Mike Krieger

The rules of professional product development are being rewritten in real time. - PMs and designers can ship software as easily as engineers. - Software is no longer just built for humans—it’s also built for agents as first-class citizens. To better understand how we build products in this world, I invited Mike Krieger (@mikeyk) on @every’s AI & I podcast. Mike cofounded Instagram and is now a member of the technical staff at Anthropic, co-leading Anthropic Labs, their internal incubator for experimental products. He's been at the frontier of two transformative technology waves: mobile/social and now agent-native software. We discussed: - How to build a truly agent-native product. The best products today, like Claude Code, allow users to do things that their creators never intended. But that requires hard trade-offs between freedom and safety/reliability for frontier products, an issue that Mike's team is learning how to solve. - What's different about building now versus building Instagram. At Instagram, it took months to hit dead ends and learn what to cut. Now, that cycle runs in hours. - The trap of building too much, too fast with agents. You can go from idea to a nearly-shipped product in a day, but that process doesn’t give you the incremental feedback that used to tell you what not to build. The models are great at adding features, but can create a product that lacks coherence. - How Anthropic Labs structures product teams. New product experiments are led by only two people, usually a product manager or designer paired with an engineer. Mike says bigger teams tend to be too slow because of coordination costs. - Why you need to throw out your product and start over every three to six months. AI progress means most of your harness will be outdated quickly—the best teams build this into their product strategy. And much more! You should watch this one. Timestamps Introduction: What's gotten easier—and what hasn't—about building products in the age of AI: Why vibe coding creates "indoor trees": How rewrites have become a normal part of the development process: What "agent native" product design means: How Mike's labs team is structured and the cofounder model: The best signal for a product bet is someone with "break through walls" conviction: Navigating enterprise customers while keeping pace with rapid AI change: OpenClaw, personal agents, and the product question defining 2026:

A statement on the comments from Secretary of War Pete Hegseth. anthropic.com/news/statement…