The Ledger, every show

“So essentially, if you combine a well-aligned model, so this is, like, essentially three years of research into alignment, With a prompt injection classifier, which we run for all traffic, and what this is doing is it's based on Chrysola's mechanistic interpre…”

“And he had the model rewrite it from Zig to Rust. It was one prompt. It was a dynamic workflow, and a dynamic workflows are a feature in quad code that essentially let you orchestrate, you know, dozens, 100,000 of agents to do work productively. And it ran for…”

“And so now we have every day, maybe 20 or 30 of these routines. It's running across all of our code bases and It's not totally there yet, but we're on the path to fully automating the maintenance of our apps by doing this. And this is, again, hundreds of agent…”

“QuadCode is a hundred percent written by QuadCode. Cowork is a hundred percent written by QuadCode.”

“And over the next few months, I think what we're going to see is just across the industry, it's going to become increasingly solved, you know, for every kind of code base, every tech stack that people work on.”

“Over the last year, like, since we introduced quad code, we probably, I don't know the exact number, we probably, like, forex the engineering team or something like this, but productivity per engineer has increased 200% in terms of, like, pull requests.”

“My take is, I think for people that are using that are using quad code, that are using agents to code today, you still have to understand the layer under. But yeah, in a year or two, it's not gonna matter.”

“And since Quad Code came out, productivity per engineer at Anthropic has grown a 150%.”

“If you look at Anthropic overall, it ranges between, like, 70 to 90% you know, depending on the team. For a lot of teams, it's also, like, a hundred percent. For a lot of people, it's a hundred percent.”

“So continuing to trace the exponential, I think what will happen is coding will be generally solved for everyone. And I think today coding is practically solved, you know, for me, and I think it'll be the case for everyone you know, regardless of domain.”

“I think we're gonna start to see the title software engineer go away, and I think it's just gonna be maybe builder, maybe product manager, maybe we'll keep the title as kind of a vestigial thing, but the work that people do, it's not just gonna be coding, it's…”

“For five, one example of something it does that I think no other model has done is it runs for a very long period of time. And especially when you combine Opus Five with auto mode, it's just like incredible. Like it can go for days, weeks, months at a time. It…”

“And what's interesting is that the model is actually a little bit more intelligent without these prompts. That's something that we've been finding.”

“One example is the model can now rewrite essentially any code base from one language to a different language.”

“What happened with Claude is now many companies, including Anthropic, and all of our biggest customers are reporting gains on the order of hundreds of percentage points. And I think the last number that we reported is the amount of code written per engineer at…”

“Essentially we found both in the laboratory setting, and now we're finding in the wild, this is safer than what we had before. So as a user, it's a really nice benefit, because you don't have to sit there and say yes over and over, and actually the result is b…”

“Some modes get less important, and this is, for example, switching costs, because if you want to switch from vendor A to vendor B, you can, you know, you can just ask Quad to do that, and Quad is going to get better and better over time at it.”

“Quad is starting to generate its own ideas for what to build next for QuadCode, but it's, you know, it's not always good ideas, and I still generate most of the ideas, and, you know, at some point it's gonna change. The model's gonna improve, and it's gonna be…”

“And my prediction back in May of 2025 was, by the end of the year, you might not need an IDE to code anymore, and we're gonna start to see engineers not doing this.”

“I think it's going to be a lot of the roles that are adjacent to engineering. So yeah, it could be like product managers. It could be design, could be data science. It is going to expand to pretty much any kind of work that you can do on a computer because the…”

“And so I imagine a world, you know, a few years in the future where everyone is able to program. And what does that unlock? Anyone can just build software anytime. And I have no idea. It's just the same way that, you know, in the 1400, no one could have predic…”

“I do think that there is a future where I think by the end of the year, what we're going to start to see is these start to get even murkier, murkier, where I think in some places the title software engineer is going to start to go away. And it's just gonna be …”

“I think the first kind of big example where it worked is our plugins feature was entirely built by a swarm over, over a weekend. It just ran for like a few days. There wasn't really human intervention and plugins is pretty much in the form that it was when it …”

“Every single function on our team codes, like our PM's code, our designers code, our EM codes, our like everyone, our finance guy codes, like everyone on our team codes. We're going to start to see this everywhere.”

“But I think that the models six or 12 months from now, they probably won't need this anymore because they're all going to be pretty good and you won't have to define very rigidly what each one's responsibilities are anymore.”

“And so quad code actually doesn't use this technique called rag. Instead, what it does is it just searches files the same way that a human would.”

“I think one way it will definitely play out is it's going to change programming where programming is no longer direct text manipulation, but it's more working with agents to get the work done.”

“Yeah, we're kind of bordering on three right now.”

“Everything is the model. Like that's the thing that wins in the end. And it just, as the model gets better, it's it subsumes everything else. So, you know, at some point the model will encode its own knowledge graph. It'll encode its own like KV story if you j…”

“But I also agree that, you know, maybe in a month or two months or three months, you won't need this anymore because, you know, the bitter lesson always wins.”

“So yeah, we deleted 80% of the system prompt.”

“This is in production now. This is what quad code uses now when you're running it.”

“And actually in this case, Quad also decided to live blog it. So what it did is it created a Slack channel internally, and it started just posting screenshots every few minutes of its progress.”

“So coding is solved for the kind of coding that I do. It's not solved for everyone. You know, there's still code bases that are like super deep systems code bases where quad still struggles. There's distributed systems where quad still struggles. There's reall…”

“Even something as simple as like editing a file on your computer. You know, like a year and a half ago, there was no AI product that could actually do that. But this is the first thing that quad code was able to do. It could edit a file on your desktop.”

“I did a talk at Y Combinator, you know, the startup incubator yesterday, and I asked people to raise their hands, you know, everyone, everyone's using QuadCode, and I asked them, You know, raise your hand if a hundred percent of your code is written using quad…”

“One of the cool things about quad, and this is something that we started to see pretty early with quad code users, is actually very few people nowadays run one quad code at a time. Most people run many, many quad codes, you know, ranging from, you know, a few …”

“And at some point, Claude is going to become really good at asking Claude to do this. And that person is going to be asking Claude that asked Claude to do this. And this chain will just keep getting deeper, but in the end, you still need people that are piloti…”

“Things that we saw is, you know, in a year with hundreds of engineers working on it, you would see a gain of like a few percentage points of productivity, something like this.”

“You know, at Anthropic, we're starting to see some engineers that are spending, you know, like hundreds of thousands a month in, in tokens.”

“We at this point have like pretty sophisticated technology to understand what's happening in the neurons to trace it. And so for example, like if there's a neuron related to deception, we can start, we're starting to get to the point where we can monitor it an…”

“Everything that's happening right now around, you know, just like quad code becoming this huge, you know, multi-billion dollar business.”

“A really common pattern is I ask claw to build something. It'll look in the code base. It'll see some engineer touch something in the git flame and then it'll message that engineer on Slack. Just like asking a clarifying question. And then once it gets the ans…”

“You can write these prototypes and you can just do like 20 prototypes back to back, see which one you like, and then ship that, and the whole thing takes maybe a couple hours. Whereas in the past, what you would have had to do is like learn to use origami or f…”

“There was some stuff from Mercury that like, 70% of startups are, you know, choosing quad as their model of choice.”

“There were some other stuff from like semi-analysis that four percent of all public commits are made by quad code.”

“It plotted the course for perseverance, like for like the Mars Rover.”

“And they built it in, I think something like 10 days. It was just like a hundred percent written by quad code.”