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Top Anthropic engineer says Claude now writes 'literally all' her team's code

22 October 2026 at 10:00
Katelyn Lesse, head of platform engineering at Anthropic, speaks at a conference.
Katelyn Lesse, head of platform engineering at Anthropic.

Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg via Getty Images

  • Anthropic platform engineering head Katelyn Lesse said that Claude now writes all her team's code.
  • Lesse shared ways that Claude Code has helped the company become more efficient.
  • Anthropic nears an initial public offering at a potential $2 trillion valuation.

A top Anthropic engineer says that Claude Code has already wiped out all human coding at one of the AI lab's central teams.

Katelyn Lesse leads the AI startup's platform engineering group, which handles the company's core services, developer tools, and product infrastructure — it's essentially the engine room of Anthropic. Lesse said at Grafana Labs' ObservabilityCON event on Tuesday that among her staff, which tallied 200 as of this summer, the era of human-written code is fully over.

"When it comes to our team and how we're actually building and maintaining our systems, all of our code is written by Claude," Lesse said. "Like, literally all of it."

Anthropic's heavy reliance on Claude Code has helped it remain relatively small, as it approaches an initial public offering that could value it at nearly $2 trillion. The company's revenue growth slowed in the third quarter of this year. Maintaining its lofty valuation may depend on selling more companies on the AI-first approach espoused by Lesse and other Anthropic leaders.

Lesse said that people on her teams are still designing systems and verifications, and then offloading the actual coding to Claude. She said that when the company changed the programming language of a major codebase from Python to Rust, workers developed a way to verify the final product.

"But the grunt work of building the pieces and actually monitoring the pieces and actually making sure that we felt good about it, that was agents all the way down," Lesse said.

Lesse said Anthropic already lets agents fix tests autonomously, with no human interaction, and it's thinking about how staff can get comfortable with agents autonomously making changes to the actual codebase, given the improvements in AI models over the last year.

"As engineering leaders, we're like terrified, and we're like, let's be really careful about this, but I think the line is starting to push," Lesse said.

Anthropic has also embraced Claude Code companywide. It released a report last week saying that as AI agents have worked more inside the company, it has hired for a smaller share of junior technical positions. And in May, Anthropic said that Claude then wrote more than 80% of the entire company's production code.

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A San Francisco gym went viral for a sign about vibe coding. The gym says it's an AI-generated fake.

22 October 2026 at 10:00
A sign about vibe coding that Fitness SF says is fake.
Fitness SF said that this gym etiquette sign is an "AI-generated fake."

@iansbrash

  • A sign instructing San Francisco gym-goers not to vibe code between sets went viral.
  • The sign was an "AI-generated fake," according to the gym.
  • Amid tech's vibe-coding obsession and fitness boom, it's no surprise the image has gotten heat.

Don't hog the leg press while prompting Claude.

A screen with the logo of Fitness SF, a Bay Area chain of gyms, went viral among techies on X and Instagram on Monday. The image instructed gym-goers to refrain from writing code or prompting AI during their workouts. "Be present. Lift harder. Ship later," the image reads.

Troy Macfarland, Fitness SF's director of marketing, said, however, that the image was an "AI-generated fake." The gym does have etiquette signs that mention phone usage and being courteous, he wrote, but none mention vibe coding.

"This person altered our actual images displayed on the screen," Macfarland wrote. "I will give an 'A' for creativity to him."

It's not clear whether the image was generated with AI, Photoshop, or some other tool. Ian Brash, whose post with the image got almost 7,000 likes, did not respond to a request for comment.

Being non-technical in San Francisco must feel like divine retribution

At least Fitness SF knows their customer base pic.twitter.com/skeGGvluBJ

— ian brash (@iansbrash) October 19, 2026

In San Francisco's AI mania, it's no surprise a sign like that blew up on X. Techies weighed in, cracking their own jokes about how tied they were to their coding agents.

One X user told Fitness SF to give their copywriter a raise. A Cognition engineer said that vibe coding between sets was encouraged at his company's gym.

"Vibe coding at the gym?" one X user wrote. "You're worried about the wrong weights."

One reaction image often appears in the comment sections of posts like this one. It shows a muscled man, holding a giant nuclear bomb in his hands, jumping into the city of San Francisco. One VC posted it with the message: "Even I have limits."

Claude Code and cardio

The sign tapped into two of the buzziest subcultures in tech.

First, there's AI coding. Ever since the launch of Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex, engineers have been tied to their phones (or walking around with half-open laptops) to continue building. Some techies told Business Insider that their love of vibe coding created distance between them and their girlfriends.

Then there's the gym. Tech bros are getting fit, pumping themselves full of peptides and getting shredded at early-morning Equinox sessions. A developer at the gym used to be an anomaly; now, it's the norm.

Some techies seemed skeptical from the start. One X user quoted the post, writing that there was "no way this is real."

Another user responded that they didn't know about that specific sign, but they did know about the underlying issue. "This is a real problem at the Equinox in San Francisco," they wrote.

Read the original article on Business Insider

This Box executive loves candidates with side projects. His own involves bringing back old-school TV.

22 October 2026 at 06:11
Rand Wacker, VP of product strategy at Box.
Rand Wacker, a Box executive, loves a good side project.

Box

  • Rand Wacker, a Box product executive, wants his potential hires to go beyond being just AI-literate.
  • Wacker likes when candidates show him their side projects, especially if they've monetized them.
  • He's dipped his toes into building, too, with an Apple TV app that evokes the feel of old-school TV.

Knowing how to use AI is only enough to get a foot in the door for interviews, according to a Box executive.

Rand Wacker, Box's vice president of product strategy, said that for candidates applying for a job at Box, AI literacy is a bare-minimum requirement. Having a fully developed side hustle or project — something he practices himself — is what gives potential hires a leg up in interviews.

Case studies, which he said used to be a staple in Box interviews, are now a relic of the past. Now, he expects candidates to be prototyping out their ideas.

What he really likes to see is candidates showing him a product they've built themselves using AI, even if it has nothing to do with Box's business. He said he's had potential hires show him mobile apps that they've built, gotten onto the App Store, and are monetizing to some degree.

"They're running this little side hustle overall," he said. "And it shows the passion."

He said that people who explore and experiment with AI are the ones who win in the AI world, as they figure out how to use it most effectively in their personal and professional lives.

He practices what he preaches

Wacker, who's spent almost 30 years in the software engineering and product management fields, said he started out as a "computer nerd" and loved playing around with software tools and building things.

As he progressed in his career, he said he had less time to experiment with building, but AI has recently allowed him to test small ideas he didn't have time to explore before vibe coding existed.

He recently made an app to bring back old-school TV because he missed the days when he'd turn it on, pick one of three cable channels, and it would play a random movie from a random point.

"These days, whenever I'm trying to find something to watch on the weekends, it's decision fatigue. Which of the six streaming services do I go to? What are the 20 million titles I scroll through?" he said.

Using Cursor, he built an Apple TV app that would access his entire movie library, pick a random movie, and play it from a random point.

Working on these kinds of projects is a great way to learn the tools available on the market, get ideas for how to use them in other areas, and scratch the itch to create something of his own.

Wacker is one of many executives who have dipped their toes back into building and writing code in recent years. Leaders who haven't written lines of code in decades have started experimenting with AI coding to stay closer to their products and feel like individual contributors.

Read the original article on Business Insider
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