MechanismArticle · 11:41 — 13:11
Anthropic ships features internally first and only releases them publicly if they demonstrate user retention with that cohort.
Cat Wu explains Anthropic's dogfooding culture: every feature is tested internally against a retention bar before public release, which forces polish and prioritization. ✦ AI generated
Cat Wu · Simon Willison's Weblog · 2026-07-21 · original ↗
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“How do you deal with the hardest problem in all of engineering — prioritization? How do you decide which features are worth building and shipping when building a feature is so much more inexpensive now?”
One is we dogfood our products every single day. Whenever there's something we want to be able to do in our products that we're not able to, instead of finding a different solution we fix our product so it can support that case. We have a very heavy dogfooding culture internally. Before we share our products with everyone in the world, we share them with everyone within Anthropic, and with some early customers who give us very honest feedback about it — the more brutal the better — and we iterate until people love it.
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