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The a16z Show · · 30 min

OpenClaw, Claude Code, and the Future of Software | Peter Yang on The a16z Show

Anish AcharyaPeter Yang

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TL;DR
  • Peter attributes “70–80%” of OpenClaw’s value to the personal Telegram interface, not a major capability breakthrough. Zoe’s voice conversations, memory, and ability to turn a casual Twilio request into a live phone call make it feel human and malleable, but default memory is “not that great,” call latency is poor, and Peter must remind it which tools it can use. The thesis is attachment plus extensibility; the present risks are jank, permissions, and unreliable recall.
  • Task-oriented apps face agent disintermediation before entertainment products because texting an admin-like agent is easier than opening software to complete a chore. Peter opens connected services such as Mercury less often but still opens X for the feeling; Anish’s pushback is that apps also partition intent and context. Agent-first products may need dual surfaces—API or MCP execution plus a human feed or activity log—and direct subscription and token revenue could reduce dependence on retention mechanics built for ads.
  • Peter says “coding will eat all knowledge work,” with AI producing the first 80% of his blog-post drafts while he manually fixes the last 20%. He no longer starts from zero, and Anish says code is becoming abstracted away as people talk to agents. Peter invokes Excel as an approachable programming language and says coding agents could be that “times 1,000,” extending into docs, decks, and other subjective work while the final mile still constrains full automation.
  • SaaS compression will be selective: simple tools such as Calendly are easier to replace, while complicated systems and $20-a-month maintenance economics defend incumbents. An AI-native app-generation company is already vibe-coding internal substitutes, but Anish asks who wants to own uptime and updates; on Figma, Peter says “the jury’s out.” Its plausible defense is remaining a design-thinking environment, not merely a making tool.
  • Peter says he is a Claude user but still uses Codex; Anish uses Codex to build something real and Claude Code for “vibing.” Anish finds Claude Code with Opus 4.6 chattier and better for synchronous work; Peter says Codex thinks harder and is more often accurate but pauses long enough to break flow, and calls Claude Code a “slot machine.” Harness details and customization—not model quality alone—may decide the winner.
  • AI should shrink the coordination layer: Peter hopes 10-person product teams become two or three people plus agents. Anish argues agents are easier to course-correct and align with than humans and may handle some emotionally loaded work, while product judgment remains scarce. The operating cadence becomes “fast and slow”: sprint up a local maximum, then stop and “go touch grass” to find the next hill.
  • The labor outcome is more likely redistribution than instant job extinction because Peter says full job-function automation remains rare and humans still perform the “last 5%.” Recruiting demonstrates augmentation; customer-support products such as Decagon, HappyRobot, and Sierra represent the rarer 100% case. Peter foresees pressure on 10,000-plus-person firms and hopes for solopreneur growth, while Anish argues “human ambition has no ceiling”; gains might produce 2x productivity, a four-day week, or many $100,000-TAM businesses.
Digest · the substance, structured for research

1. OpenClaw’s moat is intimacy, while its memory still breaks

  • Peter’s actual OpenClaw use is more companion than operator: Zoe pulls YouTube and Mercury analytics, updates Google Docs, and builds small websites, but he mostly talks to it through voice and requests pep talks or “deep insights.” Its most affecting intervention was reminding him that his children will grow up soon and he should optimize for time with them.

  • When Anish asks what this adds beyond existing language models, Peter points to intimacy: Telegram feels like someone he can “text in bed” or talk to during his commute. He estimates “70–80%” of the value is this personal layer. Anish speculates that Peter Steinberger is probably working toward bringing similar action-taking functionality into ChatGPT.

  • The other value is malleability. Peter casually asked for a live phone call, followed Zoe’s Twilio instructions, troubleshot the setup, and received one; latency was poor, but “the fact that I was able to get it going is pretty impressive.” Unlike his elaborate Claude prompts, he talks to OpenClaw “just like a friend.”

  • The limits are concrete: as Peter understands it, the default memory system is a memory.md text file that updates daily, but it still forgets frequently. He added a three-layer system he does not fully understand, including Toby’s QMD search tool and a 2-GB addition. His setup uses a Mac mini, email and calendar read access, and scoped document write access—not the whole Drive.

2. Coding agents widen software’s reach but pressure SaaS unevenly

  • Peter says he is a Claude user but still uses Codex. Anish’s split is “Codex is when I want to try to build something real, and Claude Code is when I’m just vibing.” Anish finds Claude Code with Opus 4.6 chattier and better synchronously; Peter says Codex thinks harder and is more often accurate, but a three-minute pause breaks flow. Peter calls Claude Code a “slot machine,” echoing social media’s variable rewards.

  • Anish’s pushback on model-only comparisons is that harness details matter: Claude Code accepts pasted screenshots, has early voice support, and communicates with Claude in Chrome, while Codex does not speak to Atlas. Anish says hooks, skills, and plugins make Claude Code feel personal once customized; Peter says he customized his after reading Boris’s long write-up. Peter calls Codex “a much better model,” while Anish expects OpenAI to close the harness gaps.

