Anthropic's CPO on what comes next | Mike Krieger (co-founder of Instagram)

... 90% of your code roughly is written by AI now.

The team that works in the most futuristic way is the Claude code team. They're using Claude code to build Claude code in a very self-improving kind of way. We really rapidly became bottlenecked on other things, like our merge queue. We had to completely re-architect it because so much more code was being written and so many more pull requests were being submitted. Over half of our pull requests are Claude Code generated. Probably at this point it's probably over 70%. And it just completely blew out the expectations of it.

You guys are at the edge of where things are heading.

I had the very bizarre experience of I had two tabs open. It was AI 2027 and my product strategy, and it was this, like, moment where I'm like, "Wait, am I the character in the story?"

It feels like ChatGPT is just winning in consumer mindshare. How does that inform the way you think about product, strategy, and mission?

I think there's room for several generationally important companies to be built in AI right now. How do we figure out what we wanna be when we grow up versus, like, what we currently aren't or wish that we were, or, like, see other players in the space being?

What's something that you've changed your mind about what AI is capable of and where AI is heading?

I had this notion coming in, like, yes, these models are great, but are they able to have an independent opinion? And it's actually really flipped for me only in the last month.

Today my guest is Mike Krieger. Mike is chief product officer at Anthropic, the company behind Claude. He's also the co-founder of Instagram. He's one of my most favorite product builders and thinkers. He's also now leading product at one of the most important companies in the world, and I'm so thrilled to have had a chance to chat with him on the podcast. We chat about what he's changed his mind about most in terms of AI capabilities in the years since he joined Anthropic, how product development changes and where bottlenecks emerge when 90% of your code is written by AI, which is now true at Anthropic. Also his thoughts on OpenAI versus Anthropic, the future of MCP, why he shut down Artifact, his last startup, and how he feels about it, also what skills he's encouraging his kids to develop with the rise of AI, and we close the podcast on a very heartwarming message that Claude wanted me to share with Mike. A big thank you to my newsletter Slack community for suggesting topics for this conversation. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. Also, if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter, you get a year free of a bunch of incredible products, including Linear, Superhuman, Notion, Perplexity, and Granola. Check it out at lennysnewsletter.com and click bundle. With that, I bring you Mike Krieger. This episode is brought to you by Productboard, the leading product management platform for the enterprise. For over 10 years, Productboard has helped customer-centric organizations like Zoom, Salesforce, and Autodesk build the right products faster. And as an end-to-end platform, Productboard seamlessly supports all stages of the product development life cycle, from gathering customer insights, to planning a roadmap, to aligning stakeholders, to earning customer buy-in, all with a single source of truth. And now, product leaders can get even more visibility into customer needs with Productboard Pulse, a new voice of customer solution. Built-in intelligence helps you analyze trends across all of your feedback and then dive deeper by asking AI your follow-up questions. See how Productboard can help your team deliver higher impact products that solve real customer needs and advance your business goals. For a special offer and free 15-day trial, visit productboard.com/lenny. That's productboard.com/L-E-N-N-Y. Last year, 1.3% of the global GDP flowed through Stripe. That's over $1.4 trillion. And driving that huge number are the millions of businesses growing more rapidly with Stripe. For industry leaders like Forbes, Atlassian, OpenAI, and Toyota, Stripe isn't just financial software. It's a powerful partner that simplifies how they move money, making it as seamless and borderless as the internet itself. For example, Hertz boosted its online payment authorization rates by 4% after migrating to Stripe. And imagine seeing a 23% lift in revenue like Forbes did just six months after switching to Stripe for subscription management. Stripe has been leveraging AI for the last decade to make its product better at growing revenue for all businesses, from smarter checkouts, to fraud prevention, and beyond. Join the ranks of over half of the Fortune 100 companies that trust Stripe to drive change. Learn more at stripe.com. Mike, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.