PodQueue

What happens when an internal hack turns into a $400 million AI rocket ship? In this episode, Matt Turck sits down with Boris Cherny, the creator of Claude Code at Anthropic, to unpack the wild story behind the fastest-growing AI coding tool on the planet.

Boris reveals how Claude Code started as a personal productivity tool, only to become Anthropic’s secret weapon — now used by nearly every engineer at the company and rapidly spreading across the industry. You’ll hear how Claude Code’s “agentic” approach lets AI not just suggest code, but actually plan, edit, debug, and even manage entire projects—sometimes with a whole fleet of subagents working in parallel.

We go deep on why Claude Code runs in the terminal (and why that’s a feature, not a bug), how its Claude.md memory files let teams build a living, shareable knowledge base, and why safety and human-in-the-loop controls are baked into every action. Boris shares real stories of onboarding times dropping from weeks to days, and how even non-coders are hacking Cloud Code for everything from note-taking to business metrics.

Anthropic

Website - https://www.anthropic.com

X/Twitter - https://x.com/AnthropicAI

Boris Cherny

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/bcherny

X/Twitter - https://x.com/bcherny

FIRSTMARK

Website - https://firstmark.com

X/Twitter - https://twitter.com/FirstMarkCap

Matt Turck (Managing Director)

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/turck/

X/Twitter - https://twitter.com/mattturck

LISTEN ON:

Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/7yLATDSaFvgJG80ACcRJtq

Apple - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-mad-podcast-with-matt-turck/id1686238724

00:00 – Intro

01:15 – Did You Expect Claude Code’s Success?

04:22 – How Claude Code Works and Origins

08:05 – Command Line vs IDE: Why Start Claude Code in the Terminal?

11:31 – The Evolution of Programming: From Punch Cards to Agents

13:20 – Product Follows Model: Simple Interfaces and Fast Evolution

15:17 – Who Is Claude Code For? (Engineers, Designers, PMs & More)

17:46 – What Can Claude Code Actually Do? (Actions & Capabilities)

21:14 – Agentic Actions, Subagents, and Workflows

25:30 – Claude Code’s Awareness, Memory, and Knowledge Sharing

33:28 – Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Customization

35:30 – Safety, Human Oversight, and Enterprise Considerations

38:10 – UX/UI: Making Claude Code Useful and Enjoyable

40:44 – Pricing for Power Users and Subscription Models

43:36 – Real-World Use Cases: Debugging, Testing, and More

46:44 – How Does Claude Code Transform Onboarding?

49:36 – The Future of Coding: Agents, Teams, and Collaboration

54:11 – The AI Coding Wars: Competition & Ecosystem

57:27 – The Future of Coding as a Profession

58:41 – What’s Next for Claude Code

In late 2019 I was lucky to have the opportunity to sit down and chat with Warren Burt at Brunetti’s in Carlton (Melbourne). Warren has made incredible contributions to electronic music, in both the US and Australia for several decades now as a artist, teacher, writer, instrument designer and organi

Join Spectre Journal and Haymarket Books for a rebroadcast of a discussion on ecosocialism with Kohei Saito

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Kohei Saito's recent book Marx in the Anthropocene (Cambridge University Press, 2023) has spurred renewed interest in Marx’s ecological thought and ignited further controversy around a number of key debates within contemporary left eco-theory - most notably concerning disagreements between Marxist ecomodernism and what Saito dubs “degrowth communism.”

In this Spectre Live feature, Saito will be joined by prominent climate researcher and author Holly Jean Buck and Spectre ecosocialist editor Dan Boscov-Ellen in a discussion about Marxism, degrowth, technology, and left strategy.

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Speakers:

Kohei Saito is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tokyo. He is the author of (in English) Karl Marx's Ecosocialism, Marx in the Anthropocene, and the forthcoming Slow Down: The Deceleration Manifesto.

Holly Jean Buck is an Assistant Professor of Environment and Sustainability at the University at Buffalo. She is an environmental social scientist whose research focuses on public engagement with emerging climate and energy technologies. She is the author of After Geoengineering (Verso, 2019) and Ending Fossil Fuels: Why Net Zero Is Not Enough (Verso, 2021), and holds a Ph.D in Development Sociology from Cornell University.

Dan Boscov-Ellen is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. His background is in environmental philosophy and critical theory. He is currently working on a book about the ethics of climate change, provisionally entitled Critical Climate Ethics: Capitalism, Colonialism, and the Climate Crisis.

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This event is sponsored by Haymarket Books and Spectre Journal. While all of our events are freely available, we ask that those who are able make a solidarity donation in support of our important publishing and programming work.

In an era where AI transforms software development, the most valuable skill isn't writing code - it's communicating intent with precision. This talk reveals how specifications, not prompts or code, are becoming the fundamental unit of programming, and why spec-writing is the new superpower.

