(2026-02-06) Yegge The Anthropic Hive Mind

Steve Yegge: The Anthropic Hive Mind. They are a spaceship that is beginning to take off... This whole post is just spidey-sense stuff. Don’t read too much into it. Just hunches. Vibes, really.

Everyone I’ve met from Anthropic is the best of the best of the best, to an even crazier degree than Google was at its peak

Anthropic is unusually impenetrable as a company. Employees there all know they just need to keep their mouths shut and heads down and they’ll be billionaires and beyond, so they have lots of incentive to do exactly that. It’s tricky to get them to open up, even when they do chat with you.

But I managed. People usually figure out I’m harmless within about 14 seconds of meeting me

By talking to enough of them, and getting their perspectives in long conversations, I have begun to suspect that the future of software development is the Hive Mind.

Happy But Sad

To me it seems that almost everyone there is vibrantly happy. It has the same crackle of electricity in the air that Amazon had back in 1998

paint it impressionistically, a big broad stroke at a time. Each section in this post is a stroke, and this one is all about the mood.

But at both early Amazon and Anthropic, everyone knew something amazing was about to happen that would change society forever

At Anthropic every single person and team I met, without exception, feels kind of sweetly but sadly transcendent. They have a distinct feel of a group of people who are tasked with shepherding something of civilization-level importance into existence, and while they’re excited, they all also have a solemn kind of elvish old-world-fading-away gravity

But I am starting to suspect they feel genuinely sorry for a lot of companies. Because we’re not taking this stuff seriously enough. 2026 is going to be a year that just about breaks a lot of companies, and many don’t see it coming. Anthropic is trying to warn everyone, and it’s like yelling about an offshore earthquake to villages that haven’t seen a tidal wave in a century.

The Vibe Mind

Everyone you talk to from Anthropic will eventually mention the chaos. It is not run like any other company of this size. Every other company quickly becomes “professional”

I mean sure, yes, for their production systems, they are of course very serious and appropriately frowny-faced and have lots of world-class SREs and scaling engineers. Buuuut, you know. The tail that wags their dog is Claude in its various incarnations, and that’s the Work Generator that keeps the hive buzzingly happily along.

I’m sure there are exceptions at the periphery

But at the core, they are self-evidently in the middle (or maybe beginning) of a Golden Age, which I’ll talk about in the next section. And it’s very churny and frothy there.

The employees often describe it as a hive mind that is run entirely on vibes

But if you interfere with the hive mind operation, upsetting that balance, you’ll gently be pushed out to the edges, and maybe beyond.

It feels fragile, and it may have scaling ceilings we’re all unaware of. But they have kept it going so far, and I have some thoughts about how they’re managing it.

How To End a Golden Age

I’m going to share something with you here that’s orthogonal to the Hive Mind, but Anthropic is demonstrating this other property so clearly that we need a time-out to examine it together.

A Golden Age is a period of intense innovation, category creation, velocity, and productivity that lasts typically several years. Golden Ages at companies have the property of attracting all the greatest talent in the industry, very quickly

I watched Google ossify and become siloed and effectively incapable of cross-functional work, while Amazon continued to execute and innovate.

If you need a third Golden Age example, Microsoft had many of the greatest minds in the industry gathered together in the early 2000s

for a few years it was magical, and they produced stuff that shaped the entire industry. For a few years they were thought leaders. Many wound up fleeing to Google after it came crashing down.

Google had killed their innovation machine on the vine when they switched their focus to profits, which caused a shift in the ratio of work to people.

Google’s motto under their original CEO Eric Schmidt was, “Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom.” Schmidt’s explanation was that he was “generating luck” by encouraging innovation and taking a lot of bets, hoping some would pay off. It was something Google could afford to do

When Larry Page took over as CEO in April 2011, his motto was: “More Wood Behind Fewer Arrows.” He felt–and rightly so–that the unfettered, unsupervised 20% work and Labs activity hadn’t produced any real hits

Was it killing 20% work that caused the crash? Not directly

Amazon never had 20% work.

What did they have that Google didn’t?

One clue is something my colleague Jacob Gabrielson told me when he was a Principal Engineer at Amazon in maybe 2015-ish

I told him that people often fought over projects at Google, and Jacob told me that it never happened at Amazon, because, as he put it, “Everyone here is always slightly oversubscribed.”

During Golden Ages, there is more work than people. And when they crash, it is because there are more people than work.

Larry Page told the company in April 2011, when he became CEO, “stop working on new stuff, we’re only going to do X, Y, and Z.” And they kept every single engineer, but cut the amount of work by a solid 50% or more. You could no longer work on any problem you wanted. And there wasn’t really enough to go around.

It kicked off a wave of empire building, territoriality, politicking, land grabs, and, as Lydia Ash taught me, Cookie Licking–a phrase folks at Microsoft had invented to accuse people of claiming work that they will never actually get around to doing.

At Anthropic, they are smack in the middle of a Golden Age, where there is far more available work than there are people to do it, on pretty much all fronts

*there is never a reason to fight over work. There is infinite work.

And so everyone gets many chances to put their ideas in the sun, and the Hive Mind judges their merit.*

The Small Version

My strong suspicion is that Anthropic is operating the way all successful companies will soon operate within a few short years

My friends Ajit Banerjee, Ryan Snodgrass, and Milkana Brace are a little 3-person startup called SageOx. They spend their time in a little apartment in Kirkland, about a mile from me, above a coffee shop bakery, alternating between coding and sleeping, for weeks on end.

