Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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.
01:12:13 · Lenny Rachitsky, Boris Cherny
[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. [01:12:30] S0: So, before I joined Anthropic I was actually living in rural Japan. And it was a totally different lifestyle. I was the only engineer in the town. I was the only English speaker in the town. It was just a totally different vibe. A couple times a week I would bike to the farmer's market, and you bike by rice paddies and stuff. It was just a totally different speed. Just complete opposite of San Francisco. One of the things that I really liked is a way that we got to know our neighbors, and we built friendships is by trading pickles. So, in the town where we lived it was actually, like, everyone made miso, everyone made pickles. And so, I actually got decently good at making miso. And I made a bunch of batches, and this is something that I still make. Miso is this interesting thing where it teaches you to think on these long time skills that's just very different than engineering, because a batch of white miso takes, at least, three months to make. And a red miso is, like, two, three, four years. You just have to be very patient. [01:13:31] S1: Wow.
01:13:31 · Lenny Rachitsky, Boris Cherny
[01:13:31] S1: Wow. [01:13:32] S0: You mix it up, and then you just let it sit. You have to be very, very patient. So, the thing that I love about it is just thinking in these long time skills. And, yeah. I think post-AGI or if I wasn't at Anthropic, I'd probably be making miso. [01:13:46] S1: I love this answer. Ben asked me to ask you about what's the deal with you and Miso. And so, I love that you answered it. Okay. So, the future might be just going deep into miso, getting really good at making miso. Amazing. Boris, this was incredible. I feel like we're brothers now from Ukraine. Before we get to our very exciting lightning round, is there anything else that you wanted to share? Is there anything you wanted to leave listeners with? Anything you want to double down on?
01:14:18 · Boris Cherny, Lenny Rachitsky
[01:14:18] S0: Yeah. I think I would just underscore for Anthropic since the beginning, this idea of starting at coding, then getting to tool use, then getting to computer use has just been the way that we think about things. And this is the way that we know the models are going to develop, or the way that we want to build our models. And it's also the way that we get to learn about safety, study it, and improve it the most. So, everything that's happening right now around just Claude Code becoming this huge multi-billion dollar business, and now all of my friends use Claude Code, and they just text me about it all the time. So, this thing getting big. In some ways, it's a total surprise, because this isn't the ... We didn't know that it would be this product. We didn't know that it would start in a terminal, or anything like this. But, in some ways, it's just totally unsurprising, because this has been our belief as a company for a long time. At the same time, it just feels still very early. Like, most of the world still does not use Claude Code, most of the world still does not use AI. So, it just feels like this is 1% on, and there's so much more to go. [01:15:21] S1: Oh, man. That's insane to think, seeing the numbers that are coming out. You guys just raised a bazillion dollars. I think Claude Code alone is making $2 billion revenue. Anthropic, I think the number you guys put out, you're making $15 billion in revenue. It's insane to just think this is how early it still is, and just the numbers we're seeing.