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  "title": "How Claude Code is built - Gergely Orosz",
  "note": "[Claude Code](https://claude.com/product/claude-code) has been transformational for agentic software development. The first handful of times I used it I was blown away not just by what it does but how it does it.\n\nI feel like the pull quote everyone will highlight on this is:\n\n> Fun fact: 90% of code in Claude Code is written by itself!\n\nbut for those that think software will just write itself also note\n\n> software engineers appear _very much_ in demand\n\nI had never heard of this \"product overhang\" concept.\n\n> **In AI, we talk about \"product overhang\", and this is what we discovered with the prototype.** Product overhang means that a model is able to do a specific thing, but the product that the AI runs in isn't built in a way that captures this capability. What I discovered about Claude exploring the filesystem was pure product overhang. The model could already do this, but there wasn't a product built around this capability!\"\n\nA big theme I see here that I’m also seeing with other teams using agentic coding tools is the freedom to explore. There is **no way** that a team could create 20 prototypes for a feature, explore the various options, and then decide how to proceed. Now with AI we can do just that.\n\nI had a similar conversation recently with an engineering team and asked how they picked one of multiple ways that a specific problem could be approached. They said they prototyped all of them and then decided. That blew me away.\n\nCould this be the unlock of the golden age of software? Think of this progression.\n\n1. Interpreted languages and tools like Python allowed us to reduce the cost of refactoring software dramatically from the days of compiled C++ code. This allowed us to adopt agile practices and try things.\n2. The cloud brought the same ephemeral agility to infrastructure. We can provision services as we wish to and try things to find what works best.\n3. Could AI allow us to orchestrate all of this to \"explore\" product ideas more than having to \"map the journey\" ahead of time? \n\n_Sadly the rest of the article is only for paid subscribers, but just that first part was worth it._ \n\n",
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