A Fireside Chat with Cat and Thariq from the Claude Code team
Simon Willison Simon Willison
Anthropic executives Cat Wu and Thariq Shihipar discussed Claude Code and Claude Tag, the company's AI coding tools, in a fireside chat at the AI Engineer World's Fair. Claude Tag, a Slack integration launched last week, now generates 65% of Anthropic's product engineering pull requests, enabling collaborative and proactive AI-assisted coding across teams. The tools have fundamentally shifted software engineering workflows at Anthropic by reducing development timelines from months to weeks and elevating the importance of product taste over execution skills.
Why it matters
Earlier this month I hosted a fireside chat session at the AI Engineer World's Fair with Cat Wu and Thariq Shihipar from Anthropic's Claude Code team. We talked about Claude Code, Claude Tag, Fable, coding agent security, evals, tool design, and how Anthropic use these tools themselves. The full video of the session is now available on YouTube. Below is an edited copy of the transcript, with extra links and my own bolded highlights. A few top-level notes if you don't want to watch the video or wade through the whole transcript: Claude Tag (Claude's new collaborative Slack integration) now lands 65% of the product engineering PRs for the Claude Code team. Claude Code ships features to Anthropic employees first, and only ships the features that demonstrate user retention with that cohort Critical changes to Claude Code are still reviewed manually, but the team increasingly relies on automated code review for the "outer layers" of the product. Adding examples to a system prompt is no long
