If you're willing to spend $100,000 a year right now in tokens, you are living the way somebody in 2028 is going to live. You have to sweat the tokens as much as you sweat the pixels. You have to be using the models to come up with good and great and better ideas, and there's no substitute for that.
Diane endorses the idea that token-maxing today is a preview of the future, and emphasizes that the most creative thinkers and best prototypers internally spend a lot of time with Claude. She adds that experimentation doesn't have to be an individual sport — communal discovery in public channels accelerates finding new use cases. ✦ AI generated
Diane Penn · Lenny's Podcast · 2026-07-26 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 19:56
“Thoughts on this idea of and the value of token maxing, let's call it.”
Internally some of the most creative thinkers, the best like prototypers do spend a lot of time with Claude with every new version of a research model that we have. And so there is something around you have to be like using the models to then come up with good then great then better ideas and there's no substitute for that. It's very hard to come up with a perfect strategy without touching the technology when it's moving this quickly.
verbatim transcript · starts at 19:56
19:52anthropics DNA and I think is also continuing to be a big part of how we operate in product in labs and and across research. This makes me think about something Gary Tan's been talking about uh president of YC. I don't know what his title is. uh he's he had this interesting point that if you're willing to spend $100,000 a year right now in tokens, you are living the
20:16way somebody in 2028 is going to live because by then it'll be really cheap. Everyone can work this way. But if you there's this alpha opportunity right now to just live in the future, go crazy on token spend. Uh and so there's a big opportunity for people to learn what the future's like and also just build much faster. Thoughts on this idea of and the value of token maxing, let's call it.
20:37Yeah, I think I I take more of like a almost product lens. It's almost like token spin is more the input and really the output is what you described of experimentation and I think if we were orienting like goals around experimentation. I feel like that that might be the better framing of the outcomes and therefore there might be different ways of achieving that outcome. I will say
21:01internally some of the most creative thinkers, the best like prototypers do spend a lot of time with Claude with every new version of a research model that we have. And so there is something around you have to be like using the models to then come up with good then great than better ideas and there's no substitute for that. um it's very hard to come up with a perfect strategy
21:31without touching the technology when it's moving this quickly. At the same time, I think there's other things that we could be doing like so one thing that we um do a lot is actually working in public at internally within anthropic. And so in the early days when we had less product surfaces, there was a slack channel where everyone almost the entire company was testing early versions of Claude and trying
21:59different use cases. Like people were not calling them use cases, but you might be asking it to edit an essay or uh to come up with the right way to send this email. Like they were all different use cases, but we all worked in public. And then what you would see magically is different users or different different folks on the team coming up with an idea and then other people trying different
22:24variations of that idea and then within maybe 10 or so requests there was something magical or potentially a new use case that emerges. And I think there's a lot in not just individuals figuring out by themselves how to use this technology. I think we could be doing more to actually bring like that communal discovery when we do experimentation. Like experimentation is not always necessarily a individual sport.