Today on the AI Daily Brief, the future of vibe coding and what's in store with AI 2026 with Mike Krieger, the chief product officer of Anthropic. Now, as we move forward into our end of year episodes, I'm excited to add a couple of conversations into the mix. You might know Mike Krieger as the co-founder of Instagram. Real ones will also know him as the co-founder of Artifact, an AI-powered news app. However, for most of you right now, Mike's most important role is as the chief product officer of Anthropic. In this conversation, we talk about the origins of Anthropic's focus on coding, how enterprise AI usage has changed over the course of the year, and some of the trends that Mike is most excited about heading into 2026. All right, Mike, welcome to the AI Daily Brief. Great to have you here.
It's great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Yeah. So, this is a super fun, like I was just saying, some of my favorite episodes of the year are these end of year episodes where we get to kind of think big, look forward. And you, one of the big themes I think for me heading into the new year is sort of everything vibe coding, everything agentic. And so I was super excited to have you join the show. What I wanted to do though is actually kind of go way back a little bit. I think a lot of folks see Anthropic as sort of the torchbearer in a lot of ways for AI coding. And I wondered, you know, I was thinking about when you joined the organization and just how early was that sort of focus clear? Was that an emergent phenomenon as it became clear that there was something very differentiated in these models and that's sort of how people were using it, or was that sort of like intention from very early on that this is a broad sort of set of use cases that matter to you guys?
Yeah, the thing I always like to say whenever there's sort of product folks inside Anthropic that are thinking about sort of which direction to take things in is the more you can align with the sort of company's general long-term perspective about where powerful AI will come from, like the smoother things will go. Because Anthropic is nothing but focused, right? And I think that that's shown through in sort of the bets that we choose to make versus not. And definitely there's this belief that for very powerful AI you need the ability of the model to sort of reason about things, to plan agentically and work for a long time horizon, but then also to be able to write and run code, not only to produce software but because it's a really useful tool for solving problems. And so that belief was in there and it predates me. I joined in May of last year, but it kind of coincided sort of with the outside world realizing it because Claude 3, which had come out I think a month before that, was the first model. And I remember there was like that moment on Twitter when everybody said, 'Oh wow, this model can actually write like not just sort of function level but like entire files of code.' And compared to now it was not very good at it, but it was already amazing what it could do then. And then we paired it with our first sort of more coding-oriented product, which was Artifacts. So you could have Claude kind of generate, you know, at the time it was mostly React sites alongside the chat. And that was kind of, I think for a lot of people, the first moment they realized, 'Oh, this is an interesting new experience of kind of coding alongside the model and not necessarily doing it in a development environment.'
Yeah, it's interesting. I think you can in a lot of ways almost chart people's sort of the viability of a lot of this to key releases alongside Anthropic. You know, I remember when I first started this show, it was actually April of 2023, and already sort of agent coding was like the thing that people were most excited about. Like GPT Engineer, which would later actually morph into Lovable at like 18 months later or something like that, was my first viral YouTube episode was about GPT Engineer. And so it's interesting to see kind of at each stage how more use cases get unlocked and sort of a broader set of people come into the fold. Coming into 2025, you know, I think that the odds-on favorite for what the year was going to be about, at least if you had looked back at kind of all the AI content creators, was going to be the year of agents, right? And I think looking back, it was, but it was the year of coding agents. Did you guys have a sense coming into this year that this was poised to be kind of the significant use case or the breakout based on what conversations you were having, based on the capabilities that you were seeing?
Yeah, it's a great sort of moment to reflect because going into the sort of last couple weeks of the year last year, we had built something internally we called Claude CLI, which we later released as Claude Code. And that was the emergence of that came from our labs team, which is a team that really focuses on trying to do sort of disruptive zero-to-one ideas. And that was everything from like early computer use explorations and some wacky things, and also this Claude CLI thing. And between I think September when the first version got sort of rolled out internally to December, it rapidly overtook every other sort of coding tool we had internally. And it was because it kind of had this bet that the models are going to be able to do more and more, maybe not this model but the next one and the next one and the next one. But let's let the model cook for longer. Let's let it sort of act for longer periods of time. And so that, you know, going to the holidays it was that question of do we release this, you know, like do we now add a third component to the product portfolio beyond just Claude AI and the API. And so that was the active conversation that was happening. But we really felt like if not us, then at least somebody using our models would sort of co-discover this piece where you don't need to hold the model so closely anymore. You can let it operate over a sort of fuzzier task definition and over a longer time. It still needed a fair amount of handholding then, but you could see the shape of it. So it was definitely, coming into this year, we felt like that was going to be a major shift in how people are going to build software.
Well, it's a super interesting point. One of the things, I mean, you have a deep product experience, and one of the challenges I think now for product folks and just for entrepreneurs in general is there's this sense that to be successful you have to not just give lip service to the idea of skating to where the puck is going, but actually sort of design and orient what you're building for capabilities that do not yet exist. And that's an extraordinarily hard thing to do. And it sounds like that was part of the genesis of Claude Code was just some sort of attempt or scratching against that itch in some way.
