The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
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Mike Krieger estimates Claude Code is over 95% written by AI
“At this point, I would be shocked if it wasn't 95% plus.”
Anthropic's Claude Code team uses Claude to write and review itself
“The team that works in the most futuristic way is the Claude code team, because they're using Claude code to build Claude code in a very self-improving kind of way. And, you know, early on in that project, they would do very line by line pull request reviews, …”
Mike Krieger expects AI to autonomously resolve user feedback by 2025
“Hey, I'm in the discord, the, you know, the, Cloud anthropic discord. I'm in the user for I'm on X and I'm reading things and like, here's what's emergent. That's step one. Models can do that today. Step two, which the models probably can do today. We just hav…”
Mike Krieger says MCP is more promising for agents than computer use
“To really have agency and have these agentic use cases. Like one way you approach it is computer use, but computer use has a bunch of limitations. The way I get way more excited about everything is an MCP and our models are really good at using MCPs. All of a …”
Krieger: AI benchmark evals often contain flawed ground-truth answers
“And some of these model these evals we've seen, like, even the golden answer, I'm like, I'm not sure a human would say it, or, like, I think that math is actually a little wrong, like, getting a hundred percent is gonna be really hard, because even just gradin…”
Mike Krieger uses Claude Opus 4 as his primary strategy partner
“Where my go-to product strategy partner is Claude, and it has been basically for that full year where I'll write an initial strategy. I'll share it with Claude basically, and I'll have it, you know, look at it. And in the past, it's pretty anodyne kind of comm…”
Anthropic models hit 72% on SWE-bench, crushing earlier timeline predictions
“He's like, I think we'll be at 90% by the end of 20, 25 or something like that. And sure enough, we're at about 72 now with the new models and. We're at 50% when you made that prediction and it's like continued to scale pretty much like as predicted.”
Krieger: Anthropic embeds product teams directly in post-training research workflows
“The functional unit of work at Anthropic is no longer like take the model and then like go like work with design and product to go ship a product. It's more like we are at like, we're in the post-training conversations around how these things should work. And …”
Krieger: A huge overhang remains between AI capabilities and everyday adoption
“Like there's still set, we call it overhang, right? Like the Delta between what the models and the products can do and how it's been, they're being used on a daily basis, huge overhang. So that's, we're still like a very, very strong necessary role for product…”
Krieger: Major strategy and product pivots are extremely difficult for remote teams
“And I think there were like major shifts that we would have wanted to make it both in the strategy and the product and the team. And it's really hard to do that. If you are all fully remote, like nothing replaces like the Instagram days”
Mike Krieger steered Anthropic's product strategy toward APIs over consumer apps
“I came in, everybody expected me to just like go super, super hard on consumer and make that the thing. And I again would make the other mistake. Instead, I spent a bunch of time talking to like financial services companies and insurance companies and like oth…”
Mike Krieger confirms Anthropic is not planning to acquire Cursor
“I don't think we're gonna buy a cursor.
Cursor's very big but we love working with them.”
The best AI startups intentionally build at the edge of model failure
“I think being willing to build more at the edge of the capabilities and basically break the model and then be surprised by the next model.”
Optimizing AI models for likability risks creating sycophancy, says Mike Krieger
“It would be very dangerous to over optimize on like Claude's likability, you know, because you can fall into things like, you know, is Claude gonna be sycophantic? Is Claude gonna tell you what you hear? Is Claude going to like prolong conversations just for p…”
Mike Krieger says AI products should measure task completion, not engagement
“I don't have a great answer yet, but I think that like, it's not the web two O or even the social media days, like engagement metrics, you know, it should hopefully really be around Like, did it actually help you get your work done?”
Krieger: Delegating all cognition to AI short-circuits independent thought
“Not just sort of delegating all of your cognition to the, you know, to the AI, cuz they won't always get it right. And also kind of like, you know, kind of short circuits, any kind of independent thought.”
