RSS preview of Lenny Rachitsky

Rss preview of Blog of Lenny Rachitsky

What launched at Google I/O 2026 (30-minute day 1 recap)

2026-05-20 09:59:31

Today is day one of Google I/O 2026, and I walk through every major announcement live—from the new Gemini 3.5 model family to Anti-Gravity 2.0, Google AI Studio, Gemini’s consumer redesign, the Omni video model, Flow, Stitch, and Pomelli. I test them in real time and tell you exactly which ones delivered.

Listen or watch on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts

What you’ll learn:

How Gemini 3.5 Flash benchmarks against Claude and GPT models on speed and agentic coding tasks
How Anti-Gravity 2.0’s new features (projects, scheduled tasks, subagents, slash commands) compare to Codex and Claude Code
Why the /grill-me slash command could be a more aggressive alternative to Claude Code’s clarification flow—and how to use it
How Google AI Studio’s new Workspace integration is designed to own the internal productivity app use case
How Google’s new creative tools work in practice: Omni (video generation), Flow (cinematic video editing and character consistency), Stitch (streaming UI design with inline edits), and Pomelli (brand identity and asset generation)
Why Google’s launch-to-availability gap is still a problem—and what to do when a featured product doesn’t actually work yet

Brought to you by:

Magic Patterns—Prototypes that look like your product

Thoughtspot—Build AI-powered analytics into your product

In this episode, we cover:

(00:00) Google I/O 2026 day 1 overview

(01:47) Gemini 3.5 flash

(04:19) Antigravity updates

(06:32) CLI test and agent features

(07:59) Core agent features released today—May 19th, 2026

(09:43) New slash commands

(11:20) Antigravity test results and takeaways

(12:25) AI Studio updates

(13:52) Access issues

(15:20) Gemini redesign

(17:24) Gemini image gen test

(19:16) Omni (video generation)

(22:56) Flow (cinematic editing)

(24:31) Avatar creation test

(26:45) Pomelli and Stitch

(31:13) Recap and final thoughts

Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].

The Lenny and Friends Summit is back!

2026-05-19 23:27:24

👋 Hey there, I’m Lenny. Each week, I answer reader questions about building product, driving growth, and accelerating your career. For more: Lenny’s Podcast | Lennybot | How I AI | My favorite AI/PM courses, public speaking course, and interview prep copilot

Subscribe now

Two years ago, we held the first-ever Lenny and Friends Summit. It was one of the most meaningful days of my life. Full of in-depth talks, intimate roundtables, and a lot of human connection. At the end of the day, an attendee handed me this note before quickly walking away:

There’s such power in IRL events, especially these days and especially for product leaders, who often lack peers they can be real with. Ever since the first summit, I’ve been getting messages about how much y’all want another event like this.

Today, I’m excited to share that the Lenny and Friends Summit returns on Thursday, September 10, in San Francisco! Apply now.

My vision is to make this the best product event in the world. We’re keeping it intentionally small—every attendee will be handpicked—and along with in-depth talks from the world’s top operators, we’ll have interactive workshops, tons of opportunities to get to know other attendees, and a few fun surprises.

My three main goals for this summit are to help you:

Deeply understand where the product role is heading
Learn tangible skills to thrive in that future
Build lasting connections with other world-class leaders

Here’s the initial lineup of speakers, each of whom has a unique lens into the future of building (with more to be announced soon):

Apply now

Given that we’re expecting lots of interest and the venue has limited capacity, we’re asking people to apply to attend. Paid newsletter subscribers will get priority consideration. This summit is for senior product and AI leaders; typical titles include Chief, VP, Director, Senior, Group, Lead, or Principal.

If you’re just starting your career in product or growth, the content won’t be as relevant for you. I may host a future event geared toward early-career folks.

To give you a sense of what the last summit felt like, a few messages I got from attendees last year:

“The highest-ROI networking event I have been to.” —Senior PM

“Every aspect of the event was absolutely remarkable.” —CPO

“So many insightful discussions, learnings, and connections, and many tactical takeaways I plan to immediately put in practice.” —Product Lead

“The hit rate of good talks was higher than at any other conference I’ve been to.” —Sr. Director of Product

“A powerful reminder of why I fell in love with building products.” —Founder

Finally, some of my favorite moments from the day:

I’m so excited to be doing this again. Whether you made it to the first summit or missed the chance then, we’ve put a lot of thought into making this one even better: more hands-on workshops, more opportunities to meet other attendees, and more options for how to spend your day.

See you there!

Apply now

Any questions? Please email [email protected], and we’ll do our best to reply promptly.

If you’re finding this newsletter valuable, share it with a friend, and consider subscribing if you haven’t already. There are group discounts, gift options, and referral bonuses available.

Subscribe now

Sincerely,

Lenny 👋

🎙️ How I AI: HTML is the new Markdown: How Anthropic engineers are building with Claude Code

2026-05-18 23:00:52

HTML is the new Markdown: How Anthropic engineers are building with Claude Code | Thariq Shihipar

Listen now on YouTube • Spotify • Apple Podcasts

Brought to you by:

Celigo—Intelligent automation built for AI

Persona—Trusted identity verification for any use case

Thariq Shihipar is an engineer on Anthropic’s Claude Code team. In this episode (recorded live at Anthropic’s Code with Claude event), Thariq shows how he uses HTML artifacts to plan projects, create interactive specs, build throwaway micro-apps, and maintain living design systems that help humans stay in the loop as agents do more of the work. He also explains why engineers are becoming “compute allocators,” why most AI-generated tokens won’t end up in production, and how richer interfaces can lead to better products.