Drawing from production experience, we demonstrate how rigorous, versioned specifications serve as the source of truth that compiles to documentation, evaluations, model behaviors, and maybe even code.

Just as the US Constitution acts as a versioned spec with judicial review as its grader, AI systems need executable specifications that align both human teams and machine intelligence. We'll look at OpenAI's Model Spec as a real-world example.

Finally, we'll end on some open questions about what the future of developer tooling looks like in a world where communication once again becomes the most important artifact in engineering.

About Sean Grove

Sean Grove works on alignment reasoning at OpenAI, helping translate high‑level intent into enforceable specs and evaluations. Before OpenAI he founded OneGraph, a GraphQL developer‑tools startup later acquired by Netlify. He has delivered dozens of technical talks worldwide on developer tooling, APIs, AI UX and design, and now alignment.

Recorded at the AI Engineer World's Fair in San Francisco. Stay up to date on our upcoming events and content by joining our newsletter here: https://www.ai.engineer/newsletter

On July 3, 2024, Boyce Upholt presented “The Great River: The Making and Unmaking of the Mississippi” as part of the History Is Lunch series.

The Mississippi River is central to the United States, both physically and metaphorically. Its watershed spans almost half the country. Mark Twain’s travels on the river inspired the America’s first national literature. Blues and jazz were born in its floodplains and carried upstream.

In his new book The Great River: The Making and Unmaking of the Mississippi, Upholt tells the epic story of the wild and unruly river and the centuries of efforts to control it. For thousands of years the Mississippi watershed was home to millions of Indigenous people who regarded “the great river” with awe and respect and depended on its regular flooding. But the expanse of its watershed and the rich soils of its floodplain made Europeans view the river as a foe to conquer.

“Centuries of human attempts to own, contain, and rework the Mississippi River, from Thomas Jefferson’s expansionist land hunger through today’s era of environmental concern, have transformed its landscape,” said Upholt. “And those government-built levees, jetties, dikes, and dams have not only damaged ecosystems—they may not work much longer.”

John M. Barry, author of Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America, wrote that “The Great River is easily one of the best books ever written about the Mississippi. It brings depth of scholarship to everything from geology to history to current politics, all of it elegantly written.”

Connecticut native Boyce Upholt moved to Mississippi in 2009 to work with Teach for America. He earned his BA in English from Haverford College and his MFA from Warren Wilson College. Upholt is the winner of a James Beard Award for investigative journalism, and his writing has appeared in The Atlantic, National Geographic, Oxford American, and Virginia Quarterly Review, among other publications. The Great River: The Making and Unmaking of the Mississippi is his first book.

History Is Lunch is a weekly lecture series of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History that explores all aspects of the state’s past. The hour-long programs are held in the Craig H. Neilsen Auditorium of the Museum of Mississippi History and Mississippi Civil Rights Museum building at 222 North Street in Jackson and livestreamed on YouTube and Facebook.

Axios media correspondent Sara Fischer speaks to Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince about the impacts of AI on search traffic and content compensation, and what those shifts mean for publishers at an Axios Live event at Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.

As all publishers face down the gaping maw of large language models gobbling their content, what can a long history of syndication and editorial IP licensing teach us about equitable and profitable partnerships? Reflecting on lessons from her years at The New York Times and now The Daily Mail Group, Alice explores the current opportunities in news licensing in a fragmented distribution ecosystem. Do we really have to reinvent the licensing wheel just for LLMs?

Alice Ting

VP, Global Head of Partnerships & Licensing

dmg media

David Farrier's books include Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils (2020) and Anthropocene Poetics (2019). Footprints won the Royal Society of Literature’s Giles St. Aubyn award and has been translated into nine languages. He is Professor of Literature and the Environment at the University of Edi

We can't do this alone

Ben Zhao, Session Closing Keynote, Open Repositories 2025 (OR2025) , Chicago, Illinois, USA, 15-18 June 2025

Citation: Zhao, B. (2025, Haziran 16). Dealing with Generative AI, Harms and Mitigation Techniques. Open Repositories 2025 (OR2025), Chicago, Illinois, USA. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15790708

License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International

Summary: This keynote addresses two key questions: Are large language models (LLMs) the right interface for data and information access, and what harms do AI models pose to institutions like libraries today? He explains that current LLMs, while powerful, are fundamentally flawed pattern-matchers rather than true reasoning systems. New techniques like chain-of-thought processing, self-verification, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) offer partial improvements but rely on the same unreliable foundations. On the second question, Zhao highlights the growing problem of AI-driven web scraping, noting that most mitigation strategies offer limited protection. He concludes that today’s generative AI LLMs are fundamentally flawed, and while composition techniques offer limited improvement, meaningful progress will require new architectures built with better understanding and ethical data sourcing. In the meantime, AI-driven crawlers pose an immediate threat, with most conventional defences proving ineffective—leaving commercial, network-level blocking as one of the few viable mitigation strategies.