Be more ambitious

The awesome Simon Willison hosted a session between Cat Wu and Thariq Shihipar from Anthropic’s Claude Code team. Given that I love Claude Code, I wanted to watch the full video but didn’t have the time to. So I was reading the edited transcript that Simon published, and this stood out to me:

Thanks to Claude Code, I am now having more fun than ever, and I keep telling my friend that I feel like a 5-year-old. I’m increasingly doing things that I otherwise wouldn’t have dared to attempt, and slowly but perceptibly, I’m becoming more ambitious in the kind of projects I am attempting. Again, in the absence of Claude Code and Codex, these projects would’ve rotted in the remote recesses of my imagination.

Simon: Let’s talk a little bit about the human element. A lot of people are feeling a sense of loss now that so much of what they considered to be their role in building software is being subsumed by the models. How do you think about that? How has the past year and a half changed the way you think about your own craft and the value that you add?

Thariq: Cat and Boris are such good reminders that you have to be more ambitious. They’re always like: we’re growing so fast, we have to be on the edge, we have to do the best work we can. That’s a constant reminder for me — any time I’m slow on something, I’m like, okay, can I do it faster? Can I be more ambitious here? And oftentimes the answer is Claude, because Claude is getting better as you go — the last time I tried this, it was with the previous model. On your point about loss: I think this is real. If you’re only trying to do the same work you were doing before LLMs, and now it’s a prompt, it is, I think, kind of a sad feeling. And the way you offset that is by being more ambitious. I think Jared is such a good example — he hand-wrote all of the Zig code in his Oakland apartment in about a year, barely left his house, and had so much fun doing that. Now I see him rewrite all of Bun into Rust and he’s having so much fun doing that — it’s so much more ambitious, and that’s how he offsets it. Generally it’s asking how do I do the bigger thing and do more — I think success is fun. It’s changing your ambition.