Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth - Building the most AI-pilled engineering team in the world | Fiona Fung (Manager of the Claude Code and Cowork Teams)

Episode Date: June 21, 2026

Fiona Fung leads the teams behind Claude Code and Cowork at Anthropic (overseeing Boris Cherny and the entire engineering and PM team). Before Anthropic, she spent 11 years at Microsoft building Visual Studio and TypeScript and then moved to Meta, where she started Facebook Marketplace (now generating over $100 billion in GMV annually), worked on Meta’s first smart glasses and AR glasses, and led infrastructure, growth, integrity, and safety teams at Instagram. She’s been an engineer for over 25 years and has a unique perspective on how the role of building software is changing.In our in-depth conversation, we discuss:1. What she’s learned about running a team that’s shipping 8x more code than before2. Which roles AI will transform next3. Specific ways her team uses AI4. How Claude “routines” have changed how she operates as a manager5. The context-switching problem no one has solved yet6. The biggest unsolved problem in AI7. What keeps her up at night—Brought to you by:WorkOS—Make your app enterprise-ready, with SSO, SCIM, RBAC, and more: https://workos.com/lennyMercury—Radically different banking, now with Command: https://mercury.com/—Where to find Fiona Fung:• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/fionafung—Where to find Lenny:• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/—In this episode, we cover:(00:00) Introduction to Fiona Fung(02:31) How the engineering role has transformed over 25 years(09:28) What an AI-pilled software team looks like in 2026(12:26) Using Claude to manage and review team output(14:40) The evolution of code review and verification(16:55) Who to hire: creative builders and deep systems experts(18:18) The shift to ambitious thinking(19:40) The growth mindset required to thrive in AI-native teams(25:52) Helping small businesses adopt AI tools(31:46) How Anthropic spots latent demand and builds for it(35:08) The next frontier: asynchronous work with AI routines(38:06) Agency and accountability in AI-native teams(39:40) The vibe shift from token-maxing to ROI measurement(44:24) The “bad vs. sad” quality framework(49:34) Why all managers start as ICs at Anthropic(55:24) Preventing skill atrophy(58:43) Managing context switching with 20 AI agents running(1:00:08) How PM and data science roles are transforming(1:03:40) The importance of dogfooding and using your own product(1:08:36) Outstanding questions(1:12:48) The future of engineering jobs and education(1:17:59) What keeps Fiona up at night: team culture at scale(1:22:53) From six-month roadmaps to JIT (just-in-time) monthly planning(1:27:03) Lightning round—References: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/building-the-most-ai-pilled-engineering—Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [e-mail].—Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed. To hear more, visit www.lennysnewsletter.com

Anthropic engineers on average of eight times as much code per quarter as they did compared to 2025. Coding is no longer the bottleneck. It's lifted the ceiling of what anyone is able to do. Everything is now possible in theory. Now it's about how ambitious can you be. It's always something we ask ourselves, what's better than me doing it? I haven't thought, do it. The people that seem to be doing best are taking the most initiative, getting the most proactive, have the most agency.

We say with high agency is also high accountability. So it's all about making sure folks have that freedom to cook. But then it's also like, okay, what's the accountability? for it? What's a hypothesis of what you're trying to solve? I'm curious what is lost in this new world of software engineering. You can start being a lonely experience because we all started just working with our agent so much. And on the ClockCo team, recently we started a pairwise programming lunch. Something you think about is this gap forming between people that are leaning into AI,

killing it, and then people that are not super frustrated, fighting, resisting. In terms of frustration, I think sometimes I also see a little bit of fear. For anything that there is a fear, my advice is lean in and ask, What can I do about it? What is within my control? Today my guest is Fiona Fung. Fiona leads the teams behind Claude Coat and co-work at Anthropic. She oversees both Boris Churny and Kat Wu, both of whom who have been on the podcast

and whose episodes are in the top 10 most listened to episodes of all time. Before Anthropic at Microsoft, Fiona ran the teams that built TypeScript and Visual Studio. After that, she went to Facebook where she started the Facebook Marketplace team, which She took from Idea to launch. Today, Facebook Marketplace generates over $100 billion in GMV every year. Also, while at Meta, she oversaw work on Meta's first smart glasses product, and then she helped build Orion, their first AR glasses product. Then she went to Instagram, where she led infrastructure, growth, integrity, and safety teams.

While at Instagram and at Meta, she oversaw an org of over 500 people. Fiona has been an engineer for over 25 years and as a longtime engineering leader, especially now at Anthropic. She has such a unique lens into where things are heading, what's worth paying attention to, and what teams should be thinking about right now as AI transforms the world of building. A huge thank you to Kat Wu, Boris Churney,

and Mohamed Hagazi for suggesting topics and questions for this conversation. Before we get into it, don't forget to check out Lenny's product pass.com for a free year of the hottest and most well-crafted AI products in the world, available exclusively to Lenny's newsletter subscribers, With that, I bring you Fiona Fung. Fiona, thank you so much for being here.

Welcome to the podcast. Thanks so much for having me, Lenny. So I was at the Code with Cloud event a month ago at this point. And I went to your talk. And I was just like, holy shit, I got to get Fiona on this podcast. She's thinking so far ahead of where everybody else is going and where people are at with AI. So you've been an engineer for 25 years. I was browsing your LinkedIn.

You started at IBM, of all places. It's such a different place to be these days. And it's just insane how much the job of an engineer has changed over the past just like two years. It's like a completely different job. Like people may forget 100% of code was written by humans not long ago. And now it's getting to 100% of code written by AI. As Boris famously said, coding is solved. along these lines there's just this tweet that you guys put out yesterday where you showed here's the tweet

Anthropic engineers on average of eight times as much code per quarter as they did compare it to 21 to 2025. We'll show this chart on the screen. It's just like stable, stable, stable, stable, shooting off into the moon. So it's just insane how much this role has changed. I'm curious about your kind of path as an engineer living through this, having been an engineer for a long time. what have been kind of like the big moments along the way where it's shifted your way of thinking and operating that have led you to what you do now and how you operate now? Oh, I love this kind of walk back in time. Yeah, like IBM working on DB2, the operating system services team.

Like back then I was thinking, oh, how can I, how can I be like the like what's a hard area of the stack? And I really thought the lower level you go closer to the OS. Then it's like more hardcore and you'll learn more. So that was, I was really fortunate to gotten into the IBM internship. But the funny thing was, I would, I think there's even a big shift from IBM to Microsoft. So at IBM, it was, I think, VIM. Like, I didn't have an IDE that we used. I think there might have been an Eclipse license.

But for some reasons, most of us didn't use this. So I remembered it was mainly like VIM and, you know, like kind of terminal debugging. And then when I joined Microsoft, I mean, this is how naive I was. I didn't even know about IDs and such. And back then, you didn't really. really get to pick teams. Like, this was early 2000s. Actually, first off, I should say, I was so grateful that I landed the internship and the role because to take us all the way back in time, the dot-com bubble burst in 2000. And so for my graduating class, like a lot of the companies

weren't hiring and were having freezes. So I was so fortunate when Microsoft extended me an offer and so they're like, you're going to work on Visual Studio. I did not even know what Visual Studio was because I came from like a Unix school. So I remember asking, oh, because I was thinking, well, the name, Visual Studio, I'm like, oh, is this like a better paint program? And I could tell the look at my manager's face, like, what is going on? But then it ended up becoming like the love of my life for the first, you know, 11 years of my career. But that was the first time I used an IDE. So joining the Visual Studio team, seeing, oh, wow, like here's an IDE with like debuggers and you can set break points and do multi-threaded debugging. Like that was also always mind-blowing for me to think about

the stepwise change. So yeah, like that was kind of, you know, like that was kind of, you know, the story going from I bring him to Visual Studio. And then what I really loved actually about Visual Studio is I was on the Visual Studio Editor team. So I used a VES editor to build the VS editor. And that's where my whole love of dogfeeding comes from. Like I, I remembered I wanted to first and foremost create a delightful experience not only for myself, but for my teammates.

Because also, if we go back in that time, if you remember, I mean, when did Twitter come out? Like, was it 2006 or something? Feels like it's been around my whole life. But back then, like before social media, it was also harder for most engineers to hear fast customer feedback. Like for sure there you would be user research sessions or we would have customers visit us. But you didn't get the rapid feedback that you do nowadays.

But back then I was so lucky because I was on VS. We ourselves gave each other so much rapid feedback because we were all heavy VS users on the team. This episode is brought to you by our seasons present, renting sponsor WorkOS. What do OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, Versel, Replet, Sierra, Clay, and hundreds of other winning companies all have in common? They are all powered by WorkOS.

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So I love this. I love you reminding us of these moments in the history of software engineering that have changed the work in a big way. Yeah, when I worked on Visual Studio. Back then, we also shipped software on. CDs. I mean, before, like, and that's why there were really hard deadlines, because you had to make sure the software is ready for us to give to manufacturing to then, you know, put on the CDs for us to them put on the shelves. And, and then so once, that was another shift when we actually started to be able to, you know, ship software online. And I think that's the interesting thing.

And I kind of mentioned this in my talk. It's before when you, like, engineering time was like, like, really precious resource. But you also have these really hard deadlines, for example, like printing software and CDs. And so back then you would do a lot more planning because you just wanted to make sure given the time you have, you make the best of it. And that's the shift that, you know, like we're seeing with, with Cloud Code and Co work is coding is no longer the bottleneck. And so not like, you know, you showed up, you showed the tweet on that graphic. So but now it's all about like where has that shift happen. Like now not only engineers with we also have designers, PMs, everybody on the Clark Coat Team checks in code. So like when not only more people,

people checking in code, but like kind of different disciplines, but also the throughput is so high. How do we think about verification? Like that's kind of this other shift that I'm seeing. Maybe just kind of set this theme that I want to have for this conversation. A lot of people are just wondering, what is what is software engineering, managing software engineers managing software and product teams look like in the future? And you are living through that right now. So you mentioned this point about a more focus on verification, making sure the quality of the code being 8X is actually high and something that will work.

So just like, let me ask this broad question. Let's kind of see what this conversation goes. What does an AI-pilled software team look like in 2026? Because the roles are blowing, it's shifting more to this builder. Like everybody starts being a builder, I would say. The other shift that I've recently done is I actually have a cloud code remote session. that I enlist in all of our repos. And so this way, I have full visibility into the work that everybody's doing.

