Claude Code was built before the model was ready

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 2:37

   Okay. Cool. Yeah. So I started QuadCode kind of accidentally in a lot of ways. I joined this team back in late 2024. It was sort of this incubator within Anthropic called Anthropic Labs. And the team kind of served its purpose. We created QuadCode, MCP, and the desktop app. It was a team. It was just a few of us. So very much like innovation team. We built the thing that we wanted to build. We disbanded the team. Now the team's actually back together for round two. Mike Krieger, who's the, you know, like the chief product officer at Anthropic and used to be one of the founders at Instagram. So he's leading that right now.

2. 3:15

   so the kind of the the the reason that I started to work on coding is we felt like there was this product overhang and I'm guessing people here use that word a lot but we definitely use this word a lot in kind of within the lab there's this idea that the model can do all this stuff that no product has yet captured and in late 2024 when we were looking at coding the way that we did coding the state of the art at the time was type ahead because you open your ID and you press tab and you can like complete like one line at a time.

3. 3:45

   And that was the thing that Sonnet 3.5 enabled for the first time. But the feeling was we could actually go a lot further than that and the model was almost ready for the next big step. So we don't have to do type ahead anymore, we can just have the agent write all of the code. And so I built it and it just really didn't work for the first six months. It was like not very good, it was barely usable.

4. 4:08

   I used it for maybe 10% of my code or something like that. And even after we released quad code initially, it was not a hit. There's a lot of people that used it, but it did not have this exponential growth that it has today. That started with Opus 4 in May. And I remember that very clearly. That's like when the exponential growth started, and then it kind of inflected with every model release. Like it started with Opus 4, then 4.5, then 4.6, now 4.7.

5. 4:33

   It just kind of keeps inflecting. But essentially, we were trying to build this thing that was like pre-PMF. and we knew that it wouldn't have PMF for six months because we were building for the next model. And that was the idea pretty much the whole time. And, you know, for Anthropic in general, we've always just been very focused. We've always cared about business and enterprise and safety and coding.

6. 4:54

   That's just always been kind of the way that we wanted to build. And so at some point we kind of knew that we wanted to build a product. We didn't know exactly. So this kind of ended up being the product bet. It's an incredible story, especially that it was an accident.