00:00:26 · Aditya Agarwal, Thariq Shihipar
[00:00:26] S1: Many of you, maybe have met Thariq when he has come back, and spent some time during our, like, AI startup school demos, which have been awesome. But it was so great that we wanted to give you, like, a full hour just for conversation and q and a. But as I mentioned, a member, now alum, and kind of one of the faces of Claude Code. But let's spend a little time kind of bringing people up to speed on your your journey, almost your minus one journey and your time at Anthropic. So you joined a year ago and we haven't actually talked about this. Like, what went into that decision? What brought you there? And then we'll get a... Into a little bit of what the last year has been like, which I'm sure has been fascinating. [00:01:05] S0: Yeah. Totally. So I ran a VC backed gaming company for five years before joining SPC. And I had always sort of... I was like trying to make him into an AI gaming company and my co founders could not... Like would not do it. And so around 2024, I I like had decided to shut down the company and return funds and I was debating between joining like a... I I was talking to the Cursor team a lot because I'd like actually been using Cursor. But then I was like, no, I am going to try and start a new company and join South Park Commons. And yeah, I I think that I actually really felt that was like a really pivotal moment for me, especially because of the the small groups. So we were like in a little squad and and that squad, I met Tom who now runs Goodfire and Sawyer who is like a... He's one of the smartest AI engineers I know. Fire squad.
00:01:05 · Thariq Shihipar, Aditya Agarwal
[00:01:05] S0: Yeah. Totally. So I ran a VC backed gaming company for five years before joining SPC. And I had always sort of... I was like trying to make him into an AI gaming company and my co founders could not... Like would not do it. And so around 2024, I I like had decided to shut down the company and return funds and I was debating between joining like a... I I was talking to the Cursor team a lot because I'd like actually been using Cursor. But then I was like, no, I am going to try and start a new company and join South Park Commons. And yeah, I I think that I actually really felt that was like a really pivotal moment for me, especially because of the the small groups. So we were like in a little squad and and that squad, I met Tom who now runs Goodfire and Sawyer who is like a... He's one of the smartest AI engineers I know. Fire squad. [00:02:04] S1: Yeah.
00:02:04 · Aditya Agarwal, Thariq Shihipar
[00:02:04] S1: Yeah. [00:02:04] S0: Yeah. I was just sort of going through it. You know, was sort of mourning my old company and trying to figure out like what, like, could I make another company or like, was I good at this AI stuff or something, you know? And talking to Tom who had like sort of led interpretability at DeepMind and sent me these papers, and I was like, oh, yeah. Like, I... It's not that hard. You know? Like, I can start like, you know, doing work here and contributing. And so I worked for Tom's company for about three Yeah. And so after SPC, I worked for Tom's company. Then while I was doing that and wrapping that up, Sawyer texted me being like, dude, have you used Claude Code? What month? This was like March 2025, I think. Yeah. And he's like, Opus four just came out. It's so much better than Cursor. And was like, no, I I I have it. But I I got into it and I was immediately just like really really hooked. And I was like, yeah, I need to like sort of join Anthropic and I like doesn't matter what they want me to do there, I'll I'll do it, you know? I think initially I joined as like a... What what do they call it? Like a a demo designer on the design team. And I was just like, dude, like if you think that's what I can do, like sure. You know what I mean? And then ultimately, like, very quickly found myself on the Claude Code team. Yeah.
00:02:04 · Thariq Shihipar, Aditya Agarwal
[00:02:04] S0: Yeah. I was just sort of going through it. You know, was sort of mourning my old company and trying to figure out like what, like, could I make another company or like, was I good at this AI stuff or something, you know? And talking to Tom who had like sort of led interpretability at DeepMind and sent me these papers, and I was like, oh, yeah. Like, I... It's not that hard. You know? Like, I can start like, you know, doing work here and contributing. And so I worked for Tom's company for about three Yeah. And so after SPC, I worked for Tom's company. Then while I was doing that and wrapping that up, Sawyer texted me being like, dude, have you used Claude Code? What month? This was like March 2025, I think. Yeah. And he's like, Opus four just came out. It's so much better than Cursor. And was like, no, I I I have it. But I I got into it and I was immediately just like really really hooked. And I was like, yeah, I need to like sort of join Anthropic and I like doesn't matter what they want me to do there, I'll I'll do it, you know? I think initially I joined as like a... What what do they call it? Like a a demo designer on the design team. And I was just like, dude, like if you think that's what I can do, like sure. You know what I mean? And then ultimately, like, very quickly found myself on the Claude Code team. Yeah. [00:03:21] S1: I guess on that note, you you have sort of become one of the faces of Claude Code. Was that intentional or organic? I mean, I think you've historically liked technical writing, but like, how did that come about?
00:03:21 · Aditya Agarwal, Thariq Shihipar
[00:03:21] S1: I guess on that note, you you have sort of become one of the faces of Claude Code. Was that intentional or organic? I mean, I think you've historically liked technical writing, but like, how did that come about? [00:03:32] S0: Yeah. I mean, I I think that my, like, specific interest was sort of like trying to increase the, like, communication bandwidth between humans and agents. And and so I feel that like the agents and these models overall are are much more intelligent than maybe even right now we're utilizing them. When I joined the Claude Code team, one of the first features I introduced was this thing called ask user questions. So like during the flow, especially during planning, Claude Code might be like, hey, let's stop and like clarify what you're trying to do. Right? And I I think previous to this, like, people would just sort of like... It was very dependent on the user to, in detail, explain what they want and know the unknown unknowns, for example. And so that was like something where I felt has become one of the most popular features in the Claude Code, really changed how people interact with the the agent. But I also felt the more time I've spent on it, I actually feel like it's more important to educate humans than improve the agent UX sometimes. Because as the models get smarter, there's just way more stuff that they can do. And like how do you build a mental model of how to prompt Claude is like really like maybe more valuable or like I'm better at it than like, you know, doing more product work.
00:04:50 · Aditya Agarwal
[00:04:50] S1: I'd be curious being on the inside and we'll get into like, we'll we'll unpack, you know, how to get the most out of Claude in a sec. But I think a lot of us had this moment in February of this year with 4.6. That was kind of this oh moment where the model got significantly better in the long horizon. Reasoning was at a point where you could actually see yourself doing, like, really meaningful big work. Internally, when was that moment for you guys or for you personally where you're like... Obviously, you you saw that March 2025 with four. But was there a moment in between in advance of when we saw publicly where it kinda hit you?