Yeah, we have product principles inside Anthropic and one of them is 'ride the exponential,' which is like we're trying to build products that both meet the moment, so they're useful today, or at least they poke at something useful today. Maybe the ones that are a little early we won't release yet, but that they can naturally improve. And it's been interesting even on the Claude Code side, we've deleted parts of the harness over time rather than added to it because the model can do more. And it's really interesting also, we work with a lot of kind of downstream customers that are using the model and sometimes we'll drop a new model, you know, a research model, and they'll say it doesn't look like it improved very much. And then we'll send some applied AI folks to spend time with them and they realize, 'Right now we're actually harness-bound and we need to actually let them evolve and let the model do a bit more to loosen that as well.' But it's definitely an active conversation that we have with folks building on top of the platform. Like they have some visibility about where we're going, like maybe they'll be in a research program early access, but they still have to do a fair amount of this, 'All right, so if the models are here now and I need to do this much additional scaffolding, what does this look like if I need to do less scaffolding? Is my product still useful and adding value? And can the model then do even more for me, or is it now going to squeeze the piece that I thought I was adding value in?'
Have you been surprised at all with the way that people have used Claude Code since you released it? Because it is much broader uptake than just sort of the core audience of software engineers.
Yeah, absolutely. We internally, you know, had this internal project that people were using and then we've like buttoned it up and put on a more fancy suit to be able to release it publicly. But then as you can imagine, like the internal use cases kind of kept co-developing. And so we do like every two to three times a year we do a hackathon, and it's been notable that every hackathon we've done has been around the time that some technology is poised for a breakout. So the first one we did was around MCP and every single project was MCP-based before really the rest of the world had kind of caught on to MCP. The second one we did was around the time that Claude Code had been released, and what was really interesting was how many projects were not coding projects but they were using Claude Code as the underlying engine. So there was one that was using Claude for doing bioinformatics, which we later kind of channeled into Claude for Life Sciences. Another one that was using Claude as a sort of SDR in a box and was able to use Claude Code as a way of looking at data sources. There was Claude as a data scientist. There's all these sort of pop-up projects that was nice so that they didn't have to reinvent the tool use kind of bit. They could just add value on top of that. And then when we launched it we started seeing things externally too, like people using Claude Code as their project manager, Claude Code as their PM, Claude Code as a data scientist externally. So we started seeing this much more. It's why we eventually renamed the underlying SDK to the Claude Agent SDK because we realized calling it code was doing it a disservice relative to what kind of use cases we were actually seeing.
Yeah. So this is one of the questions that I'm most interested to see in the coming year, but even the coming years, is what it takes to kind of rewire people with these new tool sets. It's like this whole language, this whole infrastructure that they have access to, especially if they haven't before, especially if they're not developers. Do you think that some of this, you know, if on the spectrum from this early kind of usage of Claude Code for non-coding use cases is tinkerers who are kind of more technical than they let on on the one end of the spectrum versus actually kind of heralding a different set of interaction patterns that people are going to have, kind of how do you see that evolving?
Yeah, I think it's early still. Like even when we look inside companies that have deployed like Claude for Enterprise and they have builders within their sales team or their ads team or whatever different non-technical team, you will always find this sort of persona which is the tinkerer builder, like early adopter within that space that usually is not an engineer, doesn't even have an engineering background, but has figured out enough and has like learned the primitives and can then talk to Claude enough about how to fix these issues that they can then kind of build something pretty powerful, whether it's automating part of what they were doing, sort of enriching what they were doing, making their team's lives easier, like all these different pieces. But it does still take that person, which I think is probably a natural part of the kind of software life cycle. We are, I think, there's still this gap, and I think that that's both a gap in interface in terms of how people think to interact with and how these products reveal their full capabilities, and then also the actual capabilities themselves. Where if you had a human coworker and it was very creative at solving problems, like you gave it a high-level task, was able to do it most of the time, but sometimes it would sort of make a mistake that you would never have expected it to make based on it having just done it great last week, you'd have a pretty complicated relationship with that coworker. I still think we're at that phase still of this like gap between understandability of these systems, but then also gap of how reliable and predictable are they when they do start working, and can they feel more like a thing that gets just predictably better over time.
Yeah, I think that's true. And I also think that there's just, you know, I don't have the exact right words for this, but there's some lag in terms of just unwinding and undoing however many years or decades of the way that you've been doing a thing before. It just takes time. You know, I think about it, we're now I guess 10 months into vibe coding as a named phenomenon, right? It was same February of this year, same month that Claude Code came out. And I'm still finding myself as someone who literally podcasts about this every day and is living inside these tools, I'm only just now starting to find myself actively asking on a regular basis like, could I be building something to do this instead of using a Google Sheet or instead of however I used to do it. And again, that's me as someone who's as deep in this as you can get.
I think there's something really to the, you know, building with one tool that gets you comfortable with it and familiar with it. It's easier to build the incremental N+1, but it's that first one that requires that sort of uplift if you're not in the habit. So I was working on a project over the weekend. I was using Replit and using Opus under the hood. And then I also needed to create a Secret Santa for my family. And that, you know, because I had been in the tools already, it was over breakfast while I was cooking eggs. I kind of kicked off this asynchronous request and by the time I was done, it actually had built the whole thing. And that was really cool. But I wouldn't have reached for it as my first tool had I just not been sort of interacting with that same software. So I do think that there's this sort of still like habit creation and adaptation of even knowing you can do that that we still need to close.