And this instance, he also has access to all our Slack channels, and I'll have access to, like, how are the metrics of everything we track. And so every month, like, when I be like, hey, you know what's fun, like let's take a look back. And so we'll actually do it together. I'll share my, you know, like code code, you know, I've shared my screen. And we do our blog code session. And it's just about, hey, what were the focus areas?

what were some of the products that got shipped? How did it do? Oh, what were the feedback channels? And so I, even though, like, before I would have just used these sessions to, like, generate PRs and bug fixes, I actually have these sessions to enable me to have conversations with folks that I support. Say more about that. So this is like a management technique, let's say, to help people not just ship,

but actually ship better, understand if they're shipping things that have impact. Is that kind of the idea here? Just, like, use claw tips. keep on top of all the things people are shipping and then make that a conversation with them. Exactly. So like yeah, outside of just, you know, the action of shipping is how did it do in market or hey, did we have, you know, like did we cause some bugs? And it's okay to, like I have the saying make new mistakes. Like it's okay to make mistakes. Just make new ones so that we're always learning because if you aim to make zero mistakes, like that probably means you're not, you know,

moving fast enough or being a little bit too cautious. And so yeah, by having Claude, like so then it can I'll also look at, like, for example, actually, yeah, we were, I was just looking at, oh, you know, given some of the, you know, incidents that we have, like, let's look across all of this. Can we generate a theme? Like, what's a good area investment for us next? Especially we think about, like, quality. Like, are we seeing any hotspots of where there could be a gap? I think that used to be just a much more manual process, I would say. Like, if I look back a year ago, I don't think I would have been able to, you know, have some of these insights with God. Yeah, well, partly is because, like, there's that.

also people weren't shipping as much so you could just make a little bullet list. Here's the things I shipped last quarter. This feature, that feature, this feature, that feature. So what I'm hearing here is this is like one of the only ways to stay on top of all the things, a teammate is shipping. So this is a really cool thread of just like how you found ways to stand top of this 8X increasing code. What else has worked in helping you and your team stay on top of and maintain quality

of all the stuff that y'all are shipping? Because that's obviously a challenge, a bigger challenge. Yeah. Yeah, and so definitely like the feedback channels are really important to us, but then we also get a lot of feedback. And like, for example, even I myself, usually what my morning ritual would be, you know, I get my morning cup of coffee and then I look at the feedback channels and then I try to pick a, you know, if I have some maker time, what's something that maybe I would be able to help out or what I could like see some gaps. Like that just used to be something I would do every morning. And yeah, I think maybe a month or two ago, we launched routines. And that's also completely changed.

Like now I just have a routine that automates all this for me. And then there's also, it's almost like before I would, you know, be able to kind of like, you know, generate some prompts. But now with routines, it's almost like I'm, you know, having an agent help me, Jerry, like generate the prompts and the PR. So for example, one is, hey, keep a look on this feedback channel. You know, what are some of the themes? And then like when I wake up, then, you know, I have a really good summary of that. And then even some like PRs that I'll be able to take a look and review. And the feedback channel, where is that feedback coming from?

Was that like emails, Twitter, or a combo of everything? Ah, our feedback channels are definitely like we have a lot from internal ends, but also like emails, channels. Actually, everybody, like when we all get feedback on even like when friends ping us or our LinkedIn or socials, we'll all actually like post all of that in Slack as well. And so and we also have like, of course, partnerships. And so we have different channels for all the various sources. But that's what I mean.

of I need Claude's help to help me stay on top because there is so much incoming feedback. Got it. Okay. So this is cool. So this is like a way of working that you've built to stay on top of all the stuff shipping, which is this kind of daily ritual slash routine where you as a manager look at what people are saying about the current state of Cloud Code and co-work and used to just like, okay, someone go fix this, go fix that.

Now it's like, here's the PR that'll fix this thing. Check it out. We're ready to ship it if you want. Awesome. Okay. Like obviously a big challenge for people is also just code review. I imagine Clod is also doing a lot of its own code reviews. Is there anything there you've recently figured out that allows your teams to ship faster stuff

that they are confident is great. Yeah. And honestly it's crazy when you think we didn't even have Claude Code reviews last year. And so speak at bottlenecks, that was a really, really big bottleneck of, you know, the human reviewers. So we definitely for the important, like, like areas that need deep subject matter expertise, we definitely want to make sure we have the proper, you know, like humans still reviewing. I would say what helps us, though, is the more that we can automate to almost check in the

framework for what good looks like. Claude is very good when you give it a framework to validate against those frameworks. So I had mentioned like, you know, or like, you know, like recently we just updated like content design to Taviskelenet. And this is why like I think if you have specs or like check those into the repo and then make sure the spec also keeps up to date with the code like frequently. But that's what I found like works really well of any time you have like a statement of what good looks like, get the end of the repo and then code review can make sure it's still matching what you set up to do. Basically it's like the evolution of test-driven development. Yes.

For TDD, it's because I remember that was like a big thing, my gosh, maybe like in the 2000s of write the test first. And then you can make sure the test fails. Then you do actually the code. In principle is really good. But I think, I know I remember it, I myself struggling a bit because it was almost like you have to eat the broccoli first. I was like, oh, you have to write this test first. And I just get so much thrill out of shipping and building product.

So it's funny. Actually, the first bug I fixed on Claw code, I remember asking Claw, hey, I want to do test driven development. Help me write the test first. Make sure it fails. And then we'll actually, you know, do the fix. And then now the test pass. And the fact that that used to be, you know, like that test generation used to just be this tax that I remember having to pay, like the fact that that's not automated.

And you can even revisit all these principles that have been around for a while, but now they actually might be even more efficient just because you have the models that can do more of the work for you. Yeah, like that's so unfair. It's just right to test for you first. So on this point of builders, one of my favorite slides from your talk that I want to ask about is, who you are hiring and what you look for in people. And so I'll read what you said there, and I want to hear more here. So the two profiles that you now look for when you're hiring are creative builders with product sense and deep systems experts for the hard parts. Yeah, the deep subject matter expertise. Like, for example, when I first run cloud code, we had really great kind of like product generalists.

And then I realized, oh, we were missing folks with systems background. And so that was definitely an area that we needed. more folks with kind of like systems and distribute systems expertise. And so I would say whatever are the parts that it's all about trust but verified. The models are really good, but there are definitely a lot of areas that still need, you know, the verification. And so wherever you need the deep subject matter expertise, I would say that's, you know, an area to definitely still invest in. And the other one is kind of like the product, the product sense books, almost like the dreamers. Like these are folks that usually will be like, my gosh, you're really passionate

about a product and they have an idea, they build it, and then it's always like looking at the feedback and then iterating and polishing and making sure that the product is a delightful experience. Like owning that product end to end, that's like another skill set that sort of does really well on CloudCatting. This super resonates. There's this word ambition. I don't know if you used it, but that's what I thought of as you were talking. That's been coming up a bunch recently in the podcast and other work I've been doing. There's this 10xie engineer. I have, tuck into the other day and he was just like, I used to, like, I heard about a feature idea. Like someone's like, hey, we should build this. And I was like, no, that's really hard and

complicated. And he's like, but now I'm like, no, no, that's so possible. I just ask Claude to do it. And it just does it. And it's this whole mindset shift. And he's just realizing now it's about how ambitious can you be. Like, everything is now possible in theory. Now it's about how ambitious and how big can you think versus just like, okay, it's all these stupid little features and things they have to unblock. Does that resonate? Is that something that you think about? Yes, actually I was just catching up with an

engineer yesterday and he actually is not a mobile engineer by trade, but we really needed to update this feature to also have a mobile footprint. And it was just amazing. He's like, you know what? And it's common because you might think, wait, but I don't, I'm not like an Android expert.

But now, thanks to Claude, actually, I can actually have a partner and actually also do this on the mobile surfaces. And so that definitely resonates. It's like it's left at the ceiling of what and anyone is able to do. So let me follow that thread. As the role has transformed in such a crazy way, some people are thriving. Some people super frustrated, unhappy, fighting, resisting. What do you see common across the people that are doing really well, the engineers that have adapted and are thriving versus the engineers and, you know, even outside engineering that are just like frustrated and having a bad time. I would say a growth mindset really, really helps.

Like actually, even before AI tooling, I found that has been just so valuable. And I learned that a lot. Actually, it was the shift from Microsoft to meta. That was where I first real, that first year, I'm like, oh, this is what having a growth mindset really means. It's really this concept of always be learning. and also what served you to get you to this point may not we serve you no longer but it's really hard because of course everybody like we all you know we've all gotten to the state by acting or you know

like operating in a certain way and so sometimes it is a little bit scared to think wait you're asked like but i've been successful so far you're asking me to change what has made me successful and so i would say like the growth mindset is is really really has has really served me well and I think it's also served others well that I noticed, like always leaning in with curiosity and always being able to learn. And then in terms of like the frustration, I think sometimes I also see a little bit of fear. And so my advice there is, at least this is how just in life, because we all have, and fear is of course an evolutionary, like I didn't study anthropology, but I think it, you know,

it makes sense, right? It helps us make sure we were able to survive and not get, eaten than, you know, by larger predators. But for anything that, you know, that there is a fear, my advice is kind of lean in and ask, okay, is there some, what can I do about it? What is within my control? Because sometimes the frustration comes from fear and feeling like, but everything is outside of my control. And so it's happening to me. And so if you think about, okay, what is in your control instead of happening to you? Is it happening for you? And then what's something that you might be able to kind of like do and change like I felt that's been helpful because if not it it it is super

frustrating to have the fear and then feeling like everything's outside of your control like I actually remembered um when I was in actually when I was in high it's funny when we were going back to IBM when I was in high school I actually didn't go into computer science or engineering like I really wanted to be a visual artist and this is how far back we go back then computers were really expensive. So actually didn't even have access to a computer. My first computer with access to computer was grade nine, I think, in high school. I don't even know this happens in high school anymore. My high school had a typing class where you had a class just to learn how to type on the keyboard and learn to be really proficient. And that was my first time. And then, you know, the next class

was maybe like some HTML programming. So anyways, but the reason why I found love with it was why what I love about art is creating and being able, if you have an idea, that you can go and create and tell a story. And then I realized, oh, computers and programming, you know, that enables me to do that. So anyways, I tried to really fast try to make up for all the, you know, science classes for me to get into university. But I had this fear of, oh, but how will I afford to get into an engineering school? And it was this big unknown. I grew up in Ontario.

