01]. [00:38:00] S1: Is really good. [00:38:01] S0: Yeah. [00:38:02] S1: Go for it. [00:38:03] S0: I see. So you give it a little bit of freedom to do more of this? [00:38:05] S1: Yeah. [00:38:06] S0: Okay. That is so interesting. It reminds me, speaking on this idea of go for it, like I wasn't planning to talk about this, but I just watched Tyler Cowen had this awesome talk about just like what's happening. I don't know if you know Tyler Cowen, this really smart dude, economist, has a podcast. There's so much talk of the people that are doing best in this world. His term is initiative. They have initiative. Another term people use, agency. Is that something just like, people hear this a lot, just like the people that seem to be doing best are taking the most initiative, getting the most proactive, have the most agency. Does that kind of spark any thoughts to you, just what people may need to, I don't know, think about or improve on?
00:38:06 · Lenny Rachitsky, Fiona Fung
[00:38:06] S0: Okay. That is so interesting. It reminds me, speaking on this idea of go for it, like I wasn't planning to talk about this, but I just watched Tyler Cowen had this awesome talk about just like what's happening. I don't know if you know Tyler Cowen, this really smart dude, economist, has a podcast. There's so much talk of the people that are doing best in this world. His term is initiative. They have initiative. Another term people use, agency. Is that something just like, people hear this a lot, just like the people that seem to be doing best are taking the most initiative, getting the most proactive, have the most agency. Does that kind of spark any thoughts to you, just what people may need to, I don't know, think about or improve on? [00:38:47] S1: Actually, I love that word: agency. That's what we really hold important on the Claude Code and Cowork team. But it's interesting, I say along with high, because we really, it's about like, "Hey, here's a problem." And then it's really everybody on the team has ideas for how to address the problem. So it's really high agency. And then we say with high agency, it's also high accountability. So it's all about making sure folks have that freedom to cook, but then it's also like, okay, what's the accountability for it as well? And again, it goes back to what's a hypothesis of what you're trying to solve. So I think, yeah, the balance like are almost like two sides are the same kind of agency and then accountability I think has served our team really well.
00:39:29 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:39:29] S0: Such an important element of agency. Okay, cool. Everyone's off doing stuff, but okay, what have you busted it up? What have you done? So kind of along those lines, it feels like there's this vibe shift recently from token maxing, just go crazy, spend as much as possible, just see what's possible to like, wait, what are we actually getting out of this? How much is it costing? What's the ROI? Interestingly, Boris was actually head of eng productivity at Meta. That was his job, is measuring eng productivity. And then also just this tweet of lines per code, like code shift. There's this interesting discussion of just how do you actually measure productivity increase and ROI of AI tools in spend? You guys have the unfair advantage of getting free tokens working in Anthropic. With that in mind, what have you learned about just how to measure say ROI of engineers in today's world?