Lenny Rachitsky argues product teams should design for AI capabilities six months ahead, not today's models. Quad Code wrote minimal code at first because early models were unreliable, but bet on improvement. When Opus 4 and Sonnet 4 launched, code quality jumped and adoption exploded.
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Build for the model six months out. It's going to be uncomfortable because your product market fit won't be very good for the first six months. But when that model comes out, you're just going to hit the ground running and the product is going to click and start to work. Something that quad code got right from the very beginning. We bet on building for the model six months from now, not for the model of today, and for the very early versions of the product. It just wrote so little of my code because I didn't trust it. These models just weren't very good at coding. They were getting there, but it was still pretty early. So back then, the model automated some things, but really wasn't doing a huge amount of my coding. And so the bet with quad code was at some point, the model gets good enough that it can just write a lot of the code. And this is the thing that we first started seeing with Opus 4 and Sonnet 4, and Opus 4 was our first kind of ASL3 class model. We just saw this inflection because everyone started to use quad code for the first time, and that was when our growth really went exponential.