So I was very grateful. I knew there was an Ontario, you know, school assistance program. Oh, staff, I think is coverage. I'm very grateful for it. but I didn't know how much of that would cover my tuition or like expenses. And it was just as unknown and it would be like a year, a year out. And I remember thinking, okay, what can I, what can I do about it? And then as luck would have it, the National Bank of Canada just posted this flyer in our high school saying,

hey, we're hiring high school interns to be a bank teller. And I remember, oh, that like, and of course it was going to be minimum wage, but I thought that could be a lifeline. But it was funny because the class I hated the most in high school was accounting, so I don't know if it would be any good at it at all. But I signed up to be a bank teller. And that ended up being such a great decision because I worked all summer, saved up. And then actually I was able to work as a bank teller on the weekends.

So like, yeah, well, I would go to school Monday, today Friday, and then I'm tired to be a bank teller. And that ended up being this lifeline that enabled me to, you know, like pay for all my school expenses. And, you know, we talked about the year 2000.com crash. than when folks weren't hiring as much interns, actually, I continued being a bank teller for for two, two years. And so, but, but like that was the one action I felt I could take that was within my control to try to counter this fear I have of if I'm really going to go down this path. I don't even know if I could have afford to go to school. So that's probably my other advice

of like growth mindset and the source of, you know, frustration or anxiety. If it's coming from, you know, but like see is there some is there one action that's within your control that you can take to you know so it like because I think there's and you know there was a saying like do something's what would you do if you're not afraid actually those are my two favorite things before like what would you do if you're not afraid and do something scary once in a while because that's also usually how we grow um I found that when you're when you're really good and proficient what you do you're kind of at peak you know like maximum efficiency but then how do you keep growing is you then do something scary that you might not have done before. And yeah, you will have a dip because you need to learn. But that's

kind of how you keep pushing yourself to learn. The quote that I have probably used the most on this podcast of all quotes is the cave you fear contains the treasure you seek. Oh, I love that. And it's so true. Just like, like, I forget who put this, but just the thing that it's scariest is like, that's a compass towards that's what you should be doing. Hmm. I'm going to steal your quote. Yeah, they please do. Like, you know, there's like, like, Don't do all the scary things. Like maybe don't drip off a clip. But maybe in career moves, it's probably a good choice.

So kind of following this path, something that I know that is important to you, something you think about that I also think about is this kind of gap that is forming between people that are just like leaning into AI, killing it, doing super well, and then people that are just like not. And this is like a scary time for people that may be left behind in this new world that is emerging. I know you spent a lot of time with small businesses. That's a big passion of yours to help people learn how to use AI in their work. Talk about just like how you think about that and what maybe we should be thinking about to help folks, you know, stay, not fall behind, basically.

Oh, I love this. Yeah, it's one of my passion topics because I kind of mentioned, you know, like growing up in Canada. And I moved there when I was a kid. I was born in Hong Kong. So I didn't speak any English and my parents had to work all the time. So my grandma who is the best grandmother anyone could have ever asked for. I know everybody thinks her grandma's the best, but I really was so lucky I had the best grandma. She moved with us just to

take care of me while my parents were working. But neither of us spoke English, but I was able to learn how to speak English by going to school and speaking with classmates. And when I think about my grandma, I was very alienating for her to be in the new country. And back then, it wasn't as walkable.

But one summer, I remembered we just happened to find this little yarn shop that was owned by a lady that also spoke Cantonese. And so that became every week we would go to this yarn shop this summer. My grandma found her knitting circle and then I think I learned how to do like macromay, which I think is having a comeback, by the way. It's always funny to see what's, you know, macromay. Macromay, I think, yeah.

Heard it here first on Lenny's podcast. I think Macromay's coming back. But that was probably where my love came from. I'm like, oh, wow, this little small business created this wonderful sense of community. and I've been really fortunate to, you know, become friends with all of the small businesses that I love. So that's kind of like where the passion comes from. And then how it happened was I was using co-work for my own business expensing travel. I don't know what it is.

I really don't like doing business expensing. And when I was using co-work, it was magic. I'm like, all these things that I don't like to do, like co-work is doing for me. And I'm like, wait a minute, all my friends. And honestly, small business owners, they really bust their butt. like they work incredibly hard. And they're usually, you know, like sometimes might be operating on really small margins. And so I thought if it's, if Claude Co-work is so good at helping me do my little, you know,

business travel expense, this would be huge for it. Because I see my friends sometimes sitting at the bar with stacks of bills and all they're doing is invoicing and expensing. And I think nobody actually really likes to do it. So that's kind of where it came from. And then so, yeah, I remembered like helping a couple of them on. onboard and it was also very humbling to see them go through our onboarding flow. Actually, it found some really good bugs. So it was really like a win-win. But it was also delightful for me

because they also used co-work in ways that I wouldn't have thought about because I was all fixated on. Look at how it is amazing with PDFs and invoice. And then, you know, one of my friends who runs two restaurants, she's like, oh my gosh, this folder I have is like a drunk drawer of like, it's basically our documents folder just becomes this junk drawer of every or downloads like just you know like the kitchen junk drawer and she's like I know I have a few menus in here and I can't find it and I'm like well let's ask co-work so we gave co-work access to the directory found the menus and then she's in a really unique way she goes like I want to make sure I keep my prices reasonable for locals and tourists so she goes hey Cawd look across my style of cuisine in this area is it

comparable and it came back with really cool almost like market analysis and she goes I actually just went to that restaurant in Seattle. That was pretty good. So I learned something every time. And yeah, they've been giving me great feedback as well. So the question then is just like, how do we spread this to everybody? Because as you see, you know, there's like, a lot of people are just like, I don't have time for this. Or I hate it.

It's just like, I want to ignore it. Is it like talking? Is it just talking about these sharing examples? What do you think? What's like a way to make a dent in this problem? For all of us, especially to your listeners, are probably very AI-pilled. If there's anyone either in their community or their family that has,

like I would start with what has something that really you felt, that you really have felt has made a meaningful life change for you with the AI tools. And then seeing if that is a conversation starter. Because for me, AI is a tool. Again, it's the whole light and the dark. I totally understand the frustrating part as well. But for me, I'm also felt like knowledge is power, like have to learn how to use the tools.

because it could actually, you know, be the light part of that light and dark equation. So I think that that's something that I would love everybody's help with of if there's, whether it's a community member or even if there's a business you're really like and you think, hey, have you ever, it's, it's a little awkward to start. Like I remember when I first reached up my friends, I'm like, because I don't talk about what I do with them a lot, but I'm like, hey, kind of, you know, working a eye. Can I, can I, can I, it sounds, it's even unnatural for me to do it because I'm, you know, I'm like, hey, can I show you what, you know,

co-work is possible and then, and then, but we end up having a while fun. So, yeah, I would love for like, that conversation starter would be great of, yeah, because I just want to make sure we keep sharing the, the knowledge and, you know, making the tool equitable, because if not, I'm concerned that the divide grows larger and larger.

Me too. I find that sharing use cases, as you said, is it so powerful. I was just using cowork the other day to fill up my son's camp forms and just sharing that on Twitter, just like a lot of people are like, oh, wow, I didn't think about that. It's just like these little things you don't think about that co-work and clock go can do. Kind of along those lines, speaking of co-work, if you think about it, Anthropic has been super early on uncovering these really big opportunities ahead of everyone else. For example, coding so far ahead, like realizing this is a huge market.

Whether it was intentional or not, it was just like, whoa, that's maybe the biggest, new business opportunity to history. And then co-work is a great example, just leaning into knowledge work. Let's just solve all knowledge of work. Why not? So far ahead of everyone else. Another element is it feels like a focus on the personality of the model,

something you all were very early on, just how important that is, not just for the experience, but just also the intelligence and success of the model. What is it that you think enthropic and the teams do differently that allows you, to uncover these opportunities and then just go big on them before other labs, let's say.

Well, I haven't worked in any other labs, so I'm not sure how the labs operate, but I will share like, yeah, with, and like actually on the Cloud Code team as well and co-work, like we also keep in on like latent demand. Now, we're very fortunate with coding as a use case because so many ants that we were, you know, like our own first customers and we're able to do like really rapid feedback. And so I think, but latent demand has has been like a, Like, for example, a cowork we noticed, a lot of folks that were not necessarily the coders, we're using cloud code.

Can we make that experience better? I think that's actually even outside of Anthropic. That served me well in all the different products I've worked on. But, and actually, it's funny. You mentioned, like, you know, the cloud for, you know, my passion with small business. After I, you know, I had a few of those visits, we ended up now launching Cloud for Small Business, which is really cool because I, and it totally didn't come from me, so I'm not taking credit. But I noticed it too of like when I was working with it because they were asking me,

oh, does it have this plug in, right? This plugin? I'm like, I think it does. And then we have to, you know, go and search for it. So actually now cloud was small business bundles it all off. So inside coworker, you just have this little toggle. And there was a wonderful team that's been kind of like, you know, doing co-work sessions with small business that probably found, hey, we could have like an efficiency gain here or like make the experience better.

And so I would say like always, not only for products that, you. you're on, like making sure you're always listening to feedback and always iterating, trying to make a delightful, reliable, high-quality experience. But then also keeping an eye out for, oh, what are these other use cases that are popping up? And can we also make that experience better? It's interesting. Like, after, like, you know, in software, I've learned that customers will use your product

in ways that you did not intend for good or for bad. And so the best way is really like, it's all about. about that iteration, learn, and keep close to the feedback. Wait and demand. That terms come up a bunch on this podcast. There's some there. It might be something there. So essentially it's just watching closely for behavior that you may not have expected

or that is just kind of emerging and then just going big on that, essentially, exploring it, building something awesome. And having a hypothesis for, hey, like, because actually when you see people jumping through hoops to make something work, can you actually make that an even like a smoother and better experience? Yeah. Coming back to the way that your teams operate, you guys are so at the edge of what's possible. And the role of just engineering has changed so much. I'm curious what you think is the next kind of frontier of how engineering in particular is going to change. Is it like, you know, fleets of agents?

