I think it is actually the right thing to do now that if you're ever building a command line interface tool, you want to build it so it can be used by humans and also by agents.
Hey everyone, thanks for joining us. I'm Mike Krieger here at Anthropic. I work at Anthropic Labs. I'm really excited for our conversation today. I'm joined by Hugo Baja and David Singleton from Dreamer. I think it's going to be a great chat all about agents, building on the agents SDK, getting a company started today, building on the exponential. I think it's going to be a whole lot of fun. I'm especially excited about this conversation. One because I've known these both for a while and it's been really fun to see them build and see what emerge from all of their kind of startup process. But also because I think it's just a very interesting moment where I think you're starting to finally see the promise of agents come real. And I think with their product, it'll accelerate that even further in terms of actually connecting it to what is personal to you, to what's meaningful to you, to actually helping you get work done throughout the day. And so I think it's a particularly timely conversation. But maybe just as a start, how did you both meet? I'm always really interested in co-founder meeting stories.
Hugo and I met a long time ago back in London in the 18 years. 18 years ago when we worked on mobile apps at Google before Android, so this was the very early days of mobile. I'd worked at a place called Symbian before building smartphone operating system software before smartphones were a thing and we got the chance to work on honestly everything. I started the Google search app. We worked on Google Maps for mobile, Gmail, all of the apps and it was a really special time because we were actually just like today's exponential but maybe a little slower. Everything was going in that direction. But a lot of things had to be invented. You know we had to figure out the right UI paradigms, the right security models and so forth. Then of course we both got involved in early Android and maybe Hugo can pick it up from there.
Yeah. So a long time ago, maybe we should stop counting 18 years does sound like a lot. So we worked on mobile for a while at Google. I then went on to the Android team worked in product over there. Was there for a few years then went to the other side of the Android ecosystem. Worked on consumer hardware at Xiaomi in China. Ended up doing virtual reality at Meta. And then eventually started this with David and I. It's really interesting that I like to remember the fact that when we were like in 2010 which I consider like the sort of the dividing you know sort of element between the last computing era and this one we weren't like thinking geez we are living that you know transition right now it was a few years later that we went back to look at it and say wow that was the time when things when that page turned and I think a few years from now we're going to be thinking like right about now was when that page turned and we'll know what it is that caused that page to turn and we'll talk about that a lot today I'm sure.
I think that timing aspect is really interesting. And I remember when we were building Instagram and the iPhone 3GS was the phone that was like state-of-the-art at the time. And we couldn't have seen exactly what the iPhone 4 would have been, but you started to draw the lines. Well, the first one had a terrible camera, the next one had a better camera, right? Where is this going? And can we map it and time it correctly?
And then GPS and App Store and then things exploded.
Absolutely. Well, great. Well, let's get into it. So, maybe let's kick it off with what is Dreamer and then maybe show us a little bit about what you all have built.
Yeah. So, Dreamer is a place where anyone can discover, build, and enjoy AI agents and agentic apps. And let me show you. So this is my Dreamer home. Everyone's looks different. And this is a platform where you can do a lot of serious business. You know, I have my calendar hero agent right here in the middle. It helps me prepare for meetings, make sure I know everything I need to know. But I also have my little fun corner up here. So, you know, there's a magic picture of my dog, Otis. This is my favorite watch. I'm a shared lover of the F91W Casio as well. So it's a classic. And then whatever that below thing is. Oh, yeah. This is a Tamagotchi. But it's kind of a personal productivity Tamagotchi. Unfortunately, right now it's a little sad. So, I aspire to stay on top of my inbox. So, if I click through here, let's take a look. This pet was called Tama. It lived healthily for zero days because to keep this pet healthy, I have to respond to all the emails that I label in my own inbox with to respond. And if I don't stay on top of them, then it goes back in its lifespan. And this one, I've been a little busy with this stuff recently. So, hopefully it'll pick it up again soon.
Nice. This one you built?
