Anthropic’s CPO Just Dropped a Stat That Should Scare You

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Anthropic’s CPO Just Dropped a Stat That Should Scare You

Mike Krieger @ Anthropic

Hannah Ren

Jan 05, 2026

Morning, CEO!

I spent most of my weekend feeling proud that I reorganized my dishwasher loading strategy. It felt like a big win for efficiency.

Then I read an interview with Mike Krieger, the co-founder of Instagram and current CPO of Anthropic.

He casually dropped a statistic that made my inner Career Crisis Committee call an emergency meeting:

At Anthropic, AI now writes 90% of their production code.

Read that again. 90%.

While I was feeling smug about stacking plates better, the engineers building Claude are using Claude to do almost all of their actual work.

We are looking at a fundamental shift in the economics of effort.

Here is the playbook on how Krieger is navigating 2026, and how we can steal it to stop doing grunt work and start charging for our brains.

1. The “How” is Dead. Long Live the “Vibe.”

For the last 20 years of my career, the biggest monster under my bed was the “How.”

I want to build an app that runs on my parents’ phones, records their stories, and writes memos for our family archive.

The AI part? Easy.

The app part? Nightmare. Dealing with microphone permissions, UI layouts, and building an APK file sounds like a form of torture I am not willing to endure on a Saturday.

So the idea dies, and the stories stay untold.

The “How” was a giant, expensive wall standing between my Brain and Reality.

Krieger says the cost of “How” has dropped to roughly zero.

He calls this the era of “Vibe Coding.”

You don’t need to know the syntax. You don’t need to remember where the semicolon goes or why the computer is yelling at you.

You just need the vibe—the intention, the logic, the “thing you want to happen.”

Mike shared a story. He needed a “Secret Santa” app for his family. In the old world, he wouldn’t build it. The friction was too high. His brain’s strict "Low Power Mode" would have kicked in and convinced him to just draw names out of a hat.

In this new world? He built the app over breakfast. While cooking eggs.

The Strategy for Us:

If you are still telling your boss that you can’t solve a problem because you “don’t have the technical skills,” you are lying to them.

And worse, you’re lying to yourself.

The barrier isn’t code anymore. It isn’t budget. It’s just inertia. The new skill isn’t typing; it’s having the guts to describe what you want and hitting “Enter.”

2. The Bottleneck Paradox

There is a concept called The Theory of Constraints.

It basically says: A system can only go as fast as its slowest part. If you widen the bottleneck, the flow speeds up until it slams into a new, different bottleneck.

So, if AI writes 90% of the code instantly, where did the bottleneck go?

Krieger says it moved upstream. The new bottleneck is Taste.

At Anthropic, they realized generating code was easy. The hard part was the “Merge Queue”—the line to get that code approved.

They had a firehose of AI-generated work and a tiny straw of human approval.

This is the counter-intuitive insight: When creation is free, curation becomes the most expensive resource in the universe.

Think about your current role.

If you are the person who do the work (writing the email, crunching the Excel sheet), you are in the danger zone. That work is going to zero.

But if you are the person who decides what work gets done, and verifies if it’s actually good? You just became 10x more valuable.

The Strategy for Us:

Stop trying to be the best bricklayer on the construction site.

Be the foreman.

Your value to your “client” is no longer your ability to grind out output. It is your ability to look at 50 AI-generated options and say, “That one. That is the one that won’t get us sued. Ship it.”

Taste is the new technical skill.

3. From “Chatting” to “Actual Work”

If 2024 was the year of the Chatbot (”Write me a poem about a potato”), and 2025 was the year AI came for the Junior Developer’s job...

What is 2026?

Mike’s prediction: 2026 is the year AI reliably takes work off your plate.

Notice the word reliably. And notice the difference in the relationship.

A tool is a hammer. You have to swing it.
A colleague is someone you email and say, “Hey, handle this,” and then you go to lunch.

Mike talks about “Horizontal Agents.” This is the boring-sounding term for the most exciting shift in our careers.

It means the AI isn’t just trapped in a little chat window on the side of your screen like a digital pet. It’s logging into your Salesforce. It’s fixing the messy data on the legacy server from 2019. It’s navigating the bureaucracy.

It is the difference between asking an intern, “How do I do this?” and telling a Senior Manager, “Go fix the Q3 sales report, email it to the board, and don’t bother me.”

This explains the “Productivity Paradox” we’ve all felt. You know, that study that says AI hasn’t made companies more productive yet?

It’s because we are treating it like a toy. We are sprinkling AI on top of broken processes.

The Strategy for Us: To win in 2026, you have to stop chatting with the AI and start delegating to it. You have to give it permission to enter your systems and do the dirty work.

To recap for the road:

Vibe Code: The barrier to building is zero. Stop making excuses.
Cultivate Taste: Be the editor, not the writer. Be the architect, not the bricklayer.
Delegate, Don't Chat: Move from swinging the hammer to directing the crew.