Felix Rieseberg

“Internally, Anthropic is a very prototype demo first culture. We have a lot of like internal prototypes that don't reach the public, and what cowork actually became is like we sort of picked the right pieces out of the many prototypes that we had, right? And that's maybe also like I think an important qualifier whenever people mention this ten day number. I do think it's important to me to mention that we didn't start with scratch, there was a lot of stuff already happening.”

“We used to live in this world maybe where you would take a product manager, and the product manager would go to a number of potential customers, and in this very low bandwidth way, would try to tease out what are the problems they're having. We internally at Anthropic are now probably much closer to the point where we're like, don't don't even write a memoir. Just like build like, let's build all the candidates very quickly. Like, let's let's just build all of them, and then pick the best ones.”

“I generally believe that Silicon Valley overall is undervaluing the local computer, and my default argument for that is always, how come you're all using MacBooks, and not like an iPad or a Chromebook? There's still value in having a local machine, and now when I think about clock as this entity that is supposed to be very useful to you, like it's tremendously useful to you, I think that entity needs to have access to all the same tools you have access to, otherwise it's going to be hamstrung in all these complex ways.”

“The analogy I've given my dad this morning, who is still, like, quite insistent on using chat, even for, like, coding things is, if you were a developer, and your employer told you that you don't need a computer, they're just gonna, like, send you emails with a code, and you send emails with a code back, Like, that maybe worked for patch files in the back, but that is not very effective. So what we can do with the VM is, because it's a Linux system, Cloud Code has more or less free reign to install whatever it needs to install.”

“For our skills are file based instead of, like, this complicated thing that exists inside a place somewhere that is, like, super proprietary. I'm really leaning into the idea of, like, it's all just files and folders, and that makes it very portable on its own right. The portability is just a file, it's just markdown, it's just text, honestly, right, like a text file words. The complete lack of structure, which means you don't need any kind of tutorial to write a skill, just like explain it to Claude the way you would explain it to me.”

“At Anthropic, as a group of people, we're deeply worried about the impact that the tools are going to have on the labor market, especially for junior employees, because I think it's only honest to say that when we talk about automating away a lot of the work that we personally find annoying, that we maybe think is not the best use of our time, in a lot of industries that kind of work would have been given to a junior or a entry level employee, right? And I think it's it's only it's only right to be really worried about that.”

“I have a solution for that, which you make them you create simulative jobs for them. So if you think about software engineering, when you're like a junior engineer, you work, like, one, two, three years. And in those three years, there's like maybe like a handful of moments where, like, you really learn something. I think now we can use AI in these models to actually, like, shortcut these careers and almost, like, simulate the early years of your work. In, like, one year, you basically got, like, three years worth of, like, projects and experience.”

“I do think, it's maybe on us as like the honest trader to come up with something better than, oh, this is super safe, as long as it doesn't do anything. But if you want this to be useful, then you have to approve every single step of the way, and like computer use is a good example, the only way to make computer use on your host, like super safe, like really super safe, is probably if you approve every single action. You need to probably delegate, you need to be able to delegate and walk away and trust that this thing is not gonna mess.”

“The reason to go with your own embedded rendering engine is because, and this is still true in 2026, the operating system rendering engines are not that good. They're just not that good. So if you're, say, a Slack, and you have a critical rendering bug in WK WebView and some of the other WebView options, your only recourse is to to tell your customer, oh, sorry, you're too poor, you didn't buy the latest MacBook. Unacceptable. So you sort of need to go down the stack and find the best rendering engine, then put it in your app.”

“This came out of a debate we had at work where people were, like, they often are in the end debating the merits of Electron and whether or not we should be building software in JavaScript, yes or no, and I still am very upset that I can run all of Windows 95 in JavaScript, and launch Microsoft Excel inside the virtualized JavaScript Windows 95 machine, and do things that I can do that entire chain faster than I can do a lot of other things in traditional SaaS applications. This is sort of like a performance rampage that I went on, so I mostly built this as a joke for some of my colleagues at Slack.”