It is one I built. So, at the center of Dreamer is the Sidekick. This little friend over here. And Sidekick understands how all the agents in the system work. It also understands all the tools that I've got connected to the system. So, I can use Sidekick to do anything, but in particular, I can use Sidekick to build agentic apps like this one. And so I just said, I want a Tamagotchi that stays alive if I stay on top of my email. I told it, you know, this is the label I care about. And our Sidekick in coding agent mode built this whole experience.
And of course, I can then publish that into our gallery and other people can install it if they also want to be shamed into staying on top of their email. And then when they install it, they can configure it and customize it to their own.
That's right. They could change what it looks like. They could change the goal that you have. Maybe you want to stay on top of exercise instead of your email.
Sure. I think this also illustrates this interesting moment where, you know, yes, you can create apps from scratch now using cloud. But actually then integrating it into these other systems, I think, is where the difference actually happens. Maybe you can talk a little bit more about how these things all actually connect to each other.
Yeah, I mean, let's take a look. So, here's our gallery, which is where you can see agents and agentic apps that have been built by the community. There's often stuff here that you can just pick up and use right away, but anything on the system, you can remix it with the coding agent to make it work just the way you wanted to. Right at the bottom layer of the system are these AI tools. So, we've partnered with a bunch of different companies to have high quality tools available as the base layer of the system that all the agents can use. I mean, you know better than anyone else. I think any AI system is only as good as the quality of the data that it can access and pull in and the quality of action that it can take on your behalf. And that's where these tools come in. So, you know, this is real Google search. These are actual data feeds. We're not scraping this off the web. It's a very premium data feed of information from NFL. There's some premium tools here from other companies that we really enjoy working with like Parallel for agentic web research. And you can compose these. The Sidekick will help you compose these to make the experiences that really work for you.
I have like being the non-mathematician at Anthropic. There are many much smarter researchers here. I get to be the product and labs person. My equation that is vastly simplified is like success in AI is quality of the model, quality of the prompting and how you scaffold it and then finally like what it actually has context and access to and I think solving that last well actually the middle two because you're not might not necessarily know exactly how to start you know how would you set up an agentic system and so having in this case Sidekick and the agent SDK power your actual applications and effectively it knows how to build those apps so you just have to really tell it what the end goal is.
That's right. Exactly that. Maybe Hugo can show us what's on his dashboard.
So, this is my dashboard. It looks completely different from David's. A lot of my daily driver stuff sits here. Similar to David, I have my calendar here. This is an agentic app called Calendar Hero, which is awesome. You should try it out. I've got my living portraits for wizards here. I'm looking at my wife. In a second, I'll be looking at you. My Caltrain schedule, my news here, which is very agentic as well. That generates summaries for me, podcast style summaries.
This has become, by the way, how I consume tech news. It's been great.
It's awesome. Right. Powered by Techmeme, and it's really awesome. It's the only source I use. I have a whole bunch of podcast things here. I have an agent that I wrote called podcast condenser, which creates highlights of podcasts with the actual person, not a summary. A kids story book creator that's very personalized, which I'll show you later. You know, some stuff about food. So, there's just a lot here. And it's where I spend most of my day.
Where do you find like what is the first couple of agents do you find people gravitate towards or even create themselves.
So, this is actually something that we've invested a lot of energy into. So, Sidekick really is your companion for this. So, when folks onboard to the platform, they actually have a conversation with the Sidekick and Sidekick will start to get to know you. It'll ask you what you're interested in. And you know, for instance, for me, I'm a busy person. I have a couple kids. I like to spend a lot of time with the kids. So the first thing that Sidekick encouraged me to build was something to explore what we could do in San Francisco every weekend together as a family. And that's actually a pretty common one. We see that that adds a lot of value for folks. But if you tell it about the kind of things that are on your mind at work, it'll start to figure out how to connect to your calendar in order to pull the right stuff together for you. So it is very personal. And the Sidekick actually helps on that journey. We're certainly seeing a ton of personal productivity. We're also seeing a lot of sports. Folks love to follow their favorite sports team. And you can go really deep into all the micro data that you like to pull out.
