Notable Quotes

On Planning and Process

"For some reason, when we started AI coding, we just kind of forgot to plan. We one-shot everything and then complain."

— Kieran Klaassen - Compound Engineering

"If your plan is not good, the work is also not going to be good. You're going to steer like a gigantic ship. It's way easier to catch mistakes in the planning phase than after that."

— Kieran Klaassen - Compound Engineering

"Planning is clearly what we need to do. But maybe we can learn from manufacturing... software engineering has become more of a manufacturing process where things are automated."

— Kieran Klaassen - Compound Engineering

"How would you do this if you had a team of capable people? It's just, you go plan."

— Kieran Klaassen - Compound Engineering

On Autonomous Agents

"All we as humans are, are loops. You wake up, read your email, look at your data, decide what to do, implement it, and go to sleep. This is what our armies of agents should be doing."

— Ryan Carson - Compound Products

"I have massive FOMO all the time now because I don't have three instances of AMP running 24/7. The speed that we're all going to get out-iterated here is unprecedented."

— Ryan Carson - Compound Products

"I should wake up to a PR. And eventually I should wake up to a shipped PR because I have another loop deciding if it's good enough."

— Ryan Carson - Compound Products

"It turns out for 15 cents, you can get a VP of marketing every day. So do that."

— Ryan Carson - On daily AI-generated product reports

On Vibe Coding Philosophy

"Vibe coding production isn't about letting AI do whatever it wants - it's about teaching AI your patterns."

— Paula Dozsa - Portola

"Typing is over."

— Nat Eliason - On voice-to-text becoming primary input

"The terminal is Stone Age."

— Nat Eliason - On preferring Conductor GUI

"Tokens don't lie."

— Tina He - On tracking tool popularity through actual usage

On Models and Capability

"We call it unhobbling the model - where you have capabilities but you could give it more space in the box, put more things that it can do into it."

— Thariq Shihipar - Anthropic

"To unhobble the model you have to believe that the model will get better. If you don't believe that, you build complicated orchestrated solutions."

— Thariq Shihipar - Anthropic

"Opus 4.5 can complete any well-defined user story with clear acceptance criteria, as long as it's atomic. We all know that. We feel it."

— Ryan Carson - On model capability

"If Claude is writing 10 times as much code, you can also delete 10 times as much code."

— Thariq Shihipar - On Javon's Paradox

On Team and Organization

"The ideal team now is a team of one."

— Toby Lutke (Shopify) - Quoted by Kieran Klaassen

"There's no QA team. There's a support team but really the engineers are the support team. Engineers read the GitHub tickets."

— Thariq Shihipar - On Claude Code team structure

"There's no replacement for talking directly to a user. Claude could do that job for you, but there's something about hearing directly that motivates you and helps you figure out the meta pattern."

— Thariq Shihipar - On maintaining user connection

On Learning and Compounding

"The compounding part is... either something went wrong and you want to say 'hey, next time, don't make this mistake again.'"

— Kieran Klaassen - On compound engineering

"It's like a Context7, but for your own code."

— Kieran Klaassen - On compounding documentation

"You don't need the skills yourself, you just need to know what to ask for."

— Katie Parrott - On the allocation economy

On Code Quality and Review

"Just delete the whole plan. This is crap."

— DHH Reviewer (AI persona) - Via Kieran Klaassen

"Sometimes the DHH reviewer has a point and it makes you think 'hey, maybe this is the complete wrong thing I'm building.' And that's good. You want opposites."

— Kieran Klaassen - On opinionated review

"I love how opinionated DHH is. No, no, no, this is the way we do it. You don't have to sign up for it, but this is the way we do it."

— Kevin Rose - On strong opinions in software

On the AI Coding Cycle

"The AI capabilities are here, but with some engineering work you can make it go higher. Then the next model comes out and it's higher and you have to delete the code. Most people get stuck at deleting the code."

— Thariq Shihipar - On the AI engineering cycle

"You have to retry these things, delete code, see what's working what's not. That's the hard part about AI engineering."

— Thariq Shihipar - On iteration

"We're replacing to-dos with tasks... to-dos are an outdated system. We're upgrading it for long context and multi-agent flows."

— Thariq Shihipar - On upcoming Claude Code features

On Product and Building

"I thought AGI would make my life calm but it's made it very stressful."

— Ryan Carson - On founder life with AI

"If you're a founder or a builder, you should be really nervous all the time now."

— Ryan Carson - On competitive pressure

"Cloud Code is truly a startup within a startup. We clearly care about this product in a way that's the moat."

— Thariq Shihipar - On Claude Code culture

"It's kind of like asking a fish what water feels like. My life is just always Cloud Code all the time."

— Thariq Shihipar - On being immersed in the product

On the Future

"Suddenly being an IC means planning. But also being a tech lead now is also making plans and managing things you've not really done as a tech lead ever. The people that know all of this are CEOs and leaders."

— Kieran Klaassen - On evolving roles

"Race to the top - we want to make sure we're setting the standard of what is an amazing developer experience."

— Thariq Shihipar - On Anthropic philosophy

"Once you see it, you can't unsee it."

— Kevin Rose - On AI coding adoption

"I failed at building my first editorial ops project... and we realized a Claude project with custom instructions worked as well as what I was building and more reliably."

— Katie Parrott - On right-sizing solutions

On Working with AI

"I treat Claude as an intern that learns very quickly."

— Paula Dozsa - Portola

"Our designers now open iOS and backend PRs."

— Paula Dozsa - On democratized development at Portola

"The thing about skills and like Claude's built-in capabilities is like you can just do it if you phrase it right."

— Katie Parrott - On natural language invocation

"I should have said in the original prompt but I'm a newbie coder. Can you explain these changes to me like I'm five?"

— Katie Parrott - On accessible AI interaction