We're All Addicted To Claude Code

I feel like when I'm using Claude Code, it's like, oh, I feel like I'm flying through the code.

When it's in your CLI, this thing can debug nested, delayed jobs, like, five levels in, and figure out what the bug was, and then write a test for it, and it never happens again. This is insane.

I think everyone who's experimenting with this stuff on, like, a hobbyist level or at, like, a very small start-up, they're just pushing the coding agents as far as they can go. 'Cause it's like you don't really have time to figure out anything else. Like, as a start-up, you have limited runway, you're just going to orient around speed. I think at a bigger company you have a lot more to lose.

What are some of the tips to become a top one percent user of coding agents?

Yeah, what's your stack? [laughing] Yeah. [upbeat music]

Hey, everyone, welcome back to another episode of The Lightcone. Garry, are you- are you ready to record?

Oh, I'm, I'm in plan mode right now, but okay, yeah.

[laughing]

I guess it's time. Sorry about that. Well, welcome to a- another episode of The Lightcone, and today we have an incredible guest, Calvin French-Owen. He's one of the first people to create Codex at OpenAI, and before that, he started Segment, which is a multi-billion dollar company that got to a very successful exit. Calvin, welcome back.

Thanks for having me.

I guess, what a crazy time for all of us. Uh, I recently got very, very addicted to Claude Code, and, uh, I would describe it as, like, ten years ago, I was a marathon runner, and I loved doing it, and then I suffered a catastrophic knee injury, which is called manager mode. [laughing]

[laughing]

And I, uh, stopped coding, which is tragic and horrible. Uh, but now the last nine days have been, like, this incredible unlock of all the things I remember being able to do. And it's like, you know, I got a new total knee replacement, and actually, it's a bionic knee, and it allows me to run five times faster. What's your take on it? Because you're, I mean, right out there at the forefront of it. I mean, Codex pioneered all of the... a lot of the ideas that now, like, everyone still uses, and Codex is still evolving, too.

For brief context, when I was at OpenAI, um, I was working on the Codex web project. At the time, Cursor was out in the market, and they had kind of built this shim, uh, around, I think it was Sonnet three point five, uh, and it was able to work in your IDE. Claude Code had just come out, uh, and it was working as a CLI. And we kind of had this idea, like, "Hey, in the future, coding is really gonna feel more like talking to a coworker." Like, you're gonna send off a question, and then they'll go off and do something and come back to you with a PR. Uh, and so that's where we started with this web view, uh, and that's what we were building. I think directionally, that's still kind of correct for where things should go, but obviously now everyone is coding with CLIs instead. Like, they're using those tools a lot more, whether it's Claude Code or whether it's Codex. And I think, at least for me, kind of the lesson in that is, I think in some sense you're right, that, like, everyone is going to become a manager in the future, or at least that's my hot take. But in order to get there, there are steps along the way, and you have to really build a lot of trust in the model and understand what it's doing.