And you're an F1 fan. Have you tried the F1? Yeah. And it's got a countdown towards the first race. Which teams am I going to track? And I'm like, all right, I can't wait for the first race to start so I can actually.
Fun fact that agentic app, I think it's called Pit Wall, was built by someone who was in our alpha community, so a builder. And they loved it so much that they joined the company. So it's been a lot of fun.
It is interesting. I mean the classic you know 90% of people consume 9% you know are going to be like kind of creating and then maybe 1% are like the you know deepest you know curators etc. How do you all think about the sort of shift between who creates who consumes like what the role of that is?
Yeah. So at the beginning I mean we had this idea of you know building an operating system for AI agents. That was what our sort of launch tweet said in November 2024. That said there was we had a pretty different I think view of the world when we started the company which is that we were going to have developers building agentic apps and like really spending a lot of time making them work well. You know, we were going to have this operating system with the system agent and so on and so forth and then consumers on the other side as users of these agentic apps kind of like in a similar way as we have these marketplaces today. And as it turns out, one of the things that really changed substantially was realizing that consumers were themselves going to be the developers in almost all cases. There's still a very important role for professional developers in our world which we can talk about later. It's around building AI tools. Builders, people who are just naturally crafty and you know have ideas and just want to build things who are not technical end up being the primary source of kind of juice and energy in this community and that was a big change. So we genuinely expected that most people would dip into the gallery, they grab the stuff that they want and then they would enjoy it and you can do that. But what we see is that almost everyone who starts using Dreamer doesn't just stop there. They'll actually build their own agents and they'll especially remix the ones that folks have already made in order to work for them. So I mean right here on my dashboard for instance there is this agentic app which was made by someone who doesn't work at the company part of our early alpha and this is an amazing agent for following your favorite basketball team and I like it. I like the Warriors so I'm super happy but my kids they're not into basketball at all. They love English Premier League soccer. So check this out. This agent app right here I made simply by taking this one and saying remix it. And I gave it the instructions make this work for English Premier League Soccer and it made this agent instead. So a lot of folks are actually finding that this is a place that they can unlock their creativity and I think that's actually a very important profound shift in the world. So it used to be that building powerful experiences was something that was kind of it required software engineers. If you want to build powerful software experiences, you have to like get a CS degree or you know go do a boot camp or whatever. And so there are a lot of folks that have had creativity locked up in themselves for years and you know no outlet and now the barrier to entry the barrier to create meaningful experiences is completely different. And that's a lot of why we started Dreamer in the first place because we could see that trend and we wanted to have a place where everyone can actually you know unlock that creativity and build stuff that they're going to enjoy.
It's been a blast even in the last couple of months seeing that idea start to spread a bit more and people seeing how you could you know take Claude Code even non-technical people and build something and I think there's like a real tipping point happening but maybe one other thing that I think is interesting to touch on you both have background in developer tools and helping people enable building basically how did you approach the development environment I've seen both the sort of more simplified just chat to get the app and then there's all a more full-featured builder with logs and databases and how did you think about you.
And we also talk about, you know, ceiling and threshold, right? What is the threshold that you have to be able to create an app and then what's the ceiling of an app that you can create there?
I'd love to talk about our SDK, but before I do, Hugo is the most kind of power builder on our platform. In fact, almost every time I'm walking into, you know, anything with him, including this conversation today, he's like putting the finishing touches on the next agent he's building. So, why don't you talk a little bit about what building feels like on Dreamer, and then I'll talk more about the SDK.
Yeah, we you know we start on our platform with a very simple experience where you just tell Sidekick what you want to build and it'll you know give you a card with a summary like a mini PRD and then you just say approve or modify and then it just goes one-shots it and gives you the thing that it has come up with but then as you get into it which is where I am now you now understand a lot about how the system works. So you want to get involved, right? You want, you know, you want to be consulted on some important decisions that the agent editor is going to make. So you end up building a relationship. I really feel like I have a relationship with our agent editor that is very similar to the relationship I have with Claude, right? We understand each other. We have a history and it remembers the types of things that I care about and want to have a specific opinion on. Right? Then this becomes just like a virtuous cycle, like a beautiful relationship. I feel like every agent is better than the previous one because we understand each other more profoundly.
Yeah. So one thing that's changed since you started from now is well one Claude Code has emerged but also the Claude Agent SDK is now out there and maybe as a brief sort of story of the Claude Agent SDK originally it was just the underpinning for Claude Code and we kept hearing from people you need to change the name of this thing because it's actually for much more than just code and I would talk to startups that had built sort of agentic orchestration platforms and then they would say you know what actually with the agent SDK once they realized it they could actually delete most of that orchestration code because the agent SDK itself was basically Claude at its best orchestrating across tools, you know, making tool calls, finding out trajectories. So, I'd love to hear how that ended up playing out into.
Well, we were one of those teams. You know, Dreamer's a platform. We use all the state-of-the-art models, but there's a lot of Anthropic in here and actually the agent SDK is something that we've really gone to town on. We built our own coding agent early on with all of our own kind of orchestration layer. And then we were using Claude Code inside the company and we realized hm this is pretty special. We could invest a tremendous amount of energy in this harness or we could invest all of our energy in having a great gallery and having the right way for people to you know actually lean into being able to build all this stuff. So we don't have to build our own harness. Why don't we try to use Claude Code? So we started using Claude Code before you even had an SDK and then we used its SDK and that allowed us to build this kind of really powerful agentic loop and it definitely accelerated our development a lot and I think we were one of those teams that was saying hey you can use this for a lot more. So there's a concept inside of Dreamer which is called Sidekick Tasks. These are powerful sub-agents that can be kicked off by any other agent. They run in the context of the Sidekick so they have access to the user's memory and so forth but still policed by the Sidekick so it ends up being safe as it comes back into the app and that's entirely today powered by the agent SDK and what we found really fun actually is there's a lot that we've built in our platform that is part of our software development kit for professional developers if they want to use it that way we actually ended up designing those tools so that they can be called and used just as well as a professional software engineer would use them by the agent SDK. So, the agent SDK is using our Dreamer CLI tool inside of its environment in order to orchestrate all of these things. And that's been an interesting trend as well. So, I think it is actually the right thing to do now that if you're ever building a command line interface tool, you want to build it so it can be used by humans and also by agents. And a lot of the things that you need to do to have a great developer experience for everyone is have self-explanatory docs. Reward infinite exploration. You know make sure it's incredibly powerful. And this stuff all ends up being a great impedance match with the agent SDK. And therefore you can do genuinely very powerful things on the platform because of that harness and our CLI actually working together.
Yeah. I one of the people I work really closely with is Ben Mann who's one of the co-founders here and he started the labs team and the other day I was like Ben I keep getting these command line arguments from he's like why are you still calling a command line yourself like Claude should be doing and it was like I'm still and I've been here a couple years and I'm like as Claude-pilled as anybody and I still find ways he's like yeah if you're trying to monitor three Docker logs why don't you have Claude monitor Claude Code can do it in the background and then it can tell you when something happened. I was like ah like I'm there's still another level of fully embracing the agent.
I think there's another thing that we're also going to look back a few years from now which for us became possible because of the Claude Agent SDK. This thing that we call a Sidekick Task. Think about this idea that software at runtime can spawn other pieces of software that are actually created and written at runtime. This roughly corresponds to software rewriting itself right as it's being used and it does it differently every time. I think this is quite profound and I expect that we're going to see this in a lot of places. And it's really thanks to you guys seeding this idea in the world.
