Howardism · Vol. 03Plate II · No. 02
Orgs, in order.
Notes35TopicOrgsOldest17 Apr 2026Newest23 May 2026
Labs, people & products: Anthropic, OpenAI, TML, Claude Code.
| Title | Summary | Date |
|---|---|---|
| AlphaProof Nexus | DeepMind framework for LLM-aided Lean proof generation; four agents (basic→full-featured); proof-sketch + EVOLVE-BLOCK interface; SafeVerify | |
| Andrej Karpathy | Co-founder OpenAI, ex-Tesla AI, Eureka Labs; coined "vibe coding," Software 1/2/3.0, "ghosts not animals," "agentic engineering"; originated the LLM-wiki pattern this vault runs on | |
| Campfire | AI-native ERP (YC S23) pulling customers off NetSuite; custom foundation model + agent platform; Series B (Accel/Ribbit); doubling ARR/quarter since Q4 2024 | |
| Dogfooding as Product Discipline | Product sense is built by relentless first-hand use ("ant food"); Mr. Peanut catch; cross-source (Cat Wu vibe-checks, Glasgow founder-led sales) | |
| Fiona Fung | Leads engineering + product for Claude Code and Cowork at Anthropic (ex-Meta/Microsoft); "what served you prior may no longer"; rewrote team norms for the AI-native org | |
| Google DeepMind | Google's AI lab; built AlphaProof Nexus; Gemini models, AlphaProof, AlphaEvolve; opens the AI-for-mathematics domain in this wiki | |
| John Glasgow | CEO/founder of Campfire; 10yr corporate finance; founder-led-sales advocate; long-horizon "last job I'll ever have" | |
| Lean | Proof assistant whose compiler mechanically verifies every step; the `sorry` placeholder enables proof sketches; mathlib maturity gates the reachable frontier | |
| Managers as ICs | Every Claude Code manager starts as an IC; flat org; agentic coding collapsed the onboarding cost that pushed managers out of the codebase | |
| Claire Vo | Host of the "How I AI" interview series (ChatPRD); interviewed Thariq Shihipar; runs a parallel component-visualization practice for non-technical stakeholders | |
| Thariq Shihipar | Engineer on the Claude Code team at Anthropic; "HTML is the new markdown" and "compute allocator" framings; three HTML-first workflows | |
| AI-Native Startup Lifecycle | Anthropic's May 2026 reframing of Idea/MVP/Launch/Scale assuming AI infrastructure: each stage's headcount/capital/skill gates dissolve; lean unicorn as deliberate target | |
| Compounding Data Moat | Anthropic's prescription for Scale-stage defensibility: time-locked behavioral fingerprint + domain-encoded edge cases + workflow lock-in via APIs/integrations beyond what migration agents can port | |
| Evals as Product Spec | Cat Wu's framing of evals as the emerging core PM skill: ten great evals beats a hundred mediocre; encode what done looks like for ambiguous AI features; companion to introspection (hypothesis) and vibe-check (direction) | |
| Zero-Friction Scope Creep | MVP failure mode when agentic coding removes the cost-based forcing function against scope creep; antidote is written scope + evidence-based amendment criteria | |
| Thinking Machines Lab | AI research lab behind interaction models (May 2026); harness-dissolves-into-model thesis; upstreamed streaming-sessions to SGLang; benchmarks against GPT-realtime / Gemini-live; research grants open | |
| Opinions on Using AI Tools & the Future of the Software Engineering Role | Debate map of four stances on using AI tools (bullish-insider / pragmatist-practitioner / skeptic-governance / architecture-thesis) + synthesis on the future SWE role: coding→deciding/verifying, role convergence, what stays human, which moats survive, honest caveats | |
| AI Brain Fry | Kropp et al. 2026/03: mental fatigue from excessive AI oversight increases minor errors +11%, major errors +39%; cognitive cost surface for both tool and employee framings | |
| AI Employee Framing | Kropp et al. (HBR May 2026, n=1,261): framing AI agents as "employees" vs "tools" cuts personal accountability −9pp, increases escalation +44%, reduces error catching −18%, no adoption gain | |
| Chloe Li | Lead author of MSM paper (arXiv 2605.02087); Anthropic Fellows Program; designed all specs and experiments | |
| Claude's Constitution / Model Spec | Anthropic Model Spec / Constitution by Askell et al.; document specifying Claude's values + hard constraints (SP1–3, GP1–2); now also a direct training input via MSM | |
| Human-AI Accountability Redesign | HBR five-pillar prescription: span-of-control redesign, role redesign, performance management reset, decision-rights/escalation/consequences, agentic-unit-not-human-role design | |
| AI Native Product Cadence | Cat Wu's 6mo→1mo→1day cadence at Anthropic: research-preview branding, mission-as-tiebreaker, evergreen launch room, lighter PRDs, weekly metrics readouts | |
| Anthropic | AI safety company / vendor of Claude; mission-as-tiebreaker culture; ~30–40 PMs across teams; Mike Krieger leads Labs round 2 | |
| Boris Cherny | Creator of Claude Code at Anthropic; phone-driven workflow with hundreds of agents; primary advocate of `/loop` primitive; "coding is solved (for me)" thesis | |
| Cat Wu | Head of Product for Claude Code and Cowork at Anthropic; primary articulator of AI-native product cadence and engineer-PM convergence | |
| Claude Character as Product | Personality as load-bearing product surface; Amanda's role at Anthropic; lunchtime vibe-checks as eval discipline; the harness asset that *doesn't* shrink | |
| Claude Code | Anthropic's agentic coding product; created by Boris Cherny late 2024; TypeScript/React; CLI/desktop/web/mobile/IDE surfaces; central tool across all 2026 sources | |
| Cowork | Anthropic's non-code knowledge-work agent product; sibling to Claude Code; output is decks/inbox/dossiers; same MCP/computer-use primitives | |
| Engineer PM Convergence | Generalists across disciplines; product taste as bottleneck skill; Anthropic Claude Code team as case study; "just do things" cultural substrate | |
| Matt Pocock | Independent AI-coding educator; built Sandcastle library; smart-zone/grill-me/tracer-bullets pedagogical framing; "bad code bases make bad agents" | |
| Mythos Model | Anthropic preview-tier frontier model; gated for safety; used internally alongside Opus 4.7; descendant expected to ship publicly later | |
| Printing Press Software Democratization | Boris Cherny's analogy: 1400s literacy expansion → AI software-writing expansion; domain knowledge displaces coding skill; 10× more disruption-grade startups predicted | |
| Seven Powers Applied to AI | Helmer/Acquired framework re-evaluated for AI: switching costs and process power erode; network effects, scale, cornered resources persist; counter-positioning amplifies | |
| Claude Opus 4.7 | GA frontier model from Anthropic; direct upgrade to 4.6 at same price; literal instruction following, 1.0–1.35× tokenizer inflation, new `xhigh` effort, first post-Glasswing safeguards |