Is it something else? Just like what's like the next big shift to how engineers operate that either you're ready? working out or implementing or just like it's starting to happen i would say we're shifting more towards async like asynchronous and so to your point the the fleets of agent like that that's why routines are so interesting because it's almost like i used to be like you know doing a prompt and synchronously and then uh i would like maybe like kick off different props asynchronous asynchronously but now i can actually have a routine that actually generates you know these these prompts for me so it's almost like the level of abstraction keeps pulling up a little bit and so i would

I wish I have a crystal ball to see what this is going to look like. It'll be fun actually for you and me to revisit a year from now. No, I want to hear more about this. So help us understand what is routines. And then what is, what do you say synchronous? You're writing a prompt and it just kind of goes off and is it writing it immediately. Talk about what this actually looks like.

Ah, yeah. So routines is like how you can audit. Like so if you remember, I was trying about my, what I used to do is always like, you know, wake up with my morning cup of coffee. And hey, look it through this Slack channel for me. But then now, like, I have a routine that I set to run every morning at a certain time to say, hey, that's right. But then it's able to actually go and kick off agents on your behalf. And so that's because like that's what, like, you know, even, you know, before it would be, oh, you could like, yeah, do a cron job to automate.

But now it's, hey, look at these feedback. And then if you're seeing some of these bugs that, what are some polish fixes that you might be able to knock out? And then it would like, oh, kick off. And then I wake up and I ended up having PRs that I could review versus. before which is still more of it. I can have different agents. And then I'm still thinking about, okay, now what do I do with this information?

So it's like that higher level abstraction of, okay, now how can I actually write a routine that also basically does prompts for me for spawning different agents. So I think we'll move more towards that kind of like asynchronous style of working. So interesting. So like in a sense as a manager, you have these kind of things you do daily. And what you're saying here is you can set up these prompts that kind of check in

every day on the things you would be doing. Like, how are the projects going? What's falling behind? What should I implac? Who's struggling? And how do I fix them, improve some polish? And so the idea here, what you're describing here is kind of write these things that you almost do as a manager daily and have clot essentially do them for you and then show you, here's what I'm doing. Here's what I'm here's what there's to review. And then it's even like then giving even more autonomy at some point of it. You know what? Like go for it. Like for example, a verification is really good? Yeah. Go for it. I see. So you give it like a little bit of freedom to do more of this. Okay. That is so interesting. That reminds me speaking on this idea of go for it. I don't like I wasn't

planning to talk about this, but I just watched Tyler Cohen had this awesome talk about just like, what's happening. I don't know if you know Tyler Cohen is really smart. The economist as a podcast. And he just had like there's so much talk of the people that are doing best in this world. His term is initiative. They have initiative. another term people use agency. Is that something just like, you know, people hear this a lot. Just like the people that seem to be doing best are taking the most initiative, getting the most proactive, have the most agency. Does that kind of spark any thoughts to you just what people may need to, I don't know, think about or improve on?

Actually, that's agent. It's, I love that word agency. That's what we really hold important on the Cloud Code and Co-Work team. But it's interesting. I say along with high, because like we really, it's about like, hey, here's a problem. And then it's really everybody on the team has ideas for how to address the problem. So it's really high agency. And then we say with high agency is also high accountability.

So it's all about like making sure folks have that freedom to cook. You know, but then it's also like, okay, what's the accountability for it as well? And that's where, and again, it goes back to like what's a hypothesis of what you're, you know, like trying to solve. So I think, yeah, the balance like we're, you know, almost like two sides are the same kind of agency. And then accountability, I think has served our team. really well. Such an important element of agency. Okay, cool. Everyone's off doing stuff, but okay, what have you actually? What have you brushed it up? What have you done? So kind of along those lines, it feels like there's this vibe shift recently from token maxing, just go crazy,

spend as much as possible, just see what's possible to like, wait, what are we actually getting out of this? How much does it cost? What's the ROI? Interestingly, Boris was actually like head of Intch productivity and meta. That was like his job is measuring inch productivity. And then also just this like tweet of lines per code, like code shift. Like there's this like interesting discussion of just how do you actually measure productivity increase and ROI of AI tools in spend? How do you like, you know, you guys have the unfair advantage of getting free, free tokens working

in Anthropic. With that in mind, what, what have you learned about just how to measure, say, ROI? of engineers in today's world. This end productivity is such a fascinating topic. Yeah, because I remember, you know, like even Boris mentioned, like we'll first start with like lines of code. And then that's throughput. And then I remembered once then there was a debate of, well, lines of code.

This engineer had this crazy lines of code, but they just took some library and then just was porting it. So they checked it in. And then I was like, well, maybe it's significant lines of code. And then it's, well, but what if we're, you know, updating our frameworks and now we're generating less code, but like the output's still the same. So now I was like, okay, maybe it's, it's like time to land PR. But it's very interesting. If it's always been whichever metric, it's like if you're really focused on the out, like my advice here is one is output, like,

is the output really going towards the outcome? Because yeah, like the token maxing, it's kind of like it's almost like the line to code that we used to have. But I'm really much more about a, what is it that we're trying to do? Like all of this, you know, there was another saying, I really, like, don't forsake motion for progress. Because if you're measuring like, you know, like tool user usage, then you're measuring the action, but is it really making whatever the end outcome of yours is like important.

And so I really try to zoom out and focus on what is the problem we're trying to solve? What's a good way to measure that? And then that's what we focus mostly on. versus kind of like the productivity measurement. I would say, though, like outside of metrics, especially if on teams as you're having more people adopt AI tooling, I would say definitely go on a listening tour for the leaders listening to a podcast,

especially, you know, I love to focus on the senior engineers as well. Like hear from them on what's working, what's not, how can we actually make it better? Because they will also help you multiply and scale that out across a full engineering team. And sometimes it's those conversations, where you might get spark an idea that comes up and also really good shared learning versus, you know, like metric dashboards. It's very interesting. I've learned some good lessons for metrics.

I'm all about like it's really great when you have a metric that you can actually hill climb on, but always keep in mind of, you know, kind of my whole growth mindset of is it still serving you? Always keep in mind like, is that metric really still serving the outcome that you were aiming for? Like a fun example I have of this is in the early Facebook marketplace days, we were kind of like launching by region and we really wanted to make sure we're building a delightful product before we expand. And I remember in the early days, one thing we would keep an eye on is kind of like number of sellers. And I remembered after launching her first region, I'm like, huh, in this area, the number of sellers is low. But actually people are like people are finding items that they're looking for, which is what we're aiming for, like helping people find items that they need. And then I realized in that region, it wasn't a large number of sellers, but there were power sellers.

But our first gate before we expand would have just been like, you know, factoring heavily number of sellers. And I remember that quick conversation of, hey, and this goes back to that whole people will use things in ways you may not expect and shift iterate learn. And so then we updated the metric to go, oh, you know, like it's not a number of seller because it didn't factor in power sellers. And so that's the advice I have to, like whatever metric, whether for productivity or even, for product, always keep an eye and make sure that you're not just having blinders on that's blindly following a metric that used to make sense because sometimes the landscape can change so fast. Even the metrics themselves might need to be adjusted. And this comes back to your process that you shared of having Claude watch all the PR's

shipping per engineer, let's say, and then not focusing on the metrics, but focusing on that leading to a conversation about what impact this has, what was maybe some bugs that happened. and that being a really powerful way of understanding what's going on with this engineer. Awesome. Let me come back to this question of speed and quality and just like impact. Is there anything else you've learned about

just how to balance those things? Just like this crazy velocity of code that's being generated and just staying on top of quality and impact. Is there anything else there that might be helpful to other teams that are trying to wrangle all these PRs being shipped every day? I would say, And this is what honestly we want to keep doing more of and being better at it too.

Like the proactive quality, so especially for quality, making sure that what are the experiences that are key and making sure you actually is, you know, actually speaking of metrics, those are really good things that you make sure you can kind of like see trends over time. And so like on the quality front, we found like, and this is like the more proactive we can be of like making sure we can get an earlier detection into. to quality. And so, like, that's been one thing that we've been paying a lot of attention to. Like, so, like, you know, I started this, hey, let's have a concept of what's bad versus what's sad. And bad is like a very bad irrecoverable error. And sad is something that's kind of like a pain point recoverable. But it's interesting. When you stack up sads, it could, you know, generally go to bad. But even having a, like, starting with a high level framework like that, and because if not, like I think sometimes with dashboards, you can have, you know, like time to load,

all these other, but when you're dealing with a lot of different product surfaces, it's harder to go, wait, is that a good number or not a good number? And so one thing that's helped us is versus just raw, you know, like performance or, you know, like reliability numbers. Also having some framework of what we think is, you know, like a bad experience and making sure we're focused on addressing those and then also keeping an eye on where we're seeing in terms of the sad. That's helped us a little bit. Yeah, I like the bad and sad. So these are kind of like thresholds of this is bad. Okay, this is serious. And this is in terms of like performance or failures or what sort of things are you measuring here? So for example, like we allow each team like speaking of agency.

So knowing that bad is like a really bad irrecoverable error, we enable each team of further surface areas or it could be services that, you know, they lead. What is like so for example, on CLI could be crash rates. Like a crash is pretty bad. You lost work. And for example, Saab might be, hey, is it flickering like it might be recoverable. But we have each team. And that's why it's been interesting. Because because surface areas are different,

like we would have all these dashboards, but it's harder to zoom out and go, okay, what's the overall theme of the experience? So to your point, we give high agency to each team of what we think constitutes a bad and what's a sad, and then what's the goal that each team wants to take. One of the, like the main takeaway I'm hearing here is one of the best tools for staying on top of quality

is just monitoring and tests versus spending more time reviewing. which makes sense because the speed is just impossible to stay on top of. And it almost speaks to this idea of closing the loop for agents to be able to kind of figure things out themselves. They know what success looks like. We'll fix it ourselves. So that's a really interesting takeaway is just invest more in the tests, e-vals, I imagine

as part of this, and then just like monitoring failures and speed and things like that. That's right. Something, I think this is public. I know that you guys have this dashboard that tracks just like F-words, like how often people are like, because they're so pissed and frustrated. There's like a funny term for it, I think. I forget what it's called. Yes.

Actually, I remember, yeah, that was last September because we were all, we were all seeing some frustrations. And, yeah, that was an engineer on the team of, hey, we should maybe track square words. I'm like, oh, that's a great idea. I remember it. I had just, you know, join when we were having that really fun conversation. Yeah, so it's, again, like, it's very interesting to kind of, like, look at, and that's why, like, evals is hard, too, because it's going back to, like, that user

experience and how we can make sure it's a delightful experience and less frustrating. But yeah, the swear word dashboard is a fun one. This episode is brought to you by Mercury, radically different banking, loved by over 300,000 entrepreneurs, and now with command. I've been a customer of Mercury's for over six years. I have never once thought about leaving. Mercury is basically what happens when banking is built by product people, not by bankers. They make it so easy. Dare I say fun to send invoices, move money around, set up virtual cards for folks. on my team. Does your bank have an API, a terminal native CLI, or an AI-ready MCP server? I don't think so. And just recently, they launched Command, a conversational interface built

directly into Mercury, which acts as your financial operator. I've been using Command to transfer money around, to figure out what categories I've been spending the most money in, analyze my cash flows, and just today I used it to find out how much I've made from a specific sponsor over the past year. I just asked, how much have I made from over the past year. Ten seconds later, I have an answer. It is so freaking cool. Visit mercury.com to learn more and apply online in minutes. Mercury is a fintech company, not an FDIC insured bank, banking services provided through Choice Financial Group and column N.A. Members FDIC. Kind of going back to the way you operate and ways that you've figured out to work in this crazy

new world that we're in. I've heard about a couple things that you've implemented that are pretty unique, I think, to how teams operate and I think is something that has worked really well for you. One is making every manager start as NIC and then just every manager has to continue being an IC part-time kind of this player coach approach. Talk about that, why that's so important in today's world. I love it. It's funny when I first joined because I have amazing recruiting partners. And I noticed we were, you know, this whole theme of kind of growth mindset.

It's just because the landscape is changing so fast. Like what worked well before like may not make sense. And even what makes sense today may make sense. need to change tomorrow, right? Like, that's what I have to keep reminding myself. So, yeah, when I first joined recruiters, like, okay, yeah, we have these kind of like manager postings. And I'm like, you know, because actually how it came from like a listening tour I did with like all the, all the members on the team of. And I heard a lot of these, hey, I really appreciate the agency, but how can I make sure prioritization? And so I kind of through that, I, I realized. And then there was some really

good feedback too of making sure that it's not too many layers of reviews. Like, there was good feedback. Some folks might have joined from other companies. They're like, you know, and then I'm like, hmm, when I actually think as a leader, if you actually start as I see first, without the like worry of supporting people, because that's a very heavy responsibility that, you know, I think like matches. But like that, but before you have to take on that full responsibility, give yourself that maker time to actually type deep into the code and learn the code base and I, I, or or the product, like, whatever it is. It doesn't have to, like, honestly, the PRs I do are like, but it's more about for me, it's important because it keeps me in the flow because we're making so many changes to

co-work and code. So even me doing PRs, it's less about what it is I'm fixing. It's more about me using the property every day just to keep that touch because as amazing as metrics and everything are and I do look at those dashboards. If you, as a leader, if you're not, you know, like living and breathing your product every day, you sometimes kind of like lose touch of the touch and feel. of the product. But anyways, on the manager front, I think giving time for managers that join to be able to go deep and to do that before supporting people. And then they actually like end up

building really great rapport with the team. Because if not, I think sometimes as managers, you know, you might come and join a new team and you instantly think, I have to manage. Let me dig into my manager toolbox and do managery things. But if you actually give yourself time to not have to worry about that first and actually learn what it's like to be an engineer and teammate on the team, that also goes really far to building rapport. And in terms of using the product, I think that's, it's interesting. Every team I've joined, one of the first, actually, across all the different products, it could be VR, it could be smart glasses, it was like Instagram.

Usually when I first joined, one comment that comes back to me is, hey, you know what, I really love how you're actually using what we build. is refreshing to see, you know, you giving user feedback. And so I think as leaders, too, it's also a way for us to experience up the work personally that the team does. Something that people may not realize you were overseeing an org of like 500 people at bed at before you moved to Anthropic, right? And you moved to IC, IC engineer basically at Anthropic from that.

I started out, like it was for a very short amount of time. But actually, this was my journey between Microsoft. at Meta. So at Meta, I interviewed as a manager, but I think at least for the first quarter, I was also in IC, because I really wanted to learn what it's like to be a meta engineer. Because before then, I was at Microsoft, kind of like cut my teeth on engineering at Microsoft, so I knew all the code bases, the tools, the languages. And yeah, but it was so valuable to have those first months, like, actually learned what it's like to ship as a meta engineer. Plus, it was also fun. Like, I think sometimes we forget if we, like, and that's, by the way,

I love about clock coat because the last time I shipped production software at Meadows probably 2017. And every year I might start, like I do a lot of dog fooding and a lot of, you know, like I also use dog feeding to help me like vet the quality of product as well. But it's been a very long time since I shipped production software. It's because part of it is I don't, I don't want to screw something up. Like I'm always, I'm always so scared of. What if I do something and then I cause a bug and then my very, ifying everything properly or am I wasting someone's time? Because, you know, like also the, the tool flows would change. But I remember that first week on Claude, I'm like, at first I almost,

again, went to my usual, let me go meet all the engineers and treat them to coffee. And then I'm like, oh, wait, wait, let me ask Claude. And so Claude was this really good onboarding buddy of mine because I was curious about the Kobe's asking questions. And then it also really, you know, helped me, like, you know, do the automated test, but I also want to still do some manual test. And I asked Cloud, hey, help me come up with like, what's the way for me to manually test this to make sure I cover all the case. But all that then gives me confidence that, okay, I can ship Pierre's again. And then I got like kind of more comfortable with again. And so I've actually had a lot of friends reach out to me that have been managed for a while that's like, hey, I'm shipping code again.

Thanks to Claude. And so, but in general, it's, it's just important to me as leaders to make sure you're kind of like using the product that your team builds. It's so interesting that you are overseeing the team as an angel leader that is most changing the role of an engineer. It's such a meta role. Like the work of an engineer is transforming because of the software that you're building. One question along these lines is just, do you worry about engineers' skills to code atrophying from not actually writing code anymore? And does it even matter? Is this like something you think about?

Is it a big deal? It's interesting because we actually have this discussion on the team a bit. Like are there things that we miss? Or like actually, to your point, I'm always thinking about like when someone's onboarding and ramping. Like you have Boris who hand-rolled the code in the early days. And of course, now does it anymore. But he gained that knowledge from before because he was in the code days. So for especially all the engineers that join, I'm also like, make sure you're like taking the time to all the work that you do,

still get the understanding of the architecture or the change. because it goes back to that trust but verify. Maybe one day it won't matter anymore, but at the pace that we're going, I actually still think, understand, like it's always double-clicking on that layer that you depend on. Like maybe that to me is a matter.

Like it's always take that time to learn about your dependencies because this way when your dependencies change, like you're kind of like more aware, or you might not be taking advantage of changes to, you know, dependencies. So I think it's always about kind of like doing that double-click. But the other thing that we found interesting, on the CloudCode team is after a while we felt it could start being a lonely experience

because we all started just working with our agents so much. So recently we started maybe like a Paralyze programming lunch because what we also learned was on CloudCode, everybody uses a CloudCodeCode coworker. Everybody uses a flow so differently. And so we found that wow, when we took Paralyze programming, we actually learn so much from each other. And but And then the other thing, too, is we make sure that, like, we also have the maker time together, too. So, like, for example, hackathons is another thing we really like to do just to make sure we're kind of, like, interacting together as a team. That is such a good point, just like the loneliness that emerges because it used to be inch teams building code together. Someone's doing back end.

Someone's doing front end. Someone's doing an iOS app. Probably a bunch of people, you know, on the back end. And it's like, you know, we have 10 clods running in parallel doing all these things. that is such a good idea of just like finding ways to connect engineers. So the idea here is like almost paraprogramming, but not. It's like parallel. It's like parallel play when kids are growing up.

Like you're kind of working next to each other, but building your own things. But even just watching how other people build is your finding is really valuable. Yeah. And it's because our own tool chain is changing so fast as well. But yeah, it's very interesting to me. I like everybody on our team just uses CloudCode and co-work in different ways. And so every time I watch someone. work, then I learned something myself as well.

How do you manage people getting over, like, obsessed with their optimizing their workflows? Is there anything you're just like, okay, it's fine. Just keep going. You know, I haven't seen too many folks on our team. Like, I think as everybody is just really excited about, you know, either a, like, an architecture update that we think will be higher reliability or some product experience. So most folks, like, that's what we talk about a lot. Like, yeah, we don't over.

It's fun lunchtime conversations, but I don't think we over-optimized because there's no perfect answer, actually. There's too much to do. Is there anything? These are really interesting insights. Just like as the role transformed, things come, things go. So I'm curious what else is kind of lost in this new world of software engineering. I used to be an engineer. I don't know if you know this.

I was an engineer for 10 years. And it was like so fun just to sit there in flow coding. You know this feeling. Just like, oh, wow, it's working. Look at a compile. is they am making progress. And now it's like, you don't do that anymore. You just sit there and kind of wait for agents to build a thing.

What else is kind of lost in this new world for engineers? It's so funny. I just had that conversation with an engineer and the team of talking about flow. Remember the old days you have this really gnarly problem and you pop the music soundtrack in and then you're just in the zone. So yeah, there is a little. And then there was always that big aha moment at the end. I would remember.

Like, yeah, you remember you're like, you finally cracked it. You know, that, yay! So what we do, but it's like, I think now we get a lot of joy from, like, the product. But I do think there is, because I hear from other engineers as well, of hit, well, I, some of the hardest parts is what I used to enjoy. Like, yeah, I heard that from another engineer as well. And so I think we're all just kind of like shifting. But I do see like the thing most, and that's why I was, I was talking about like the

Parerwise programming and the hackathon. That did recently come up more. Folks were starting to feel like it started to be a lonely experience. So interesting. Within Anthropic, I'm curious. So engineering, like, the most transformed, I think, of any role right now. What other, what's like the second most transformed role so far, would you say, within Anthropic that's most different from how it was, like, a couple years ago, let's say?

