Anthropic’s first technical PM on token maxing, the jagged edge, and living in the future | Dianne Penn

In 2023, when I started, nobody said anthropic and clawed and coding in the same sentence. I want to go back to the beginning of Anthropic. I remember dealing, man, these guys have no chance. OpenAI is so far ahead. By the time I saw people were starting to use these models not just for code auto-complete. But actually Writing long form code. And that an opportunity for us to train Opus III to be better at. That was the inflection. I always think about Opus Four Five a year later during winter break when everyone was home, able to code. What was magical about Opus 45 is we also now not just had a model, but a vehicle, a great product experience, like Cloud Code. Code, Opus Four Five wouldn't have had that moment without a product like Cloud Code. And Cloud Code wouldn't have had that type of adoption accelerated without Opus Four Five. I want to talk about how the product role is changing. For my team, the way to drive user value is to figure out the right user feedback, the evals. We actually have a saying on the team of Evals are the new PRDs. Something Gary Tan's been talking about. If you're willing to spend$100,000 a year right now on tokens, you are living the way somebody in 2028 is gonna live. You have to sweat the tokens as much as you sweat the pixels. You have to be using the models to come up with good, then great, then better ideas.

substitutes for that. People need to be more ambitious with AI tools these days because they're just capable of so much. One thing I asked the team is let's say Claude 8 comes around. What changes in what users do? What does that mean for how you're building today? Today my guest is Diane Penn. Head of product for the AI research and labs teams at Anthropic. She joined Anthropic as the first technical product manager. Over three years ago, which is a lifetime in AI time.

When the product tumus five engineers She's helped ship every model at Ananthropic from Claude II through Fable. She's also helped incubate and launch claw code, MCP skills, claw design. And also core capabilities like computer use, tool use, and reasoning. It is always such a treat and so mind expanding.

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