Anthropic’s CPO on what comes next | Mike Krieger (co-founder of Instagram)

Ninety percent of your code. Roughly is written by AI now. The team that works in the most futuristic way is the Cloud Code team. They're using Cloud Code to build Cloud Code in a very self-improving kind of way. We really rapidly became bottlenecked on other things like our merge cube. We had to completely re-architect it because so much more code was being written and so many more pull requests were being submitted that it just completely blew out the You guys are at the edge of where things are heading. I had the very bizarre experience of I had two tabs open. It was AI twenty twenty seven and my product strategy, and it was this like moment where I'm like, Wait, am I the character in the story? It feels like ChatGPT is just winning in consumer mind share. How does that inform the way you think about product, strategy, and mission? I think there's room for several general. Generationally important companies to be built in AI right now. How do we figure out what we want to be when we grow up versus like what we currently aren't or wish that we were or like see other players in the space being? What's something that you've changed your mind about, what AI is capable of and where AI is heading? I had this notion coming in, like, yes, these models are great, but are they able to have an independent opinion and it's actually really flipped for me only in the last month.

Today my guest is Mike Krieger. Mike is chief product officer at Anthropic, the company behind Claude. He's also the co founder of Instagram. He's one of my most favorite product builders and thinkers. He's also now leading product at one of the most important companies in the world, and I'm so thrilled to have had a chance to chat with him on the podcast. We chat about what he's changed his mind about most in terms of AI capabilities in the years since he joined Anthropic. How product development changes and where bottlenecks emerge, when 90% of your code is written by AI, which is now true at Anthropic.

Also, his thoughts on OpenAI versus Anthropic, the future of MCP, why he shut down Artifact his last startup, and how he feels about it. Also what skills he's encouraging his kids to develop with the rise of AI. And we close the podcast on a very heart warming message that Claude wanted me to share with Mike. A big thank you to my newsletter Slack community for suggesting topics for this conversation. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. Also, if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter, you get a year free of a bunch of incredible products, including linear, superhuman notion, perplexity, and granola. Check it out at lenny's newsletter.com and click bundle.

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