It's all the coding adjacent roles are shifting. Like, PM is, I know, like, you were chatting with Kat. I think PM is also. transform quite a bit because PM are no longer bottlenecked if they have an idea waiting on engineering bandwidth. So that's kind of like the next road that I've found shift. Like actually our PMs have also helped those roll up sleeves and helped shift, you know, like some features when we, when there wasn't, when there was something we want to do and an engineer wasn't able to. So I think it's all the coding adjacent roles are starting to shift. But I think that's where again,

the verification is important because when you have more different disciplines checking in, how do we make sure everybody has hard confidence? I also think we need to do more to keep automating these other portions of the workflows. Like for sure, we focus a lot on coding. But next, when you think about like design or data science, like those are starting to be the next area, as I think are good opportunities for us to see how we can, yeah, like start improving kind of the experiences there as well.

Yeah, I have a, speaking of data science, a data science friend and he was just saying how data science is so different now, where now most of their job is people doing their own, like, not amazing data science work using AI and then just like showing it to the data scientist. Here's the analysis I did. Can you just make sure it's right? And half the time it's not right. And so the job is just like a whole different job now. Instead of doing the work that they thought they wanted to do and that's like, all right, I'm just reviewing all this AI data science all the time. What the hell? Kind of along the lines, coming back to just how your team operates and how things are changing.

Let me see if something comes with this question. What should an engineering manager expect from their team now versus like a couple of years ago? What's like a normal, I don't know, baseline expectation of how things should work? Is it other than just, you know, we're shipping faster? Is there anything else? Oh, interesting. Well, definitely, I think most commits are Claude assisted. And so that was a shift.

I think, you know, I kind of like mentioned we have like Slack channels with all the feedback and also our dashboards that we have gave to call it. I think having engineers keep building that stronger product sense muscle is I think also like another. And I think that in general helps kind of be at these really traumatized product engineers. I would say more of these roles that were traditionally non-engineering, you do now see engineers being like and sometimes you're just blocked by you know waiting for a you know cross-functional partner i think there's there's less of those blocks now just because uh the models are able to

augment additional capabilities that you may not have as an um from as an engineer so it's kind of interesting it's both directions engineers becoming more product minded and responsible for the quality and success of a product and then everybody becoming an engineer more and more yeah that's right It's all blurring. Yeah. I forget who said this, but there's this like, like, what is a role anymore? And this guy said that it's like, what's the average of what you do? What's like the highest percentage of what you?

And that's kind of your role now, whatever it is. Yeah. Oh, man. I want to come back to your point about obsession with the product, living, breathing, the product, dark fooding. I talked to a bunch of people that work with you about you. And that's the thing that came out most, just like your obsession with living and breathing the product, using the product constantly, whatever it is you're building, this idea of dog fooding.

Talk about just like why that is so important, why that's something you instill within your teams and reports. I love it. Yeah, I think it's really, and this has worked for me, it's just been a really good way for me to keep a pulse on, you know, anytime you build product, there's a dream. Like you're really hoping to enable an experience or make an experience better. So I think being able, like that helps me keep really close to the pulse. I also think, and maybe for sure on Visual Studio that was like, you know, where I got this love of it.

But it's interesting because even Marketplace, I remembered every once in a while I'll do, like even after I left the team, actually. One time I had like a MacBook era, I wanted to sell. Like, oh, you know, I haven't sold anything on Marketplace. And I could not believe it at the minute I put it up for sale. a seller or a buyer tried to scan me. And it was an interesting, like, new scam vector I didn't detect. And so, but that goes to, again, like, people will use your products in ways that you may not expect. And so, especially as leaders or even, like, anyone on the team, we all have different, like, life.

Like, actually, it's funny when I was, you know, supporting the VR and AR teams, somehow, how I used VR, the setup, I would always be able to find these really weird floor height issues. So that ended up being a, oh, I took it, you know, like, I'm going to help us, you know, like, because somehow I got a good repro environment. And so I think it's number one, like making, that's how you keep your pulse on the product that you're building and don't get too lost in metrics and dashports only your presentations. I think that's such an important point you're saying there that I just want to make sure people here is just like, like, there's always this idea of anecdotal evidence and just like examples versus the data. And what you're saying here is as a product leader, as an engine leader, you found a lot of success in like the anecdotes, the specific little one-offs that you experience as a user versus like obsessing with the data only. Yeah. And actually sometimes it's also how I've been able to most effectively help the team. So for example, the last time I was on, I was leading a VR team.

and, you know, because like back then the, like, I, it would have been, I was, I have not checked in any code into that co-based just because I was really worried about like messing up the operating system. But what was a gap? We were doing a lot of polish fixes. And I was, I wanted to, I'm like, hey, you know what, I'll use my dog feeding time to actually vet how the experience looks. And, and so that was also probably a way that I felt I could still meaningfully contribute to help hold the quality bar for the team. And, and then like I say, like I say, Like every team member usually that always really appreciates. Because I think as a lead, like, you know, leader, you're supporting folks on team

that outside of metrics and everything. Everybody really wants to make sure their work matters. And yeah, just making sure that, you know, leaders use their product. I think folks feel the leaders then remain like really engaged and not too distanced. And this connects a lot with your point that engineers need to become more product-minded, that engineers need to become more PMs need to become more. But this is like as an engineer, this is one way to do it. Use the product constantly.

And that'll help you understand what is missing in the product as a user because you're just using it. That's right. And I would say if you're leading a team where it's really hard for you to use a product then meet with customers. Like whatever the other avenue is, that kind of like I think that's also been really important to you. Every time I've done customer visits, I always learn something new.

Like actually, I remember that was a Facebook marketplace. we're trying to launch to Latin America. And so we were testing in Chile. And I remember it just wasn't doing as well as the other regions we've done. But everything else we've tried. And then I remember I'm like, oh, yeah, and we had a really small research trip where I went to Chile. I remember getting a whole bunch of Android phones for us.

It was for a small crew, like just three of us. And upon landing and upon me opening up these Android phones, and I'm like, ah, you know, the LTE connection was much slower than what we were used to in the U.S. And so I'm like, oh, the marketplace feed didn't even load very well on these low LTE situations. What a growth block. You can't even load. But again, that's why it's so important to always, you know, like, listen to customer feedback and get that fast feedback loop. I think it was Jeff Bezos that said, if you have data and you have an anecdote, trust an anecdote over the data, surprisingly. And that's a great example. Okay. Just a couple more questions.

One is in your talk, you had this really interesting slide at the end of what questions you're kind of thinking about right now that you haven't figured out how to solve with how much is changing. I'm going to read the three. I'm curious just like if it's still these three, if there's anything else, like current problems, we need to figure out that we haven't solved in how we operate. What you shared in your talk was, do we still need separate iOS and Android orgs? How far do you push fully a ton automated reviews and which role? with role blurring, how do you ensure everyone's equally productive? Still problems? Is there anything

else that you're thinking about like, okay, we need to crack this? We haven't figured this out. You know the iOS Android one? Like I think we're still, actually it's funny because speaking of like the deep expertise, we definitely feel that it's really important, like it's really important to still bring on folks with those expertise, but we probably don't need like as large

because people are flexing. So it's, again, making sure we have, you know, like the Android and iOS. experts, but then less of the larger kind of like a mobile or one per. And so, but again, that's still a balance that we're trying to figure out if do we have the right and enough expertise. The second one was, sorry, what was the second one? Oh, yeah. It is how far do you push fully a automated review? Ah, yes. Actually, well, this is a fun one like, you know, with a content design check. I think we're looking for across all of it. Like, how do you actually get what good looks like?

And so I have like, actually the verification is still one that we, I think, and that's kind of like the second and the third, that I think there's a lot more opportunities there for us. But the how far to push, I think looking at where we think experts still matters and then also, again, have to keep asking ourselves, okay, is there a way to leverage our expertise to also automate? Like I think like looking across the whole end-to-end experience, like making sure we're not missing and like I think we come out from like an engineering standpoint but making sure on

experiences how we think about those other areas. I think there's definitely still more that we can do there. Basically how do you saw how do you set up a verification that the experience is what you want it to be exactly that and I think that one is still a hard one to crack as you kind of like mentioned evals because it's some of it for sure is accuracy but it's also that experience. So that's something that's yeah we're still kind of thinking through. Awesome. Is there anything else that's like, oh, this has changed recently? We've got to figure out how to rethink the way we operate, or is this kind of the big ones? You know, I think because with routines and everything being more async, I think there is starting to be a high load on our context switching.

Because I even remember myself was like, oh, I kicked, like, I kicked off. And so I think that's probably another thing we have to think about of how do we, you know, whether for our team members or so our users, like, how can we actually make the experience better to. reduce that load because I do see the context switching load increasing. I can like if you have 20 agents running you, there's just endless checking in and reviewing and you have to remember what you were doing there. It's like such an interesting world where like the idea of flow we talked about before like engineers and most people like there's less of the just hours of flow. But now the agents can kind of just remind you.

Here's where you're at like the reset to switch almost is easier because you don't have to like re-learn everything. You don't have to like re-understand the code base and the architecture. You can kind of just like, okay, but here's what we're trying to do. It's kind of like both got better, got worse. Well, it's interesting because I used to do book out like focus time for like, you know, with a focus time for like, you know, the focus time because you want that dedicated and then the whole context switching. And then it's interesting. Now that because I can't contact switch more with more ASIC agents, I'm noticing I do actually have to go back and block like a focus time for me to catch up on all the, you know, different ASIC work that I kicked off. Yeah. Do you have any thoughts on the solution there? Because that's hard. Just like, there's like people just want to do more and more. And just how do you do that without constantly context switching? It's really hard and annoying. Yes.

I agree. All right. Open question. Definitely haven't cracked it yet. So interesting. Okay. There's a question I thought of as we were talking that I'm like so excited to hear your answer on that. I wasn't even planning to ask this.

