Introduction and origin

0:05 Let's get started. Welcome everyone to Cloud  Code best practices. In this talk, I'm going to talk about kind of what cloud code is at a high  level. Then we'll peer under the hood a little bit to kind of understand how cloud code works. And  then knowing that because it's useful to kind of know how your tools work. We're going to talk  about good use cases for cloud code and also best practices we've figured out both internally  and from our users uh for getting the most out of this tool.

0:36 Uh but before I get started, I'd like  to introduce myself real quick and talk about how I ended up on the stage. So, my name's Cal and  I joined Enthropic about a year and a half ago uh to help start up a team we call applied  AI. And it's the applied AI's kind of mission, our team's mission is to help our customers and  partners build great products and features on top of Claude. So what that really means is  I spend a lot of my day prompting Claude to get the absolute best outputs out of these  models.

1:05 That said, I also love to code and I'm definitely one of those coders that like  starts a lot of projects, has some crazy idea, and then just never finishes them. So, I have  this graveyard of just like code that I started, never really finished. Um, but I'm always  spinning new things up. And late last year, I was in Slack and I was hearing about this new  tool that a few people are using. They were saying it was really cool.

1:05 And so, on a Friday night, I  downloaded the tool that would become Cloud Code. And I threw it at this kind of new notetaking  app that I wanted to build. And like that whole weekend just kind of totally changed the way that  I code and think about software engineering. I was carrying around my laptop with me all weekend. I  was super addicted to just watching Claude Code work and I would press enter and I'd switch over  to my browser and refresh and I watched this huge powerful application come together in front of my  eyes.

1:33 And I got way farther into this thing than I ever would have on my own. And it just blew my  mind. And while I was doing this, I was a little worried. I was like, you know, I you know, I kind  of know how these things work. So I'm like, man, I'm using a lot of tokens. I hope I don't get in  trouble or anyone like notices. I'm not really contributing to anthropic code. Um, but what  I didn't know is that the claude code team had built this internal like leaderboard tracking  how much all the anthropic employees were using this.

2:00 And over the weekend, I had shot to the  top. And so through that, I got to meet Boris and Cat and some of the early cloud code team. And I was able to start talking to them and say, "Hey, I love this tool. I also know a lot about  prompting. Can I help you all out?" And so through that I got involved and now I'm one of the core  contributors on the team and I do a lot of I work a lot on the prompting the system prompts how the  tools work the tool descriptions and tool results as well as I work on how we evaluate this tool.

2:29 So when we think about changing the prompts how