Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
01:05:50 · Boris Cherny
So, it's almost better to just wait for the next one. And I think maybe this is a final principle, and something that Claude Code I think got right in hindsight, from the very beginning, we bet on building for the model six months from now. Not for the model of today. And for the very early versions of the product, it just wrote so little of my code, because I didn't trust it. Because it was, like, Sonnet 3.5. Then it was, like, 3.6, or ... I forget. 3.5 New, whatever name we gave it. These models just weren't very good at coding yet. They were getting there, but it was still pretty early. So, back then the model did [inaudible 01:06:26] it automated some things, but it really wasn't doing a huge amount of my coding. And so, the bet with Claude Code was, at some point, the model gets good enough that it can just write a lot of the code. And this is a thing that we first started seeing with Opus 4 and Sonnet 4, and Opus 4 was our first ASL3 class model that we released back in May. And we just saw this inflection, because everyone started to use Claude Code for the first time. And that was when our growth really went exponential. And, like I said, it stayed there. So, I think this is advice that I actually gave to a lot of folks, especially, people building startups. It's going to be uncomfortable, because your product market fit won't be very good for the first six months. But if you build for the model six months out, when that model comes out, you're just going to hit the ground running, and the product is going to click, and start to work.
01:07:15 · Lenny Rachitsky, Boris Cherny
[01:07:15] S1: And when you say build for the model six months out, what is it that you think people can assume will happen? Is it just generally it will get better at things? Is it just, like, "Okay. It's almost good enough, and that's a sign that it'll probably get better at that thing"? Is there any advice there? [01:07:30] S0: I think that's a good way to do it. Obviously, within an AI lab, we get to see the specific ways that it gets better. [01:07:36] S1: Yeah.
01:07:36 · Lenny Rachitsky, Boris Cherny
[01:07:36] S1: Yeah. [01:07:37] S0: So, it's a little unfair, but also, we try to talk about this. So, one of the ways that it's going to get better is it's going to get better and better at using tools, and using computers. This is a bet that I would make. Another one is it's going to get better and better for running it for long periods of time. And this is a place ... Like, there's all sorts of studies about this, but if you just trace the trajectory, or maybe even for my own experience when I use Sonnet 3.5 back a year ago, it could run for maybe 15 or 30 seconds before it started going off the rails, and you just really had to hold its hand through any kind of complicated task. But nowadays with Opus 4.6, on average it'll run maybe 10, 20, 30 minutes unattended, and I'll just start another Claude, and have it do something else. And, like I said, I always have a bunch of Claudes running. And they can also run for hours, or even days at a time. I think there were some examples where they ran for many weeks. And so, I think over time this is going to become more and more normal where the models are running for a very, very long period of time, and you don't have to sit there and babysit them anymore. [01:08:39] S1: So, you just talked about tips for building AI products. Any tips for someone just using Claude Code, say, for the first time or just someone already using Claude Code that wants to get better. What are a couple pro-tips that you could share?
01:08:51 · Boris Cherny
[01:08:51] S0: I will give a caveat, which is there's no one right way to use Claude Code. So, I can share some tips, but, honestly, this is a dev tool. Developers are all different. Developers have different preferences. They have different environments. So, there's just so many ways to use these tools. There's no one right way. You have to find your own path. Luckily, you can ask Claude Code. It's able to make recommendations. It can edit your settings. It knows about itself. So, it can help with that. A few tips that, generally, I find pretty useful. So, number one is just use the most capable model. Currently, that's Opus 4.6. I have maximum effort enabled always. The thing that happens is sometimes people try to use a less expensive model like Sonnet, or something like this, but because it's less intelligent, it actually takes more tokens in the end to do the same task. And so, it's actually not obvious that it's cheaper if you use a less expensive model. Often, it's actually cheaper and less token-intensive if you use the most capable model, because it can just do the same thing much faster with less correction, less hand holding, and so on. So, that's the first step is just use the best model. The second one is use plan mode. I start almost all of my tasks in plan mode, maybe, like 80%, and plan mode is actually really simple. All it is is we inject one sentence into the model's prompt to say, "Please don't write any code yet." That's it. There's actually nothing fancy going on. It's just the simplest thing. And so, for people that are in the terminal it's just shift tab twice. And that gets you into plan mode. For people in the desktop app, there's a little button on the web, there's a little button. It's coming pretty soon to mobile also. And we just launched it for the Slack integration too. So, plan mode is the second one. And, essentially, the model would just go back and forth with you. Once the plan looks good then you let the model execute. I auto-accept edits after that, because if the plan looks good, it's just going to one shot it. It'll get it right the first time almost every time with Opus 4.6. And then maybe the third tip is just play around with different interfaces. I think a lot of people when they think about Claude Code, they think about a terminal.
01:10:45 · Boris Cherny, Lenny Rachitsky
And, of course, we support every terminal, we support Mac, Windows, whatever terminal you might use, it works perfectly. But we actually support a lot of other form factors too. Like, we have iOS and Android apps. We have a desktop app. There's the Slack integration. There's all sorts of things that we support. So, I would just play around with these. And, again, it's, like, every engineer is different. Everyone that's building is different. Just find the thing that feels right to you, and use that. You don't have to use a terminal. It's the same Claude agent running everywhere. [01:11:15] S1: Amazing. Okay. Just a couple more questions to round things out. What's your take on Codex? How do you feel about that product? How do you feel about where they're going? Just competing in this very competitive space in coding agents. [01:11:30] S0: Yeah. I actually haven't really used it, but I think I did use it maybe when it came out. It looked a lot like Claude Code to me, so, that was flattering. I think it's actually good to have more competition, because people should get to choose and, hopefully, it forces all of us to do an even better job. Honestly, for our team, though, we're just focused on solving the problems that users have. And so, for us, we don't spend a lot of time looking at competing products, we don't really try the other products. You want to be aware of them. You want to know they exist. But, for me, I love talking to users. I love making the product better. I love just acting on feedback. So, it's really just about building a good product.
01:11:30 · Boris Cherny, Lenny Rachitsky
[01:11:30] S0: Yeah. I actually haven't really used it, but I think I did use it maybe when it came out. It looked a lot like Claude Code to me, so, that was flattering. I think it's actually good to have more competition, because people should get to choose and, hopefully, it forces all of us to do an even better job. Honestly, for our team, though, we're just focused on solving the problems that users have. And so, for us, we don't spend a lot of time looking at competing products, we don't really try the other products. You want to be aware of them. You want to know they exist. But, for me, I love talking to users. I love making the product better. I love just acting on feedback. So, it's really just about building a good product. [01:12:13] S1: Maybe a last question. So, I talked to Ben Mann, co-founder of Anthropic, what to talk to you about. He had a bunch of suggestions, which I've integrated throughout our chat. One question he had for you is what's your plan post-AGI? What do you think you're going to be doing? What's your life like once we hit AGI? Whatever that means.