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👋 Hi, this is Gergely with a subscriber-only issue of the Pragmatic Engineer Newsletter. In every issue, I cover challenges at Big Tech and startups through the lens of engineering managers and senior engineers. If you’ve been forwarded this email, you can subscribe here.
Impressions from visiting OpenAI, Anthropic, & Cursor
A peek into where software engineering is headed from inside the sector’s leading AI labs. Agents running in the cloud are a major trend, while coding harnesses are spreading beyond the craft
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Scheduling note: this week, I’m in San Francisco at the AI Engineer’s World Fair, so there won’t be an edition of The Pulse on Thursday. However, tomorrow (Wednesday) there will be a special podcast episode – the lengthiest, most detailed one yet – with software engineering legend, Kent Beck.
In recent days, I’ve visited the offices of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Cursor, in San Francisco. Onsite, I talked with software folks working on the model side to learn more about how their way of building software is changing. This article is based on observations from those visits, including some new developments that I reckon may be adopted industry-wide.
We cover:
Next mega-trend? Agents running in the cloud to go mainstream. OpenAI, Anthropic, and Cursor are all-in on cloud agents and expect demand for them to increase massively.
Mass adoption of coding harnesses by non-developers. At OpenAI, more than 95% of non-engineers use Codex, not ChatGPT. Is it a sign of things to come across tech?
Will the main task of engineers be to make agents more efficient? Ever more engineering work is about building environments for agents to execute more efficiently at Anthropic and Cursor.
Next trend? Companies aggressively optimize spend-per-token. AI spending by software engineers is so high that it makes sense for platform teams to slash per-token cost. A case study from Coinbase.
1. Next mega-trend? Agents running in the cloud to go mainstream
Last week, Andrej Karpathy employed the phrase “new paradigm” to describe using Claude Tag – a way to mention Claude in Slack and have it kick off tasks – to work with AI:
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There was plenty of pushback against this claim on social media; after all, it’s just a Slack integration with Claude, right? I also thought this until I asked David Hershey at Anthropic’s Applied AI unit about it while visiting the company’s offices. He explained in detail what makes this particular Slack integration different from using something like Claude Code:
No additional setup. For Claude Code to work well, it should be connected to internal MCP servers, with the right skills on your local machine. Of course, at larger companies this setup is at least partially automated, but devs often need to do tweaking.
No “tool context-switching.” Just mention it in Slack! Of course, opening Claude Code is not a big effort, but it’s still more work than just typing it out in Slack, and kicking off work.
Routine work made easier. David has “Claude playing Pokémon” as his side project. Every time a new model comes out, he kicks off a run of his script on it. Previously, this took a few minutes to set up every time, and then it ran on his machine for hours. With this new Slack integration, it’s just one command.
My sense is that the excitement here is less about the Slack integration itself, and more to do with the fact that it’s easy to kick off one or more AIs that no longer run on a local machine. You can skip the setup entirely.
‘Claude Managed Agents’ is a big focus at Anthropic. While there, I met Katelyn Lesse, head of engineering for Claude Platform, who explained that Claude Managed Agents is a large, complex project which her team built over a six-month period. It’s a hosted service to execute long-running agents on various cloud providers.
Cloud agents are the “big deal”, not the Slack integration
Also last week, I had the opportunity to attend a private AI builders event, where Peter Steinberger discussed his workflow.
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He talked about how he has gotten really tired of having several OpenClaw agents running on his local machine, which heat up the CPU and slow down his whole system. So, he built Crabbox as a way to run OpenClaw agents in the cloud: