← Front page

Odd Lots · Monday, July 20, 2026

Anthropic's Claude Code Leverages 'Dogfooding' for Product Improvement

Boris Cherney reveals that Anthropic uses Claude Code internally, built on the same public API as their customers. This practice, known as 'dogfooding,' allows them to benefit directly from model improvements, leading to enhanced product capabilities. He notes that model advancements, such as Opus 4.5 and 4.6, have directly correlated with growth inflection points for Claude Code.

personBoris CherneycompanyAnthropic

The tape

3 quotes
But the thing about cloud code is we are built on the same exact infrastructure that our customers use. This is by design because for Nthropic we build products, but we also build a platform that other developers build on.
Boris Cherney
And you know, many, many thousands of companies build on our platform. And so when you look at cloud code, you know, we use the same public model that everyone does. We use the same exact public anthropic API that everyone does. We don't have some secret API that we use. We use the same exact API. And we call this dog fitting, right like the ideas like you build a product, you got to use your own product because that helps you make it a lot better.
Boris Cherney
And so when the model got better, we benefited from this on the quad code side because we you know, use the model through then the thropic API, and a lot of our customers saw the same thing, said they saw a lot of the same growth for the same reason.
Boris Cherney
Heard on Odd Lots — “The Creator of Claude Code on The Hottest Piece of Software in the World, published Monday, July 20, 2026. Heardvine summarizes and quotes with attribution and timestamps, and links to the original everywhere.
Transcribed via publisher transcript · $0.00