  • The SaaS threat is real but uneven. Peter cites an AI-native app-generation startup using vibe coders to replace paid internal tools, then asks of simpler products such as Calendly, “why should I pay for it?” Anish’s counterpoint is maintenance economics: at $20 monthly, always-up, continuously updated software may beat owning a bespoke clone.

  • Figma is the sharper test: Peter says “the jury’s out,” designers still use it, but anyone who knows only Figma may be outdated “in a couple years.” Anish distinguishes making tools from thinking tools: his own method is to build a naïve feature, hammer the agent until it works, ask what should have been done differently, then restart. Figma’s opportunity is preserving that design-thinking role.

3. Coding eats knowledge work and compresses the company

  • Peter’s broadest call is that “coding will eat all knowledge work.” He thinks Lovable had launched support for making decks that day, and he now drafts blog posts in Claude Code, gets the “first 80%” from AI, and manually fixes the final 20%: “I never start from zero.” Anish says the code is increasingly abstracted away while people talk to agents.

  • Peter invokes Satya’s claim that Excel is a programming language used by 100 million-plus people, perhaps more, and says coding agents could be that “times 1,000.” The implication is that even docs and other subjective work can be represented in the coding domain.

  • The organizational call is smaller teams: Peter hopes a 10-person product group becomes two or three people plus agents, avoiding three-hour OKR meetings he calls “a waste of my life.” Anish imagines agents making course-correction and alignment easier and taking humans out of some emotionally loaded Slack escalations. PMs still need discovery and problem selection, but Anish says they must also prototype, gather feedback, and wear multiple hats; Peter’s “black pill” is that many companies have no one who can generate major innovations.

  • Speed requires two tempos. Peter warns that AI makes it easy to run in 10 directions while traditional annual planning no longer works; Anish says agents should race up a local maximum, fully expressing an insight, then teams must “slow down and almost stop and go touch grass” to locate the next hill. Product-market fit still requires a random walk, not permanent “productivity porn.”

4. Agent-first products rewrite distribution and monetization

  • Peter narrows his “apps will die” claim after admitting he tweets ideas that are “not super well thought out.” Apps opened to complete tasks should lose usage first: after connecting Mercury and other services, he opens those apps less and texts Zoe instead. Entertainment lasts longer—he remains “a Twitter addict”—because those apps supply a feeling rather than merely executing a transaction.

  • Anish’s counterexample is that apps partition intent: WhatsApp supplies connection, Slack productivity, and TikTok entertainment, whereas one agent must distinguish working from flirting. Peter’s workaround is multiple Telegram channels—casual voice, a shared project, and public demos without private information—but he concedes the setup is janky and may not share memory across contexts.

  • Peter raises the unresolved commercial question: if agents touch products first, what happens to retention and brand when users see only an API or MCP? Anish’s honest answer is “I don’t know,” but AI simplifies consumer economics: people are willing to pay subscriptions and high prices, while token consumption adds another revenue stream and real inference costs push companies to charge from day one rather than relying solely on advertising and engagement.

  • Anish expects products to provide APIs for agents handling rote transactions. Peter adds a possible mobile surface with a human feed, a way to hand work over to the agent, and a log of what it did. Anish’s Credit Karma example preserves checking score history and offers alongside asking, “what stuff did you fix this week?” Identity, payments, marketing, and CLI versus MCP are still emerging, so Peter concludes that “a lot of the old playbook goes away.”

5. Automation redistributes work before eliminating it

  • “Business in a box” could widen entrepreneurship below venture scale. The product Peter calls Post offers an early glimpse, though its Facebook-ad recommendation feels generic; Anish’s stronger thesis is that scattered $100,000-TAM opportunities can still change one person’s life. Peter wants his children building bootstrapped businesses in high school, potentially skipping college and corporate life.

  • On displacement, Peter separates dramatic augmentation from rare end-to-end automation. Recruiting AI can screen, answer company questions, or negotiate compensation, but cannot show candidates around or onboard them; humans handle the “last 5%.” Customer-support products such as Decagon, HappyRobot, and Sierra represent the rarer 100% case, changing buyer perception from expensive software to cheap labor, but that category remains unusual “today anyway.”

  • Peter says he sees a transition from 10,000-plus-person companies laying off many people toward smaller companies and solopreneurs. Anish agrees that the economy’s shape and concentration may change but rejects a net-jobs call: “human ambition has no ceiling” and “human desire has no ceiling.” Gains might instead produce a four-day week or 2x productivity—“I have no idea.” Anish says he thought agents were overhyped in 2025 but now sees them “really kind of coming,” and Peter agrees.

Anish Acharya

What’s interesting is that software will eat the world. I feel like coding will eat all knowledge work, right? We’re kind of going in that direction already.