Krieger: Structuring AI code prompts remains a specialized engineering skill
“What I've learned though, is like the process of knowing what to ask the AI, how to compose the question, how to even think about like structuring a change between the backend and the front end. Those are still very difficult and specialized skills, and they s…”
Anthropic rebuilt its merge queue because AI generated too much code
“We really rapidly became bottlenecked on other things like our merge queue, which is the sort of sort of get in line to get your change accepted by you know, the system that then deploys it to production. We had to completely re architect it because so much mo…”
Mike Krieger expects software shipping workflows to drastically change by mid-2026
“I would expect that like a year from now, the way that we are like conceiving of building and shipping software just changes a lot because it's gonna be very painful to do it the current way.”
Krieger: Context flow limits autonomous AI workflows more than reasoning capability
“We're limited more around like making sure the context flows through all of that. So we have the right access to those things more than the model's capability to reason and propose.”
Krieger: Claude is a very good prompter of itself
“Watch our prompt improver and then note that like Claude itself is a very good prompter of Claude.”
Krieger: News apps struggle to achieve the organic virality of photo networks
“Instagram spread in the early days because people would take photos and then post them on other networks and tell friends about it. And there was like this really natural, like, how did you do that? I want to do it. News was very personal. Like I can't tell me…”
Krieger: Without market momentum, startups get one unit of output per ten inputs
“This concurrent incarnation we love, but it's like not growing. Like the way I put it, it's like 10 units of input in for one unit of output versus the other way around. Like if we like put blood, sweat and tears into the product and like Launch something we w…”
Mike Krieger says only ChatGPT and TikTok matched Instagram's consumer scale
“Instagram DAU, which is just an impossible bar. Like only one company since that, maybe two, right. You could say maybe ChatGVT and TikTok have like reached that kind of like mass consumer adoption”
Deep vertical specialization will defend AI startups for one to three years
“I think things that are going to, I can't promise this as like a five to 10 year thing, but at least like one to three years, things that feel defensible or durable. One is understanding of a particular market.”
Krieger: Startups need repeatable evals for drop-in model testing
“Like one is pushing the frontier of the models and then having a repeatable process. This actually goes back to our summit conversation, like a repeatable way to evaluate how well your product is serving those use cases and how well, if you drop a new model in…”
Mike Krieger says Claude has 'no chill' in group Slack channels
“I like to say internally, like Claude has no chill. Like if you put Claude in a Slack channel, it will chime in either way too much or too little.”
Krieger compares internal AI research disruptions to Apple WWDC announcements
“It's the thing it most reminds me of like from the Instagram days where like Apple, like WWC announcements, you're like, this could either be awesome for us or could like absolutely like cause chaos for it. It's like that, but your own company is the one kind …”
Krieger: Best product managers rapidly prototype UI designs directly using AI models
“I think prototyping with these models is a thing that is underused. Like, our best PMs do this, where we'll get in some long conversation about, like, should the UI be this or that, and before our designers have even, like, picked up their Figma, like, our, of…”
Krieger: Anthropic's Computer Use feature shows early promise for brittle UI testing
“Some early things that we're seeing that we think are really interesting, one is UI testing, which is like, I was, like, at Instagram, we had basically no UI tests, because they're hard to write, they're, like, they're brittle and they're, like, often, like, a…”
Krieger: Claude 4 does less conversational follow-up elicitation than Claude 3.7
“Particularly three, seven, four has less of the three, seven really like to ask follow-up questions and we call it elicitation. And sometimes it'd be like, I don't want to talk more about this with you, Claude. I just want you to like go in and do it.”
Krieger: Only About Three Companies Could Have Recruited Me Post-Instagram
“I mean, not many people could, but like, this is like probably a list of three companies that would have been interesting.”
Krieger: Anthropic is training Claude to teach users its own features
“One thing we're trying to get better at, and that's also letting the product be like educational in a very literal way, which is like the thing we did not do early and now we're changing is just tell Claude more about itself, which was like, you know, it's in …”
Krieger: Rick Rubin partnered with Anthropic after creating art with Claude
“We had our, one of our co-founders, Jack Clark is our, you know, head of policy and he got connected to Rick Rubin. Cause I think he's been thinking a lot about Coding the future of coding and creativity, and they've stayed in touch and, you know, Rick got exc…”