But it's so important these days, which is just like inch jobs and hiring. So interesting that you would think AI would, make engineers less necessary. On the other hand, it feels like you guys are hiring engineers like crazy. Open eyes hiring engineers like crazy. Just like there's so much demand for engineers. Where do you think this goes?

What do you think about just the future of the end role? This is a big question. But just thoughts. Actually, I'll share some vulnerability here. One, speaking of like big open questions, I really do think how we grow the next generation just because how you and me got to our engineering path is just so different. It's almost like, okay, now when you graduate from school, it's like, how do you kind of fast forward?

But the important thing to me, but still understand kind of like, you know, that double click I talk about to the layer of a neat. But that is a big question I have. And I wish I have the answers. But I wonder if it's for software engineering, it's almost like you go more towards a fellowship. or apprenticeship program. I know it's all because technically we have like internships that would, but those were like three months and little projects.

But I do wonder of, and I wish I have a chrissive all here, but it's, yeah, like how do you almost like cram in some of the, and maybe it won't matter, but you know some of the life experiences that we all got, how do you actually enable us to kind of like teach that to, you know, the next generation of builders? Right.

Like if you don't have to ever look at code, what's the incentive for a new software engineer to truly understand how infrastructure works and memory allocation, all these things that are kind of foundational. And it's interesting. Maybe the malls will get good enough that it doesn't matter. You don't have to worry about it. You know, but I do think there's something about that double click because I think that's where there might be an opportunity to improve the product or the system.

But figuring out how to learn that not necessarily by, you know, like, you. years of typing code. Yeah. Yeah. Like somebody's got to have to understand code at some level. It's like some cobal engineer they have to like pull out of that retirement one day. Like do you remember how to write Python? You know actually what's really fun?

One of my, you know, previous managers. I mean, he started software engineer when it was punch cards. And it's so fabulous. Like he's been messaging me everything. He's been building with cloud code. And I'm like, well, what a career that you go from. Like he's really like, he. he's really kind of like seeing this whole change.

So maybe I think for us to think about it is like when I think about his career, how he got started with punch cards was also totally, totally different than the now. And so it might be that I think it'll be interesting for us to see what remains important and then what changes in terms of importance. And then it's like how do you kind of gain. Like I have a theory maybe maybe that's the what is important will shift over time. And then how do you kind of kind of build the proficiency in doing that. Yeah, just learn the things that really matter.

Like the argument that I constantly hear is just like it's a new level of abstraction, just like assembly and binary, like it just keeps going up and up. And now, okay, we don't need to actually look at the code. It's like a new layer of abstraction, prompts and and Claude's thinking, you know, messages. Yeah, and it's maybe like, okay, what is an interesting problem? And what's a prioritization for experience to build? Like, it's interesting. Maybe we're kind of, yeah.

And then when you build things, how do you know it's actually resonating and, and it's kind of like doing what you intended? And it's good, yeah. Like, is this going to, are we just building a bunch of sloppy or is this actually architecture that will work? I think the advantage, though, for young people is they are so, it's so much easier to just to lean in and work in this new way versus being stuck in the way the things used to be. It's like rare. It's like amazing how many longtime engineers like yourself have adapted and embrace this. It's like so hard to just change everything. Okay, let's do it.

Well, because the rate of change is also so fast. Actually, that was the one thing of, I remember the first time I, it was probably Sonnet 3-5 or 3-6, like, and I remembered it was still like making some mistakes when I was doing things on the side. I'm like, hmm, what are you doing? And then what I noticed was some of the engineers that were resisting AI tooling. They're like, ah, but see, it's, you know, like, look at all of these. But then I think it was hard to understand of how kind of like,

the exponential rate of improvements. And so always, and maybe that's another interesting thing that I, myself, I'm learning too. Like there might have been something I tried to automate that Claude wasn't quite good enough. And then actually in the next model, oh, well, now it is good enough. So it's always also thinking about what may have not worked. Like it might be worth a time to revisit because, you know, that now might be a new capability. Yeah. That comes up a lot on this podcast.

Just build something that is almost working that is at the end. because once the model gets there, you'll be so far ahead of everybody else. Okay. Final question. You may have already answered this with what you just said, but what keeps you up at night? You know, the thing that keeps me up at night is probably, it's how we, so, you know, we talked about kind of like Cloud Code and Co-work team culture. And the team culture is really important to me.

Like, it's the one-team mentality. And I, you know, I share with folks. And by the way, culture is like a living, breathing thing. It's not just a postery slap on a wall and it changes over time. And it shows up in how we treat each other, how we're there for each other. And so the culture that seems important to me because we are growing and since the culture shifts, like making sure that maintaining the things are important, that we are, we still really, like, it's really important for me to have like diverse perspectives.

So then we can have, you know, like good, healthy, open, honest debates out in the open. And we kind of like welcome those and kind of what I call that. that one-team mentality that when you get close to the finish line, look behind you and say, is there some of my team to help because maybe you kind of finish as a team? That's probably the thing that keeps me up at night. And it's like, you know, there's so many other hard problems, right? But I think maybe a lot of the other ones are product or engineering challenges that, yes, we have, you know, like dashboards or theories or hypothesis.

But the culture is like a human aspect that is, um, I think that's the one that I always want to make sure that we're, as we grow, we're still kind of like maintaining that culture because it is kind of like the fiber of the team. And like when it starts drifting, it's, I'm always worried of it, you know, like if it drifts, are we catching it and having conversations as a team together to, to make sure we're kind of all wanting the culture to grow on the right direction. Yeah. I imagine everybody is struggling with this.

considering the pace of change and the pace of hiring, just like, especially at a company like Anthropic that's in this crazy, like the most unprecedented growth trajectory in history, I could see how that could be a challenge with so much change. So it makes sense. Like even, you know, at Airbnb when I was there, like that was quite a growth trajectory and that was nothing like what you guys are going through. And that was a constant topic of conversation. How do we maintain the culture? Actually, I'm curious. What was your experience at Airbnb be to maintain the culture is growing. A couple things. One is just the what worked well is the founders being obsessed with it. Like every

all hands, every, every big meeting is just like reminding of like the culture and the value of the culture and what the values are just the founders top down being obsessed with it was a big part of it. You just like couldn't have a meeting without that coming up as a as a thing. The other is a memory I always come back to is we had Cheryl Sandberg's speaking of a medic come to come to a fire side chat and somebody asked her just how do you maintain culture as you scale because we're just growing so fast and it's so hard to deal with all this change and culture and all these new people

and her advice was this is actually the problem you want to have because this means you're growing and doing well and this is normal versus you can nothing will change if you're doing badly like that's that's the that's a much worse situation when you're not growing and you're not hiring like crazy. That's a much worse situation that will cause even more than even suffering. So this is a good problem you're dealing with is her advice, which is always stuck with me. Oh, that's great. Like, it's interesting. Like, here you talk, I think one of the important things to have CloudCode and coworker team is whether ICs or managers, but this is a thing I especially ask for managers on the team is really important that we all talk about for sure what's going out, but also just be open about what's

not going well because then if we can actually have the conversation of what's not going well, that's how we can actually go ahead and address it. Like my, my, speaking of what keeps me up, my nightmare is especially if someone's in a manager position and, and I'm like, hey, how are things going? Everything's fine. I'm like, oh my gosh, I'm not doing fine. I know this thing's like, like, it's that whole, like, you know how there was this meme of the dog jukia cup of coffee in her room that's on fire? This is like that, that is my nightmare. So that's actually a discussion I have with a lot of folks on the team, but special managers, especially when they first joined, hey, let's always have these open conversations so that we can solve problems together.

I imagine this is something a lot of people struggle with, seeing so many people around them doing super well, at least seemingly doing well. Everything's going great. I'm growing. There's some of this awesome company or like just like everything. It's hard to, it's like hard to actually be honest and say, again, it's not going great. I'm struggling here. I'm falling behind because everyone around you is just like on the surface feeling like they're killing it.

Before we get to our very exciting lightning round, is there anything else that you either want to leave listeners with, anything else that we didn't cover, anything else that's important that you wanted to share? Maybe one thing is just a suggestion, because we talked about how can Cloud do, like, automate. Like one other thing that's really big on CloudCode and co-work team culture is explicit permission to kill processes that no longer serve us.

And so maybe a suggestion is for, you know, anyone, you know, like on working on a team or leading teams, like, pick your, like, what's one process that you either dread doing or is really highly noisy or is like really expensive in terms of like just a lot of, like it might, or is something that's just very manual? Like pick one thing and first ask is it still having its purpose. Like for example, when like even our planning like actually that was my own big first learning when. I'm like, hey, maybe we should, you know, do a six-month roadmap doc. But we're going to do it super lightweight because I don't want to waste a lot of time planning. And I felt we did a really lightweight process. That was such a good learning for me because the exercise was good to kickstart conversations and ensure aligned.

But like three months into it, I'm like, wait, have we still referenced? Because so much has changed. So that was also something I, like, and so that was also something I changed that I myself brought in thinking, hey, maybe this will this will help. So always be open to learning and always. ask yourself, whatever process you have, is it still serving its purpose just because the field is changing so fast? I love that advice. I got to follow up on this real quick. So what is it, how do you think about planning now? Do you do any planning? Is it just like a month-long roadmap?

What's kind of like the simple way to explain where you're at with that? Yeah. I call it Jit planning now, like just in time planning. So it is like around like, because yeah, I think six months was too long. So now for sure some projects will take more than a month. But we try to do like a month, a month. planning like really lightweight. Actually, there's not even dots. It's really just us on a little spreadsheet of what we think is important. But even that one, I'm kind of thinking through, hey, like every week we should probably still keep a, like, what we're trying is, here are the month's priorities. And we're going to try it up, but I have a feeling like every week we'll probably want to do really quick. Like, hey, just to check. Yep, this is the,

still this month's priorities. Good. But yeah, like, but now we've shrunk it to Jit monthly planning. So it's monthly meaning for the next month. Here's a little sheet slash Excel spreadsheet of what we're planning to do for the next month. And then every week check in is this still what we're planning to do for the next month. Yeah. It's like very, very weird. But even that one, I'm also still feeling, how can we even automate this more? Because I never wanted to be feeling like a tax when someone has to, you know, update the spreadsheet.