They’re all level 7 to 8 on my Dev Evolution to AI chart. I got the sense this is also true for essentially all the engineers at Anthropic, and probably half their business people too.

SageOx are the ones that told me that an external fourth contributor overseas wasted a bunch of time acting on 2-hour-old information, because everything is moving so fast. They’re also the ones that told me you need full transparency at all times, at their speeds, or nobody will ever see what you are doing and you’ll fall irretrievably behind.

So they all turn their volume way up and announce everything they’re doing at all times. “I AM GOING DOWN TO GET A DONUT NOW,” they will say, and someone will yell from the nap couch, “GET ME A DONUT.” “I AM ALSO DELETING THE DATABASE.” “OK.”

A lot of engineers like to work in relative privacy, or even secrecy.

at SageOx they all see each other’s work all the time, and act on that info. It’s like the whole team is pair programming at once. They course-correct each other in real time.

SageOx records even their own conversations at all times, and the transcripts are automatically uploaded and versioned, and they have the full work history of what every human and agent has done,

The consensus was, most developers would be really uncomfortable with that.

SageOx are not focused on profits either; they’re focused on discovery. They are trying to find PMF by inventing it, since this is a new category

Building for yourself is the only way to give your product a nonzero chance of success in the new world. Build something just for yourself, and make sure you love it so much that you know it’s how other people should be working.

I see far too many AI-native startup founders today trying to guess what people might want... ugh. Wrong side of the Bitter Lesson.
They’re not building for themselves, so they can’t see it

The Campfire Model

Rather than a bunch of traditional departmental silos, Anthropic and SageOx both look to me like they are building together around a campfire, at least in contrast with how most people are currently thinking about agentic development.

I started seeing this analogy when we were discussing evolutionary design at the Thoughtworks unconference offsite in Deer Valley, Utah this weekend, which Martin Fowler was kind enough to invite me to.

At one of the breakouts we were discussing Spec-Driven Development, which completely mystified me. I’d heard of it, but many people were using the term to describe a spectrum of different development practices, nearly all of which felt like waterfall to me at best, and Intentional Programming v2 at worst. Few of us found any SDD model very compelling when comparing them to our own personal development practices.

Instead, at our breakout session about SDD, we realized we mostly prefer what we were calling Exploratory Development or Evolutionary Development, where rather than making a big complex spec, everyone sits around a campfire together, and builds.

The center of the campfire is a living prototype. There is no waterfall. There is no spec. There is a prototype that simply evolves, via group sculpting, into the final product: something that finally feels right. You know it when you finally find it. (mob programming?)

*As evidence of this, Anthropic, from what I’m told, does not produce an operating plan ahead more than 90 days, and that is their outermost planning cycle. They are vibing, on the shortest cycles and fastest feedback loops imaginable for their size.

And the result, they tell me, is something like improv.*

Improv at Scale

Anthropic’s Hive Mind is described by employees as “Yes, and…” style improvisational theater. Every idea is welcomed, examined, savored, and judged by the Hive Mind. It’s all based on vibes. There is no central decision-making authority. They are just trying everything, and when magic happens, they all just kind of realize it at once.

This reminds me of pure functional data structures, which are like append-only logs. Pure functional data structures are emerging not just at the organizational level in 2026, but also in DevOps. Ledgered, versioned, pure-functional databases like Datomic and Dolt are going to become increasingly valuable for mistake-prone agentic workflows. I’ll talk more about this in a future post.

They are generating luck, exactly what Eric Schmidt had wanted. But they are doing it much, much faster than Googlers could, because they are all 10x to 100x as productive as engineers who are using Cursor and chat today, and roughly 1000x as productive as Googlers were back in 2005.

But the hive mind will also eject anyone who’s not acting like a happy worker bee in the swarm. You need to contribute your ideas in the right ways. It’s the death of the ego. These were the exact words of someone who’s been there since the early days.

*And yet, most companies arrived at where they are by learning how to say No.

This is shaping up to be a problem.*

If I’ve convinced enough people of the hive mind as an operating model, then maybe I can write more about how you might go about turning your existing company into one.

all companies are asking variations of just the same two questions. They bluster and bluff and try to act informed, but they are all terrified. When you cluster their questions, they break down into, “Will everything be OK?” and “Will we be here in five years?”

The default answer, I’m afraid, is No.

If you have an Atom Moat, then you stand a pretty good chance of weathering the storm, if you execute well.

If you have a strictly online or SaaS software presence, with no atoms in your product whatsoever, just electrons, then you are, candidly, pretty screwed if you don’t pivot. I don’t think there are any recipes for pivoting yet; this is all new, and it’s all happening very fast.

But there is a yellow brick road: spending tokens. This golden shimmering trail will lead your company gradually in the right direction. Your organization is going to have to learn a bunch of new lessons, as new bottlenecks emerge when coding is no longer the bottleneck. You need to start learning those bespoke organizational lessons early. The only way to know for sure that you’re learning those lessons is if people are out there trying and making mistakes. And you can tell how much practice they’re getting from their token spend.

You have a lot of work ahead of you. Build the campfire. Turn your product into a living prototype. Consider building some hives within your company, and giving them space to innovate.
And then pivot like hell to your new PMF, whatever that may be.