Ep. 001 - Claude Code, Memory Mania, CPUs are Back | Jordan Nanos, Doug O'Laughlin, Myron Xie

**Jordan Nanos** (0:02)
All right, hello, everyone. Welcome to episode number one of the SemiAnalysis Weekly podcast. We don't know exactly what the name is, or if this is ever going to be public, but we're testing things out, and we're going to talk about what happened in the week that was. Today's Thursday, February 12th, we had three articles that came out on the free tier newsletter, Claude Code, Rising, CPUs are Back, Memory Mania. We'll try to talk about all three and other stuff that's going on. By way of introduction, I'm Jordan Nanos. I'm here with Doug O'Laughlin and Myron. I don't even know how to pronounce your last name properly.

**Myron Xie** (0:40)
Have you ever heard of Xie Xie? Thank you in Chinese. My last name is literally that.

**Doug O'Laughlin** (0:47)
Thank you for coming.

**Myron Xie** (0:48)
I'm a very grateful person.

**Doug O'Laughlin** (0:51)
That's pretty good. Thank you for coming on this podcast today.

**Myron Xie** (0:55)
Thank you for having me.

**Jordan Nanos** (0:56)
So is it like thank or thank you, thank you? What would the...

**Doug O'Laughlin** (1:00)
No, it's...

**Myron Xie** (1:02)
If you say Xie Xie, that's thank you.

**Doug O'Laughlin** (1:06)
Okay, let's keep it on topic. This is not Transistor Radio Lite. So yeah, let's go through each of the things. I think first, Claude Code, bro. I don't want to talk about Claude Code. I've talked so much about Claude Code.
But I do want to talk about the fact that we're on the presser. I think it's kind of a big deal. It's very rare to get linked on a press release anyways, and we're on the Anthropic Raise press release. It's kind of cool.

**Jordan Nanos** (1:36)
Yeah. We meaning you. So Doug, you made a chart that made it first into our core research product a few weeks ago and then made it into the free tier newsletter that tracks how many contributions to public GitHub repos are only commits are being made authored by Claude Code because it signs off as a contributor when it sends a PR. So that number rate went from 2 percent to 4 percent. And then they included that in the announcement release. So like, walk us through that. Like how did you get the idea to do that in the first place?

**Doug O'Laughlin** (2:14)
I read a tweet where I said, you idiots, it all says it's committed by Claude Code. You could turn this off. And I was like, wait, can you scrape GitHub? And then I just asked Claude Code and that was like, that was it. I was like, oh my God, can we make a daily series? And then effectively I realized like, wow, this is like, it's like, I've been, I've definitely been rushing inside to make sure we got, we are the first to put that chart out. Cause I was like, dude, anyone who's paying attention can figure this one, configure this one out, like, especially with Claude Code. But I was like, we need to be the first. And so, I mean, like, I don't think this is like exactly news. We're going to definitely be publishing the, the data for, you know, our, our paid subs or like, you know, our, our institutional research tier, but we'll probably have some kind of public dashboard as well, or some kind of public facing information. It's like already almost 5%, right? At least according to the most recent one we did, it's like 4.7 or 4.8 or something like that. It's still growing. But yeah, that's, that's how I got to the idea, just doom scrolling. And I was like, wait, wait, wait. And then, yeah, me and, me and Claude Code wrote, you know, made the, made the chart and then obviously wrote the article. And yeah.

**Jordan Nanos** (3:24)
How much of the article did Claude write in addition to make the chart about itself?

**Doug O'Laughlin** (3:30)
Um, I don't think, I personally still want to be writing with a human voice, right? We got to train these, these models on something. We can't just be sloshing all this stuff background. I do like it for outlining more than anything else. I think the very first round of it was, I was still very excited. I was like very peaky on my excitement about Claude Code. So I dictated most of it. Then I had the dictation get cleaned up by AI. And then I kind of wrote like, okay, make a slop outline based on this. And then I wrote over it using my voice, just like manual tokens, with the fingers. And then afterward, we sent it to the powers that be, aka the internal SemiAnalysis brain squad. And then people wrote in sections, people gave feedback. At some point, I think the most heavy lifting that Claude Code did do, and specifically did this all on Claude Code, like screw vanilla, chad, or anything anymore, was mostly the outline stuff, I think, because when you write something so much, you just get lost as hell. And you're like, okay, this all makes sense in your weird little brain. But I was like, hey, just do a fresh, like a fresh go through each kind of piece and walk me through this. And I do sometimes have it, do some editing to take, what's the least relevant portion of this paragraph? I like to usually rip stuff out, but that's just me. Sometimes SemiAnalysis loves to add stuff in.