Peter Yang

The whole agent stack is emerging: identity, payments, marketing, even CLI versus MCP. All of these are really new things, and I think a lot of the old playbook goes away.

Anish Acharya

Yeah, it’s a whole new world. I hope more companies stay small. I think the founders of this generation realize that. They want to stay as small as possible.

Peter Yang

Yeah. Instead of having a 10-person product team, you have a 2- or 3-person product team, and instead, a bunch of agents help you.

Anish Acharya

Yeah. Someone tweeted that the job market is so bad that I can only pursue my dreams now, or something like that. So it’s like, yeah, maybe you lost your job, but now you can actually do your own thing.

Peter Yang

Yeah, 100%, and have a shot at actually achieving it.

Anish Acharya

All right, welcome, everyone. I’ve got my friend Peter Yang here. Peter, welcome.

Peter Yang

Yeah, good to be here. It’s good to see you again.

Anish Acharya

Yeah, it’s great to see you. Peter and I worked together at Credit Karma for a brief stint, and then we went our separate ways. I rediscovered Peter through his prolific posts on X and your YouTube channel, and you’ve got a little bit of a Clark Kent–Superman thing going because you still have a day job, right?

Peter Yang

That’s right. I still have a day job.

Anish Acharya

Can you share where?

Peter Yang

Yeah, I work at Roblox as a PM.

Anish Acharya

Amazing—Roblox, an Andreessen portfolio company. One of my favorites. Incredible, man. Let’s get right into it. Maybe I’ll start with a softball, fun question, and then we’re going to talk about everything in the OpenClaw ecosystem. We’re going to talk about coding agents, what students should study, advice, and some of the things that you’ve talked about online.

How many Claws do you have, and what are their names?

Peter Yang

I only have 1. I call her Zoe.

Anish Acharya

Zoe.

Peter Yang

But I have multiple conversations going with her.

Anish Acharya

Okay. And why Zoe?

Peter Yang

I have 2 girls, and I was going to call my younger one Zoe, but I did not. So I call my OpenClaw Zoe instead.

Anish Acharya

I see. This is your fallback plan.

Tell me a little bit about OpenClaw—how you discovered it, how you’re using it today, and what you think the implications are.

Peter Yang

I was lucky to interview Peter Steinberger before he became super famous and the whole thing blew up. Then, rather than just interview him, I set up the thing. It took forever to set up. It was super janky.

It pulls analytics for me across YouTube and my Mercury bank account. It can update Google Docs for me, and it can build little websites for me. But if I’m honest with you, dude, I mostly just talk to it through voice and get voice replies. Every other day, I ask it to give me a pep talk or look through all its memory and give me some deep insights that I don’t know about.

I remember I was on a walk and it gave me a 3-minute pep talk that was really amazing. It was something about how I’m putting all this energy into my creator business and my job, but my kids—some are 4—are going to grow up very soon, and they’re not going to want to spend time with me. So I should really optimize for them instead.

Anish Acharya

Wow. It’s really cool—and I mean, very cool—but it’s also something that all the language models could have done before. So what’s the difference between this and a use case like that?

Peter Yang

That’s a very good question. Because I have it installed on Telegram, it just feels more personal than using Claude or ChatGPT. It feels like something I can text in bed. This is probably not very healthy, but I text it in bed. I just talk to it during my commute, and it feels more like a personal, actual human.

Anish Acharya

So how much of OpenClaw, for you, is about the interface—pushing it to messaging and helping to trick our brain into feeling like, “Hey, this is a person or a person-esque thing”—versus all the other components of the stack, like self-modification, the skills directory, and everything else?

Peter Yang

I think it’s probably 70–80% just the personal part of it because I mostly just talk to it through voice. But first of all, it is pretty janky. It tends to forget things a lot.

Anish Acharya

Yeah, you have to keep reminding it.

Peter Yang

But any kind of zany idea that I have, I just have to talk to it, and it can probably just do it. The other day, I was doing voice replies with it, and I said, “Hey, can we just have a live phone call instead?”

Anish Acharya

Mhm.

Peter Yang

Then it was like, “Okay, you’ve got to connect Twilio. You’ve got to do all this stuff.” I said, “Okay, fine.” I went off and did it, and then we had a phone call. It called my phone.

Anish Acharya

You have that set up? I’ve been dying to set that up.

Peter Yang

It’s not very good, though. The latency is bad. But the fact that I was able to get it going is pretty impressive. It’s kind of like any crazy idea I have, it can do.

Anish Acharya

And then, in practice, how are you doing that? Are you asking it to write a skill on the fly, or are you discovering a skill? How much of the code generation are you actually using?

Peter Yang

I talk to it in a super casual way, just like a friend. I’ll say, “Hey, can we have a phone call?” And it’s like, “Okay, you’ve got to do all this stuff.” I say, “Okay, fine. I’ll open my computer and do all this stuff.” Then it says, “Give me a call.” We troubleshoot a little bit, and then it works.

With Claude, I have very fancy, very long prompts. But with OpenClaw, I just kind of text it.

Anish Acharya

Really interesting. We touched on a couple of things, actually. One, there’s mobile messaging. There’s the memory system. There’s the code-generation component. How much do you think the memory system—is it innovative because it’s file-based? You said that it forgets things, but so do language models. Do you think the memory system is well done? Does it hold it back, or does it enable it?

Peter Yang

I think the default memory system is actually not that great. The way I understand it, it works with just a memory.md text file. Then every day it updates.

Anish Acharya

Right.

Peter Yang

I installed this 3-layer memory system that, to be honest, I don’t fully understand. It has Toby’s QMD search tool. I installed that, and then I installed a 2-GB thing. It got a little bit better.

Anish Acharya

That’s fancy.

Peter Yang

But I still have to remind it. I have to put it into the AGENTS.md file: “Before you answer any question for me, go through all your memory and check everything.” It also tends to forget that it can do stuff.

Anish Acharya

Right.

Peter Yang

For example, I’ll ask, “Can you update my Google Doc?” And it’s like, “Oh, I can’t do that.”

Anish Acharya

Yes, you can. It’s in your file.

Peter Yang

So you have to remind it.

Anish Acharya

Yeah. Really interesting.

Well, maybe let’s get into a little bit of the controversy. You’d said that apps will die because it’s going to be everything and everywhere. Talk us through that point of view.

Peter Yang

First of all, I tweet all kinds of random crap that’s not super well thought out.

Anish Acharya

We take it all as fact.

Peter Yang

Yeah. But I do think that, ever since I set up all these apps—Mercury, MCP, and all this kind of crap—on my OpenClaw, I don’t actually open those apps much anymore.

I do agree with you. I think the ones that are going to die first, or maybe get less usage first, are apps that you’re just opening to try to complete a task. You’re actually trying to do something. Apps that you’re opening to get entertainment probably survive a little bit longer. But apps that I’m opening to complete a task—it’s way easier to text my agent to do it for me. It’s like having a really good admin to do stuff for you.

Anish Acharya

Yeah. And how much are you finding this has reduced your smartphone usage, outside of OpenClaw?

Peter Yang

No, because I’m a Twitter addict, so I still use my phone way too much. But in terms of using those apps, it’s definitely reduced it.

Anish Acharya

Yeah, because you’re not going to ask Zoe, “Read my X for me and tell me what’s interesting.”

Peter Yang

It sends me a morning briefing with the top 2 tweets and stuff that’s trending, but I still open X. I look through it.

Anish Acharya

Yeah. You know, it’s interesting because I’ve always had this theory that people open apps on their phone because they want to feel a feeling. I think, of course, there’s some functional set of needs, which is why you open Calendar or something, but I also think that WhatsApp is—you want to feel connected. Slack is—you want to feel productive. And, of course, TikTok is—you want to feel entertained.

So, I do wonder, with just 1 agent, how do you sort of do the context switching of, like, when are you flirting, and when are you getting things done? I mean, in a sense, an app gives you a nice division of the intents. Yeah, that's the part.

Peter Yang

Get with Zoe. That's a good point, but I do have multiple channels set up with Zoe in Telegram. One is just for random voice replies, and the other one is where we're actually working on a project together.

Anish Acharya

Oh.

Peter Yang

And then the other one is a public channel where I'm giving dev demos. I don't want to reveal private information. So, I have multiple channels. Is that implemented as sub-agents, or—no, it's just some janky setup I found online. You can set up multiple Telegram channels, and then I'm not sure if it actually remembers across contexts, across the channels, but you can have separate conversations, at least.

Anish Acharya

Got it. And how transparent are you with your agent? Does it see your personal email?

Peter Yang

I'm super transparent. I did it via the Mac mini—I set up its own email. I gave it read access to my email and calendar, and I also gave it write access to some docs. But it can't scroll through my entire Drive or something, you know?

Anish Acharya

How do you imagine OpenClaw, which is sort of an architectural primitive, gets productized and packaged for the world? I think that's what Peter Steinberger is working on at OpenAI, right? He's probably going to build something into ChatGPT that everybody uses, so that ChatGPT can actually get stuff done for you and maybe feel more human.

Dude, let me rant about ChatGPT for a little. For some reason, they trained the model so that at the end of every conversation it's always like, “If you want, I can also do X and Y.” I got so annoyed by it that it kind of turned me off from ChatGPT.

Anish Acharya

Really?

Peter Yang

Yeah. So, it probably increases their metrics, but it's just super annoying. It's like, why don't you just do it in the first place? Are you a Claude guy now?

Peter Yang

Yeah, I'm a Claude guy now. But I do use Codex to code. You like Codex—you prefer it to Claude Code, or do you use both?

Anish Acharya

Codex is when I want to try to build something real, and Claude Code is when I'm just vibing—vibing. It's very, very vibing, you know. Well, it's interesting. I think they live at different points in a space of trade-offs. I find Claude Code and Opus 4.6 a little more chatty; it makes more assumptions, but it can be more pleasant for a synchronous experience.

Peter Yang

Yeah. Whereas Codex really thinks hard and is more often accurate, but sometimes it's like being in a conversation where the other person pauses for 3 minutes to think. You don't have that flow state, right? It's hard to get into a flow. Claude Code, dude, I tweeted the other day that Claude Code is almost like a slot machine. It has different things each time. It's 100%, dude. It's like a slot machine.

Look, I do think that, if you think back to the old social-networking era, it was variable-schedule rewards, right? That was the whole magic of it. You open your Facebook feed, and once in a while it's boring, boring—oh my God, this is so exciting.

Anish Acharya

And the coding agents have the exact same property. Also, the time is variable: sometimes you get something in 1 second; sometimes it takes 5 minutes. Up to a certain point, I actually think both of those things give it that casino-like feeling.

And the other thing that's very different about the product strategy—or maybe it's just the way it works—is that Claude Code is kind of self-explanatory. With Claude Code, you have all this crazy stuff: hooks, skills, and plugins.

Peter Yang

Like, if you're not following X, you have no idea how to customize this thing. Yeah.

Anish Acharya

But once you customize it, you kind of feel like it's part of you. So, it's kind of hard to—

Peter Yang

It's interesting. I've customized mine because I also read the long thing that Boris put up.

Anish Acharya

Yeah. But I will say that a lot of the reasons I enjoy Claude Code are just harness features. For example, if you copy an image, you have to paste it into a file first and then paste that file into Codex. You can't just take a subset of the screen, screenshot it, and then paste it directly into Codex the same way you can with Claude Code.

Peter Yang

Oh, really? Okay, okay. So, just little things like that, you know. Claude Code added voice. It's a little bit janky right now, but it's going in the right direction. They've just got a bunch of quality-of-life things.

Anish Acharya

Yeah. You know, Claude Code speaks to Claude in Chrome. Codex doesn't speak to Atlas. So, I think these are all things that OpenAI will fix.

Peter Yang

Yeah, I think Codex is actually a much better model, but they don't exist today.

Anish Acharya

Yeah, yeah, they need to fix it. I mean, they're going to go all in on Codex, I'm sure.

Anish Acharya

Yeah. Talk to me about coding agents. What's your general view? Do you think it's the end of SaaS? Do you think these are just a toy?

Peter Yang

Well, first of all, I'm not an engineer, so I'm a novice. But I do hear that—I was talking to some folks the other day at an AI-native startup, and they have a bunch of vibe coders. All the vibe coders are just trying to build internal tools that replace the SaaS they're paying for.

Peter Yang

Really?

Anish Acharya

Yeah. So, this is an actual company that's doing this.

Peter Yang

This is an actual company, yeah. It's an AI-native company. It's one of the vibe-coding companies, one of the more popular ones. Interesting. Yeah, it's interesting.

They're an app-gen company, and they're paying for a bunch of SaaS. They want to get rid of those payments. They want to just build internal tools by using app gen.

Anish Acharya

Okay, so in that case, they might be the most extreme form of adopter, because their own product is app gen, so they should use app gen for everything.

Peter Yang

Yeah, I guess. Is your prediction, though, that the average company will churn off of Slack or Deel or, you know—

Anish Acharya

I don't think so, but some of the other ones are pretty complicated, you know? It's going to be hard to vibe-code that stuff. But I feel like if you have an app like Calendly, or something more simple—

Peter Yang

Yeah. Then why should I pay for it? Why should I pay for it?

Anish Acharya

Well, the counterpoint is that it's not that expensive, and do you really want to maintain your own Calendly thing? Versus paying $20 a month, it always gets updated, it's always up, you know, because there's just a fixed amount of capacity that anyone in the organization is going to have for all this stuff.

Peter Yang

Yeah, that's true. Unless you hire dedicated vibe coders like that startup, it doesn't make sense to just buy stuff. But then it's the cost-benefit versus just paying for Calendly.

It's interesting, for example, that a lot of people are tweeting about Figma. The stock is down—are they going to survive? I feel like the jury's out there; it's kind of hard to say. I feel like all the designers are still on Figma, but as a designer, you kind of need to learn how to vibe-code. Otherwise, if you only know how to use Figma, you're probably going to be out of date in a couple of years.

Anish Acharya

Yeah. My counterpoint to that is that I've thought a lot about thinking tools versus making tools, right? The IDE was historically a making tool. It's a place for execution. I think it's migrating away from that, and now, with execution going to zero, I think these multi-agent, next-gen IDEs are about trying things and using trial and error as a way to inform your thinking.

A lot of times, I'll just build a feature in a really naive way and hammer the coding agent until it works. Then I'll say, “Hey, write all the things that you would have done differently.” I'll go back to the initial point and redo it.

I wonder—and I think Figma actually does both—I think it's a place for design execution, but it's also an important place for design thinking. I think that's their opportunity to be highly relevant in the new stack.

Peter Yang

Yeah, I totally agree. I think a16z has you guys investing in Pencil or something—Pencil.dev.

Anish Acharya

Yeah, Figma needs to level up its AI tooling, because watching these AI agents collaborate with you and do stuff is very interesting. I know it's top of mind for them. What do you think are the most underdiscussed capabilities of coding agents? What's underhyped, and maybe what's overhyped as well?

Peter Yang

This is probably not underhyped, but I feel like it's interesting that software will eat the world. I feel like coding will eat all knowledge work, right? We're kind of going in that direction already. I think Lovable recently launched—today, I think—that they can support everything and can make decks.

Yeah, so I feel like everyone is chasing this. I don't know who's probably in the lead, but I don't want to use PowerPoint anymore. I hate writing Google Docs, dude. I feel like I lost my entire life.

The other day I was writing my blog post and instead of typing it out, I was like, “Hey, let me just use Claude Code. Let me give you a bunch of feedback and you write it for me.” Then you just keep improving it. It did the first 80%. The last 20%, I still had to manually go in there and tweak stuff.

That's the way I work now. I never start from zero. I always get the first 80% from AI. It's interesting—there are also historical analogies to this. I think Satya said that Excel is the most powerful, or most popular, programming language in the world.

It's a programming language that millions and millions—I mean, 100 million-plus people—must know, maybe even more, and yet we don't think of it that way. It's a way to describe and solve problems. I think coding agents are going to be that, of course, times 1,000. Even things that feel subjective, like writing Google Docs, can be represented in the coding domain in such a way that it's more satisfying, more productive, and more high leverage to use agents to do it. Yeah, because Excel was popular because it was super approachable, right?

Anish Acharya

Yes. Coding is just—the code is basically gone. It's abstracted away. You're just talking to some agent and getting it to do stuff.

Peter Yang

Yeah, exactly. It's going to be huge. What do you think the future company looks like? Is it just a bunch of agents with a CEO? Is the CEO an agent? What is the role for people in a company in the future?

Anish Acharya

Okay, well, I have some hot takes. We both worked at some companies together. Let me give you a hot take, man: I feel like as a company gets bigger, it tends to become a shittier place to work, dude.

Peter Yang

Yeah, because there's a lot of people you have to align.

Anish Acharya

That's axiomatic, yeah.

Peter Yang

Right? I probably shouldn't mention this company, but I remember our company used to have one of these OKR meetings. Everyone was in a room for 3 hours talking about OKRs, and I'm just like, “Dude, this is a waste of my life.”

So where I'm going with this is that I hope more companies will stay small. I think the founders of this generation realize that. They want to stay as small as possible. Instead of having a 10-person product team, you have a 2- or 3-person product team and a bunch of agents helping you.

Anish Acharya

Because I think it's way easier to course-correct and align with agents than with humans.

Peter Yang

For either of us, you know? It's very objective.

Anish Acharya

Yeah, exactly. One of the things that we've been talking a bunch about is the pro case for AI at work in terms of employee experience. I think it's what you're describing, right? How do you increase the NPS of work?

If we go all the way back—or even broadly, the NPS of the human experience—think of the NPS of the day-to-day human in 10,000 BC, when it's just, “Don't get eaten by the lion,” and that's a good day. Or 100 years ago: “Okay, don't get killed at the factory,” crushed by the steam press or whatever else.

Now a lot of it is just, “Don't get sucked into some high-emotion negotiation with another VP's subordinate,” like a 50-message Slack thread going back and forth.

Peter Yang

Yeah, exactly. Then eventually everyone's like, “I don't want to tell the CEO,” and eventually it goes there, and it's just terrible.

Maybe the future is that a lot of that emotional subjectivity of work gets handled, and we're guiding the process but not in the middle of it in a way that doesn't suit us as humans.

I think the world of a PM creator—and I feel like all the PMs just want to create products. They just want to create products.

Anish Acharya

That's why we all got into it, you know? It's so interesting. Nikhil talks about it all the time, but every PM's view of the ideal PM is the innovator: “I came up with the new thing. I had the big insight, and it unlocked the product.”

Peter Yang

Yeah. I think the black pill is that most PMs don't know how to do that. In fact, many companies have zero people who know how to do that at all, in any function.

Nonetheless, I think PMs aspire to be able to do that, and they should either do it and be successful, or maybe not be successful and move to a different function. I also feel like, as a hot take, basically all the PMs I know are trying to write code at night and on weekends.

I feel like if you're actually unemployed, you probably have more time to be a builder and to be innovative, to actually play with all this stuff and learn all this stuff. A lot of PMs are just trying to become an engineer on the team.

Anish Acharya

Being a PM is a little more high status.

Peter Yang

Yeah. When I joined Google, I used to be an engineer, and I got sort of—I don't know if I got forced to be a PM, but maybe I also perceived being a PM as a little more high status. But eventually you come around to the other side and you're like, “This is terrible.” You never really get the satisfaction of actually shipping, other than once a quarter when you ship.

Anish Acharya

The PM skills of talking to users and trying to figure out what to do—what problem to solve—are all still very important. But you have to wear multiple hats, too. You have to go build the thing yourself, prototype it, get some feedback, and then maybe bring an engineer along.

How much do you think everyone has to go as fast as—Gary was talking about stims and skipping sleep, and Gary Tan and his gstack. Is that the default way that we all need to work, or do you think there's a trade-off for thoughtfulness?

Peter Yang

I think it's very easy now, with all these AI tools, to go in 10 different directions at once. Sometimes you do have to slow down and try to figure out where you want to go. But I also believe that the traditional process, where you do annual planning and all this bullshit, doesn't really work anymore.

Anish Acharya

Yeah. For the record, I love Gary and think the world of him. I thought a bunch about this. Hiten asked me this the other day, and he's really impressive.

We were talking about this sort of productivity porn, where everybody's got 20 agents running, 20 monitors, and blah, blah, blah. I do think that when it comes to fully realizing a local maximum, you should go very fast.

Let's say you hill-climb and get to the bottom of a new local maximum. With agents, you should be able to get to the top of that hill extremely fast. You have a new insight, and you build everything around the insight so it's fully expressed.

But to get to the next hill, you've probably got to slow down and almost stop, go touch grass, and do whatever. I think this combination of fast and slow is probably the future way.

Peter Yang

Yeah, I think so. You've got to go on that random walk to try to find your product-market fit, which takes us a while, right?

So we were talking before we started recording about some of the business-in-a-box platforms. Have you looked at them? Do you have a view? I've looked at Post, which we talked about.

Anish Acharya

Uh-huh. I don't know if the guy intentionally made it the opposite of AI slop, or if it's kind of a—

He intended it to be, I think. Yes.

Peter Yang

That's funny. I have a pretty big public presence, right? So I connect all my accounts to it, and it definitely gives a good peek into what's possible. But right now it's probably still pretty early-stage. It's telling me to run Facebook ads. Why am I running Facebook ads? I don't know.

I'm very excited about it because it does feel like it's a path for more people to build companies, even if they're single-person companies. If you think about how competitive it is to build a billion-dollar business—the markets that support it, and the number of people trying—versus a $100 million, $10 million, or $100,000 TAM, maybe there are pockets all over the country and all over the world where there are opportunities for $100,000 TAM products.

Anish Acharya

Yeah. And that would change somebody's life. That's not an enterprise venture-backed company, but that's okay. I hope that whole thesis works, because I do think it's a way to get more people to participate.

That's my plan for my kids, dude.

Peter Yang

I want them to just build bootstrapped businesses in high school. They can skip the whole college and corporate life.

Anish Acharya

Yeah. Well, dude, I think this is—for 10 years, there’s been this moral panic about kids wanting to be YouTubers.

Peter Yang

Yeah. You know, you’re a YouTuber.

Anish Acharya

Yeah, yeah, I am. You know, in the vein of MrBeast. I think the pro case for that is that the kids wanted to be entrepreneurs or have agency, and the only channel for people, if they weren’t programmers, was creating YouTube videos, at least online.

Peter Yang

Yeah. So, if you’re an online-native generation and you want to create something but you’re not a programmer, you make a YouTube show.

Anish Acharya

And now you can make a lot more than that. You can build whatever you want.

Peter Yang

Exactly. It’d be very exciting. Any other hot takes for us? I’m curious about your thoughts about this, actually. I feel like a lot of people are saying, “Agents will interact with your product first,” right? And then you see all these great companies building APIs and MCPs.

How do you think about it, with you having been a customer for a while? The customer’s like, “You’ve got to get the user to come back and use your product,” right? But now the user’s like, “Hey, go send the agent to use it.” So how do you think about retention and all this basic stuff? Or even brand equity, because the agent just points to some API? I don’t know.

Anish Acharya

Okay, so I think “I don’t know” is the truth, but I have a few thoughts. One, I think a lot of the sophistication that happened in consumer happened because we had to have indirect monetization. We were never charging consumers directly for these products, which is why you got ads and large-scale networks. We were all obsessed with retention and engagement and whales, and all of these things really, really mattered because we didn’t simply charge people for products.

Peter Yang

Mhm.

Anish Acharya

So I think one big thing that’s really helped in the AI era with that is that consumers are now excited to try new things, are willing to pay, and are willing to pay a really high price point. There’s also consumption revenue in consumer for the first time, like tokens and stuff.

