Lenny RachitskyHost of Lenny's Podcast | Author of Lenny's Newsletter

Anthropic's co-founder on using Claude effectively

16 Aug 2026 · 1 min

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1:02

Ben, Anthropic's co-founder, says the way to stay relevant as AI advances is to use it ambitiously, not as a minor add-on to your current work. When Claude Code fails, restart and try a completely different prompt instead of tweaking the same one. Bold, iterative experimentation raises your success rate.

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Do you have any advice for folks that want to try to get ahead of this and not be replaced by AI? Even for me, I'm not immune to job replacement either. At some point, it's coming for all of us. Even you, Ben. Um, and you, Lenny. And me? Sorry. Oh wait, we've gone too far now. Uh, okay. Okay. I think a big part of it is just being ambitious in how you use the tools and being willing to learn new tools. People who use the new tools as if they were old tools tend to not succeed. So as an example of that, when you're coding, you know, people are very familiar with autocomplete. People are familiar with a simple chat where they can ask questions about the codebase. But the difference between people who use Claude Code very effectively and people who use it not so effectively is like, are they asking for the ambitious change? And if it doesn't work the first time, asking 3 more times because our success rate when you just completely start over and try again is much, much higher than if you just try once and then just keep banging on the same thing that didn't work.