At Code w/ Claude on May 22, 2025, in San Francisco, Anthropic’s Jo Zhu Kennedy set the stage for a compelling showcase of how startups are leveraging advanced AI models to achieve unprecedented product-market fit and scale. A diverse panel of founders, including Kevin Michael of Tempo Labs, Andrew Filev of Zencoder, Jordan Garcia of Gamma App, Amar Goel of Bito, Dhruv Amin of Create, and Hayk Martiros of Riffusion, shared their transformative experiences building on Claude, underscoring AI's pivotal role in accelerating innovation across various industries. These companies, she noted, have seen "zero to multi-million user journeys within the past 12 months."
The presentations revealed a profound shift in how software is conceived, built, and refined. AI is democratizing development, empowering non-technical roles to engage directly with code. Tempo Labs, for instance, offers an IDE that blends the intuitive design capabilities of Figma with the code-generating power of VS Code. Kevin Michael articulated this vision, stating, "Tempo is a new type of IDE that feels more like a design tool like Figma than it does VS Code." This enables product managers and designers to become "design engineers," directly creating and modifying front-end code, with Claude generating first drafts of pull requests and even entire codebases.
Andrew Filev of Zencoder highlighted AI's potential to automate the mundane, predicting that "AI Software Agents will automate 90% of routine tasks in the software development life cycle." He elaborated on the evolution of AI coding, moving from simple code completion (1st Gen) to sophisticated agents that perform unit testing, bug fixing, and custom code generation (2nd Gen). This advancement, particularly with Claude 3.5’s enhanced tool and environment support, has led to a "skyrocket" in usage, with some companies seeing 10x to 100x increases. The next frontier, 3rd Gen agents, promises full SDLC integration, handling verification, code review, and deployment.
A critical insight from Gamma App's Jordan Garcia was the immense impact of improved reasoning and web search capabilities in Claude. He noted that a single update, switching to Sonnet 3.7 with built-in web search, resulted in an "8% increase in [their] key metrics" for deck generation. This seemingly minor feature was a "huge lift," dramatically improving factual accuracy and reducing the need for extensive prompt engineering, as demonstrated by the stark difference in presentation quality when Claude could pull real-time information.
This increased code generation volume, however, introduces new challenges. Amar Goel of Bito emphasized that traditional human code review processes simply "don't scale" to meet the anticipated 10x surge in AI-generated code. Bito's AI code review platform, powered by Claude, steps in to provide high-quality, human-like feedback, focusing on "more signal, less noise." Their agentic approach deeply understands the codebase, identifying subtle bugs like incompatible class cast exceptions that even human reviewers might miss. This has led to a remarkable 89% improvement in PR merge times, with Bito providing roughly 80% of all PR feedback within minutes.
Beyond traditional software, AI is also revolutionizing creative fields. Hayk Martiros of Riffusion showcased their generative music models and Ghostwriter, an AI agent powered by Claude that helps artists write and refine song lyrics. Addressing the common "cringe" output of general LLMs for creative writing, Ghostwriter focuses on generating lyrics with "diversity, humor, taste, flow, and flair," fitting the specific musical context. This specialized AI tool has been used "tens of millions of times" to craft lyrics, demonstrating Claude's versatility in nuanced creative endeavors.
The collective narrative from these founders paints a clear picture: Claude is not just assisting developers; it's fundamentally altering the landscape of product development. By empowering non-technical users, automating complex workflows, and enhancing the quality and relevance of AI-generated outputs through advanced reasoning and context, Claude is enabling startups to achieve unprecedented speed and innovation in bringing their ideas to market.