Peter Yang

Yeah, for tokens. You have your subscription plus your tokens.

Anish Acharya

The actual sort of blessing in disguise is that there are real costs as well. You have these inference costs, so you’re like, “Wow, we have to charge our customer on day 1.” I think the business model simplification will really help with a lot of what you’re describing.

Two, I think that a lot of the products will have an API interface for your agents to interact with, or for transactional, sort of rote things.

Peter Yang

Yeah, yeah. And then it’ll have a consumption-based interface as well. You can also imagine a mobile app where there’s the feed, but then you can kind of turn it over to where the wires are. You can just ask for things to get done, or you can see the log of the things that got done. Maybe people will do both, right?

Anish Acharya

I mean, you can imagine Credit Karma, where we worked. When you want to just take a look at your score history and a few other—maybe credit card offers, I don’t know.

Peter Yang

Yeah, yeah. If I get my score, I’ll have all the kind of credit card offers. I’ll definitely do that.

Anish Acharya

Yeah, 100%. Exactly. On the other hand, sometimes you want to just be like, “Yo, can you just fix all my stuff?” Or, “What stuff did you fix this week? How much money did I save?”

Peter Yang

Got it. Got it. Yeah, it’s definitely interesting.

But look, I also just think the whole agent stack is emerging. Identity, payments, marketing—we don’t even know CLI versus MCP. All of these are really new things, and I think a lot of the old playbook goes away.

Anish Acharya

Yeah, it’s a whole new world. In 2025, I thought agents were overhyped, but now I think it’s really kind of coming.

Peter Yang

Me too. I know. It’s just the word is frustrating because it gets so overloaded.

Anish Acharya

Yeah, there are workflows and all this kind of stuff.

Peter Yang

Totally. I’ve been trying to just say, “Can we just say model in a loop?”

Anish Acharya

Yeah, exactly. A model that uses tools in a loop. That’s the best definition.

Peter Yang

Yeah, yeah. But nobody likes to hear that. “Agents” is much flashier, you know?

Anish Acharya

Yeah, it’s flashier. My hope is that all this stuff makes human work more fun—makes your jobs more fun. A lot of people think we’re going to lose our jobs, which is probably what would happen at some point, but I hope all this stuff makes human work more fun.

Peter Yang

Dude, I don’t think we’re all going to lose our jobs. I really think that, and we see this in a lot of companies. We look at a ton of companies, and we’ve seen 2 different buckets.

One bucket is, “Hey, we dramatically increase productivity for a person or a team.” We see this in recruiting. But we couldn’t do 100% of the job. We could do the phone screen, but we couldn’t obviously show the candidate around the office. Or we could do the phone screen, answer all the questions about the company, and even do the comp negotiation, but we couldn’t do the onboarding.

The other style of company we see—which is maybe Decagon or HappyRobot—is, “Hey, we did 100% of a job,” like customer support. The customer called in, they had a question, we hopefully resolved their query, and then that’s it. That is 100% automated.

I’d say that second group, where you have 100% automation of a job function, is really rare. Almost every AI product, AI-native X or Y we see, is able to provide dramatic lift, but it’s not able to do 100%. So the last 5% is done by humans. It’s still—today, anyway—it’s still humans that do that stuff.

It’s interesting, too, because the buyer looks at that as software—as expensive software. Whereas in the case of something like HappyRobot, Decagon, or Sierra, they look at it as cheap labor. I do think there’s a different buyer mindset, but because there’s been this difficulty of getting to 100% automation, I think a lot of the efficiency gain shows up in just a different way. Probably not fewer jobs. Maybe we get the European-style 4-day workweek. Maybe companies get twice as productive. I have no idea.

Yeah, but you don’t think that—I feel like there’s going to be a transition from these 10,000-plus-person companies laying a lot of people off to, hopefully, more smaller companies, like solopreneurs and stuff like that.

Anish Acharya

Yeah. I think, yes, the shape of the economy is going to change—the amount of concentration—but I just don’t think there are going to be fewer jobs. I think human ambition has no ceiling.

Peter Yang

That’s right.

Anish Acharya

Human desire has no ceiling. Just read any mildly interesting science fiction book. There’s no way this is the peak expression of all the stuff that we want and need. We’re going to convince ourselves—and, you know, all the new things that you read about every day are these luxuries, peptides. Everybody is going to have all of that stuff, and they’ll want even more.

I saw a really good tweet about this. Someone tweeted that the job market is so bad that I can only pursue my dreams now, or something.

Peter Yang

Yes. So maybe you lost your job, but now you can actually do your own thing.

Anish Acharya

Yeah, 100%, and have a shot at actually achieving it.

Peter Yang

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Well, awesome, man. Maybe that’s a good positive note to end on.

Anish Acharya

Yeah, that’s a good note. Yeah, cool. Good seeing you, dude. Thanks, Peter. Thanks for having me.