So this is actually, yeah, like just yesterday we're chatting, hey, how can we actually automate this? Speaking to that question, always ask yourselves, can we actually automate this better? Like my PM brain is like, that's so, like, how could you not do something like that? Okay, here's what we're thinking for the next month. Let's just check it once a week. Like, it's hard to imagine that not happening. And you don't have a lot of items on this spreadsheet is what I'm hearing also. Yeah, like we really try focus. So like we will share out like here's what we think are the highest priorities. And again, for that agency, given the priorities, then like everybody's like they're kind of like, item for how they think addresses those priorities.

Is there anything that's like here's for the next like six months bigger beth kind of stuff or is it just like let's just think one month ahead? I like so well usually definitely there's themes of where we think the the work and so we'll definitely like and actually the the whole team will bring everyone together like every every six months. So there will usually kick off like some themes. But then it's really the making sure we keep the pulse of what because again like even those themes change. you know, so fast when the landscape changes. All right. Let's pull out the spreadsheet. Let's take a look. Oh, man. Man, this whole podcast could have been just talking about this planning stuff that you do.

Okay, I'm going to have to find someone else to talk about this because this is so interesting just how you all plan. Yeah. Okay. Well, Fiona, with that, we reached our very exciting lightning round. I've got five questions for you. Are you ready? Ready.

Okay. First question, what are two or three books that you find yourself recommending? most to other people. Oh, I will say for fiction. Actually, two authors I recommend to everyone, Margaret Atwood and Haruki Murakami. Those are just too, like, I mean, I grew up in Canada, so I read a lot of Atwood growing up. But her books are fascinating because it's almost like speculative fiction. of you can kind of squint and say,

okay, could this actually, you know, like happen to a society? So I love her take on speculative fiction. And Miracami, I love his magical realism style. But then the one book, so those are authors, but the one book I always recommend to everyone to read at least once a year or, you know, the Little Prince. I think, I'm sure we probably all read it at some point. our lives. But I think it's a, I read it at least once a year just, you know, to, to remind me to

think about like kind of like what's truly important. Wow. That hasn't come up a bunch. Okay. I love it. Favorite recent movie or TV show you have really enjoyed? I haven't watched TV shows. That's very common across anthropic people I have on the podcast. Common theme. But I will share with you what I always have downloaded on my phone so that if I'm on the airplane. So there's three movies that I'll always have on my phone because I think they're just so so fun to watch if I have time. One is Emily. It's this French movie that, oh my gosh, all of these movies are going to be very old, by the way. It's going to be like vintage movies.

But I loved Emily. Super Wimical. So really highly recommend it to anyone that haven't seen it. It's, you know, if I, if you remember, I told you, I was going on a, I thought I was going to be a visual artist. So when I was 16, my high school, we took a trip, a high school trip to Paris. And that just, I have so many memories of that. And Emily really captures the magic. I felt Paris.

And the other two are Ghibli films. I love Spirited Away. That's, it's just such a, like, just such a fabulous. I just love that story. I love the, yeah, like I just love everything about Spirited Away. It's probably one of my favorite Jibli films. And then the third was another Jibli. film, Nassica Valley of the Wind. And I think about this one quite a bit because if anyone

asked me, hey, how did you kind of think about all these leadership trades? I think I watched that movie probably when I was eight or nine. And the hero in Nassika and how she, seeing how she leads just left such a like just left such a thumbprint in my heart, I guess you could say, that probably Nossica has inspired me to a lot in. a lot of my different leadership principles. Wow. What is that book called again? The movie's called like Nasuka Valley of the Wind,

but it was actually based on a manga. Valley of the Wind. Valley of the Wind, Nassica. That's right. Two top management books. So cool. Okay. Do you have a favorite product you recently discovered

that you really love? Could be not. Clothing, could be a gadget, could be kitchen equipment. I don't know. I'll share the product that I'm reminded of how much is made a difference in my life recently. Because I've been just traveling a little bit, and so I don't, and I like to travel really

light. So I use whatever shampoo and conditioner, you know, the hotel gives. And I forgot that. So the product that I actually have one of their hand, I promise is it's not an infomercial. Sweet Sisters Body Care, it's, you know, a local business on Whippy Island. But the reason why their product has made such a big difference in my life, it's a full line of organic hair, body, skin care. But a few years ago, I started getting this rash on my nose right here that was really painful, like actually bleeding. And I could not, for the life of me, figure out how to stop it.

Like, I tried not using any lotions. Like, I cut everything on my face and it was still really hurting. And then somebody says, what's the shampoo you're using? I'm like, it's the same shampoo I've used since I was, you know, like a teenager. And they're like maybe your body has now, and it's, you know, like generic, you know, brands shampoo they're getting and they said maybe your body's just start developing an allergy to it because of the chemicals in it that. Wow. I'm like, what?

And so anyways, this was an organic shampoo that I found. Lo and behold, I use our shampoo and then, because you don't think that when you wash your hair, it actually then, you know, it goes, goes over to the rest of your body. But so since then, I've switched everything that I used to be sweet sisters. But I'm recently reminded of how important this is because after a week of, yeah, hotel shampoo, I actually started having some skin reactions again. I'm like, ah, maybe I should get like travel-sized bottles that I could bring with me. This is an awesome pick. I love local, local business picks, even big bonus points for that.

And by the way, this travel you're doing just for folks that may not know this, there's a, there's these code with clot events that are happening. all over the world. I went to the one in SF. There's one in London. You're going to one in Tokyo. Is that the end of it or is there more after that? Tokyo is, so that yeah, that's next week. And that's the last leg of the trip. Okay. And then probably more in the future. So cool. I love that that's happening. Okay. Two more questions. Do you have a favorite life motto that you find yourself coming back to often in work or in life? Oh. So in work, I really love to remind folks keep it simple. Like what is the thing that you're really trying to do well and focus

on that do you know like keep it simple because i think sometimes we could overthink um so it's always a good mantra to think about that uh and in the life um you know probably in a world where you can be anything be kind i love that one i we were at a at a montessori school uh tour and that's what the teacher had up on the wall oh like it's you know we have so many things going on that you never know what's going on in someone else's life and that one small act of of kindness can make the biggest difference. Like, for me, actually, that was when, do you remember COVID? We were all, like, working from home during, you know, the COVID day.

It's just always really struck with me because I was in these, you know, back-to-back meetings. And I always, one-on-ones are really important to me because, you know, actually that time is usually also really important for the other person. It's something that, you know, they've been looking to. There might have things they discuss. So I always try, like, I always really prioritize one-on-ones. But during that time, my grandmother wasn't doing well and she was in a home in Canada because of COVID I couldn't go visit. And actually even my aunt and mom couldn't go visit. And it was just very rare of if they have a helper that can help, we could do FaceTime.

But you never know what time that is going to be because, you know, there's so many people that take care. And all of a sudden I got a message from my aunt going, Grandma can FaceTime at like 12 p.m. today. I'm like, oh no, there's this one-on-one that I've been meaning to have, and I just messaged, you know, my report to say, I'm really, really sorry. It's the last minute. Is it okay to, and I know it now it's when I say it doesn't seem like it's a big thing because it's like, but to me it's always really important to keep. But he was like, yeah, totally, no problem in all. And for me, that was just a small after kindness. He doesn't, he totally didn't make into big deal, but that made the biggest difference to me that got to, you know, say hi to my grandmother on Facebook. I love that. Okay. Okay. Final question. So Boris Churny, when asked him about you, when he had this interest in insight where he said in very important meetings, you can often hear Fiona, you can hear the click-clack of Fiona knitting in the background. Maybe talk about just what's going on there. And what are a couple of things you knitted recently? Oh my gosh.

Well, I knit this top recently. You make your own clothing. This is very meta for clothing. odd code building itself. You know, we're always actually, this is a whole fun thing I think between knitting and programming, because it's kind of like two stitches, knit and a pearl,

so it's zero and one. Anyway, so many concepts of stacks and cues you actually could rep, like I'm kind of like a compiler. I'm kind of like, you know, generating an executable when I knit. Yeah, actually, it was my grandma that taught me to knit when I was eight. I kind of mentioned her and I, going to that yarn shop.

And so every time I knit, I think of her. But I always like to multitests, as you could see, like, yeah, kick off multiple agents. So anytime I'm sitting, and because I practice enough and gum proficient, I don't have to look at what I'm doing. So it's almost like how, you know, sometimes people have, like, fidget spinners and such. Knitting is just, so anytime I'm sitting still, I'm like, oh, this is time to, you know, like generate more knitting executable. Because I got so much yarn that if I don't do this, yeah, my yarn. I might have a slight yarn addiction problem. I love this.

When I asked Boris what he would do when AGI hits when we don't have to work, he said he's going to make me sew. I'm guessing your answer would be just knit and make beautiful clothing. Oh my gosh. My dream is to actually open up a yarn store in my grandmother's name and create that community. Oh, wow. And then co-work would help out. You automate everything.

That's right, especially invoicing. Oh, my God. Fiona, you're awesome. It's just incredible, the work that you and your team are. doing, just changing the world in such profound ways. And there's no, it's clear white. It's growing so fast. So good job. Good job over there. Thank you for making a good type of this. Well, I'm just really honestly lucky and humble that I get to work with such an amazing team. Like I know how lucky and I am and I'm so grateful. But thanks a lot for having me on the podcast as well.

This was a lot of fun. Two final questions. Where can folks find you online if you are online, if they want to follow up on anything? And how can listeners be useful to you? you. Oh, so definitely, so I'm on LinkedIn, and I'm sure most people have shared this already, but would love feedback of what's going well, what's not going well. Also, any latent demand that you are all using that might be interesting use cases. You know, I had a friend messaged me recently to go, oh, I'm using Cloud to help me generate a building plan for my shed. And he actually showed me his whole shed, which was cool. So I would love to hear about that. And then, yeah, maybe also, you know, we talked about reaching out across,

so there's someone, whether a small business that you love or someone that you feel like hasn't, you know, assuming all the listeners are super AI-pilled, yeah, maybe take a time to hold somebody's hand to show what AI might be able to help them with. Such a good one. That is such a good answer to this question, especially coming from you.

Fiona, this was awesome. Thank you so much for being here. Thanks so much for having me, Lenny. Bye, everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lenniespodcast.com.

See you in the next episode.