A Fireside Chat with Cat and Thariq from the Claude Code team

Cat Wu: Two years ago it was pretty typical for a product manager to go talk to a bunch of customers, align over the course of six months with cross-functional teams on some PRD, and write a thorough spec on exactly how we'll implement this before the first line of code gets written. Now things are completely turned the opposite way. For a lot of engineers, the push I would give to folks in the room is to develop more of your business sense and product sense on what it is we should build, because the timeline between having an idea and building it is so much shorter — it's down from six to twelve months to maybe even a week.

Thariq Shihipar: One of the patterns we saw was that we were over-constraining Claude. The initial, maybe Opus 4-ish models wanted a lot of examples, and removing examples was extremely helpful, because it was just more creative than the examples we gave it. The other thing we did is try to give it more context and fewer 'do not do this' instructions, because that's a very strong impulse for Claude, and especially if it conflicts with user instructions later on, that can be extremely confusing to Claude.

Thariq Shihipar: On your point about loss: I think this is real. If you're only trying to do the same work you were doing before LLMs, and now it's a prompt, it is, I think, kind of a sad feeling. And the way you offset that is by being more ambitious. I think Jared is such a good example — he hand-wrote all of the Zig code in his Oakland apartment in about a year, barely left his house, and had so much fun doing that. Now I see him rewrite all of Bun into Rust and he's having so much fun doing that — it's so much more ambitious, and that's how he offsets it.

Cat Wu: Claude Tag currently lands 65% of our product PRs right now. And this is a huge shift; this is more than 50% of our PRs. The way we see people split work between Claude Code and Claude Tag is: Claude Code is still the best place for your most complex tasks, when you're interactively iterating with the agent. But Claude Tag is great for having it work proactively on your behalf, so you no longer need to manually kick off Claude Code for all the bug reports that come up for features you're working on.