How to Build an Agent-native Product | Mike Krieger

**Mike Krieger** (0:00)
The models today are good at adding features. They're not necessarily good about figuring out what to cut out of the product. You can get it to go zero, not just zero to one, but zero to N pretty quickly over the matter of hours. It's made a lot of decisions along the way, and some of the sort of intuitions you build about what are the right things to put in there, I think you build over time. I feel like that is the art and science of software design in 2026

**Dan Shipper** (0:36)
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**Mike Krieger** (1:39)
Great to be here. Thanks for having me on.

**Dan Shipper** (1:41)
Great to have you. I'm super excited. For people who don't know, you are the co-founder of Instagram and now you are at Anthropic and Anthropic Labs.
I've admired your work from afar, both at Anthropic and Instagram for a really long time. And you're obviously at the forefront of building products in AI. So, thank you for coming on.

**Mike Krieger** (2:03)
Absolutely.

**Dan Shipper** (2:04)
Where should we start? What we were talking about just now in the pre-production is, what has gotten easier and what has gotten harder or maybe stayed the same in product building as the underlying substrate or the process by which we build products has changed completely. So, tell me about your experience now versus earlier in Anthropic versus Instagram and how you think things are changing.

**Mike Krieger** (2:31)
Yeah, I was doing the thought exercise a couple of weeks ago of the Instagram story. We had another product called Bourbon. We worked on that for almost a year. It wasn't working. We pivoted. We basically spent three months building what became Instagram, launched it and then scaled it. And I was asking the question, what is now trivial and what was actually inherent in that building process that doesn't get easier, right? And that year, we probably could have hit some of the dead ends we had eventually hit sooner. But there was value in getting there too, right? Like we over complicated the product so that we then had to simplify it. I find even the models today are good at adding features. They're not necessarily good about figuring out what to cut out of the product. And that took a lot of just sort of, you know, hitting actual real world usage. And there was something about the process of incrementally adding things right now. I mean, today, especially some of the stuff we're building in labs, like, you can get it to go zero, not just zero to one, but zero to N pretty quickly over the matter of hours. But it's made a lot of decisions along the way. And yeah, you can ask it to follow up with you and do input. But some of the sort of intuitions you build about what are the right things to put in there, I think you build over time. And so I've been reflecting, like, there haven't been a lot of breakout consumer products even in the age of accelerated AI building. And I think part of it is because it just still takes time to sort of hone your view about what sort of intervention you want to make on the world and then build from there. Now, the actual building part, once you know what to build is, of course, so much easier. I had Claude basically rebuild Bourbon. It took about two hours. It was feature complete. It added filters, which Bourbon didn't have. We added those for Instagram, but I think it knew the eventual future of the products that decided to build that in. So I think that part feels really different. But I think there's also, I remember there was a week where Kevin went off and built all the filters for Instagram V1. I went off and built sort of the rest of the app. And sitting there, I would stay up till 4 a.m. and then sleep till noon. That's like my natural day night cycle. And in that process, you're making so many decisions. How should location work? And we gotta find a way of accelerating building while still sort of helping people build intuition of those decisions along the way. Because otherwise, I think you either just get very generic products that are unlikely to break out or ones that just don't reflect some deeper intuition that you come to about your space or your product.