Cat Wu and Boris Cherny, founding engineers of Claude Code at Anthropic, share on Every's AI & I podcast how they use their own product and what they've learned watching hundreds of engineers adopt it through "antfooding" (Anthropic employees = "ants", their version of dogfooding).
Practical usage insights
Plan mode is critical: don't try to one-shot everything. Enabling plan mode (Claude maps out steps before coding) doubles or triples the odds of success on complex tasks by aligning the approach before execution.
Shared settings.json: create a settings file in the codebase with pre-approved commands (routine tasks without permission prompts) and blocked files (never touch). The whole team inherits sensible defaults instead of individual configuration.
Creative stop hooks: automated actions when Claude finishes. Example: run the test suite, and on failures, tell Claude to fix the problems and keep testing instead of stopping. "You can just make the model keep going until the thing is done."
Sparring subagents: Cherny spawns multiple subagents for code review that challenge each other. First pass: style guidelines, project history, obvious bugs. Second pass: 5 subagents poking holes in the original findings. Result: captures real issues without false alarms.
Code migrations: engineers spend $1,000+/month. The main agent creates a to-do list, and subagents tackle items in parallel. Particularly effective for switching testing frameworks, where output is easy to verify.
Diary entries and institutional knowledge: Claude writes logs after each task. Separate agents review and distill them into reusable insights. Challenge: distinguishing one-off instructions ("make button pink") from genuine best practices applicable universally.
Tacit code sharing at Every: when building a new feature, subagents look at how other apps have already done it. "You don't need API or ask anyone, just [ask AI] 'How do we do this already?'"
Favorite slash commands: /commit (automate commits/push), /feature-dev (spec → plan → to-do → structured execution), /code-review (first pass on PRs, human final approval).
Product philosophy
Build for everyone, experts push the edges: a product simple enough for anyone, powerful enough for advanced users discovering novel use cases the creators never imagined. Observing how users "abuse" the product reveals latent demand for new features. Meta parallel: Facebook Dating was born from 60% of profile views being opposite-gender non-friends.
Extensibility as a core belief: every engineering environment is unique. Slash commands, hooks, and plugins let users shape their workflow. "Insert determinism at pretty much any step." The new user experience is intuitive: "drop in and it works."
Simplify as you scale: discipline of pruning as much as building. Features get unshipped when a simpler approach is found. Bash as a universal interface replaces dozens of specialized tools, reducing context: "Swiss Army knife vs. a drawer full of single-purpose gadgets."
Future vision
Exploring new form factors: CLI, IDE extension, GUI, GitHub integration, web, mobile. "No one knows what [new] form factors are, this stuff's moving so fast."
Dangerous mode evolution: current models run 30 hours straight. The next generation will likely run for days. Practical problem: you can't leave your laptop open for days. Emerging challenge: Claudes monitoring other Claudes, optimizing Claude-to-Claude communication over human inspection.
Non-technical users: data scientists, researchers, analysts, and PMs are adopting it. The VS Code extension offers a point-and-click interface instead of the terminal. Every is launching a Claude Code for Beginners camp (Nov 19): a hands-on workshop covering install, assigning tasks, and building an app end-to-end, with no programming experience required.
The article illustrates how Every was transformed by Claude Code: each feature makes the next one easier, the CEO ships to unfamiliar codebases, and non-technical people suddenly find themselves in terminals.