Biggest takeaways:

HTML has become the superior format for communicating with AI agents, replacing Markdown for planning and specs. While Markdown was popular because it’s both human- and machine-readable, HTML offers far richer expression—interactive elements, visual mockups, scrollable sections, and better information density. As Claude’s context windows have expanded and plans have grown to thousands of lines, HTML makes it actually possible to engage with the content rather than just skimming or ignoring it entirely.
Engineers are becoming “compute allocators” rather than code writers. When Claude can run for eight hours on a single task, you’re really deciding how to spend $500 of compute. The critical skill is no longer writing code; it’s deciding what’s worth building, defining the boundaries of what you need to know, and staying in sync with the agent throughout the process. This happens primarily in the spec and planning phase, making that work more important than ever.
You can build custom, throwaway UIs for editing specific parts of your plans. Thariq demonstrates this by taking a data visualization rules table from his implementation plan and asking Claude to create an ideal interface for editing just that section. The result is a beautiful, gamified UI that makes engaging with the content actually enjoyable. This “micro software on top of micro software” approach means you can have the perfect tool for every specific problem, then discard it when you’re done.
The future of agent output isn’t more text. It’s more readable interfaces. Thariq says he stopped reading thousand-line Markdown plans and started asking Claude to edit them instead, which made him less involved in the work. HTML changed that: by turning plans into visual, scrollable, interactive artifacts, Claude makes the output easier to engage with, critique, and improve. The lesson isn’t to read less. It’s to make the work legible enough that you actually want to read it.
Living design systems in HTML are more effective than traditional design tools. Instead of pointing Claude at a Figma file or GitHub repo, Thariq maintains an HTML file that represents his entire design system: colors, typography, spacing, components. This compressed understanding can be passed around to any project, and Claude can extract design systems from existing codebases and encode them in HTML. It’s both human-readable and machine-readable, with no tradeoff between the two.
The best prompts give Claude enough direction but leave room for creativity. Thariq’s prompts are remarkably simple: “Create an HTML file with a plan. Help me visualize. Include excerpts, mockups, code, whatever is needed to give me maximum context.” The key is the ending—“whatever is needed”—which signals trust and gives Claude permission to make decisions. Over-constraining with elaborate system prompts often produces worse results than simple, trusting instructions.
Only about 1% of the tokens Thariq generates go into production code. The vast majority go into dashboards, custom interfaces, weekly status updates, and tools for understanding what he wants to build. This is what abundance looks like—when tokens are cheap, you can afford to make everything you interact with beautiful and tailored to your specific needs. The hope is that this richness in the process translates into better final products.
Test verification is not the same as testing. This is a nuanced point that Thariq says deserves its own podcast episode, but the core idea is that traditional unit tests are being replaced by verification rubrics, managed agents checking outcomes, and Claude recording videos of what it did. The testing landscape is evolving rapidly, and teams need to think beyond conventional approaches.
Just-in-time documentation in whatever format works is better than centralized, templated systems. When creating content is nearly free and AI can find anything, the old anxieties about “source of truth” and standardized templates matter less. What matters is the quality of the ideas and whether the documentation helps you build better products. Thariq sends his manager weekly HTML status updates because they’re more likely to actually get read than Markdown or plain text.
Being nice to Claude probably produces better outputs, and it definitely creates a better world. While no one has run a rigorous A/B test, Thariq prefers to build the world where being kind to AI produces better results. When you’re stern with models, their reasoning gets sad (“the user is right to be disappointed in me”), and that’s not the interaction pattern anyone wants to normalize. Treat Claude like a colleague you respect, not a tool you command.

Blog:

How I AI: Thariq Shihipar on Replacing Markdown with HTML for AI-Powered Development: https://www.chatprd.ai/how-i-ai/claude-code-anthropic-thariq-shihipar-on-replacing-markdown-with-html

Detailed workflow walkthroughs:

↳ Generate a Living HTML Design System with AI for UI Consistency: https://www.chatprd.ai/how-i-ai/workflows/generate-a-living-html-design-system-with-ai-for-ui-consistency

↳ Build Disposable Micro-Apps with AI to Edit Complex Plans: https://www.chatprd.ai/how-i-ai/workflows/build-disposable-micro-apps-with-ai-to-edit-complex-plans

↳ Create Interactive HTML Project Plans with AI for Better Visualization: https://www.chatprd.ai/how-i-ai/workflows/create-interactive-html-project-plans-with-ai-for-better-visualization

If you’re enjoying these episodes, reply and let me know what you’d love to learn more about: AI workflows, hiring, growth, product strategy—anything.

Catch you next week,
Lenny

P.S. Want every new episode delivered the moment it drops? Hit “Follow” on your favorite podcast app.

HTML is the new Markdown: How Anthropic engineers are building with Claude Code | Thariq Shihipar

2026-05-18 20:02:11

Thariq Shihipar is an engineer at Anthropic working on the Claude Code team. He’s spent the past several months experimenting with HTML as a replacement for Markdown in planning and implementation workflows, discovering that richer visual formats lead to better human engagement—and, ultimately, better products. In this episode, filmed at Anthropic’s Code with Claude event in San Francisco, Thariq demonstrates how to use HTML artifacts to create interactive plans, build throwaway UIs for specific problems, and maintain living design systems that travel with your codebase.

Listen or watch on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts