Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
What happens after coding is solved? | Fiona Fung (Manager of the Claude Code and Cowork Teams)
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Andthropic engineers, on average, shift eight times as much code per quarter as they did compared to 2025. Coding is no longer the bottle in that. It's lifted the ceiling of what anyone is able to do. Everything is now possible in theory. Now it's about how ambitious can you be? It's always something we ask ourselves, "What's better than me doing it?" Have a thought, dude. The people that seem to be doing best are taking the most initiative, getting the most proactive, have the most agency. We say with high agency, it's also high accountability. So it's all about making sure folks have that freedom to cook. But then it's also like, okay, what's the accountability for it? What's the hypothesis of what you're trying to solve? I'm curious what is lost in this new world of software engineering. You start being a lonely experience because we all started just working with our agents so muching on the cloud code team. Recently, we started a pairwise programming lunch. Something you think about is this gap forming between people that are leading into AI, killing it, and then people that are not super frustrated, fighting, resisting. In terms of frustration, I think sometimes I also see a little bit of fear. For anything that there is a fear, my advice is leaning and asking, "What can I do about it? What is within my control?" Today, my guest is Fiona Fung. Fiona leads the teams behind cloud code and co-work at Anthropic. She oversees both Boris Churney and Cat Wu, both of whom who have been on the podcast and whose episodes are in the top 10 most listened to episodes of all time. Before Anthropic at Microsoft, Fiona ran the teams that built TypeScript and Visual Studio. After that, she went to Facebook where she started the Facebook Marketplace team, which she took from Idea to Launch. Today, Facebook Marketplace generates over $100 billion in GMV every year. Also, while at meta, she oversaw work on Meta's first smart glasses product, and then she helped build Orion, their first AR glasses product. Then she went to Instagram where she let infrastructure, growth, integrity, and safety teams. While at Instagram and at meta, she oversaw an org of over 500 people. Fiona has been an engineer for over 25 years, and as a longtime engineering leader, especially now at Anthropic. She has such a unique lens into where things are heading, what's worth paying attention to, and what teams should be thinking about right now as AI transforms the world of building. A huge thank you to Cat Wu, Boris Churney, and Mohamed Hegazi for suggesting topics and questions for this conversation. Before we get into it, don't forget to check out lenniesproductpass.com for a free year of the hottest and most well-crafted AI product in the world, available exclusively to lennies and newsletter subscribers. With that, I bring you Fiona Fung. Fiona, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast. Thanks so much for having me, Lenny. So I was at the code with Cloud Event, I don't know, a month ago at this point, and I went to your talk, and I was just like, "Holy shit, I got to get Fiona on this podcast."
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