“Impact, agency, and taste” by benkuhn

I’ve been thinking recently about what sets apart the people who’ve done the best work at Anthropic.

You might think that the main thing that makes people really effective at research or engineering is technical ability, and among the general population that's true. Among people hired at Anthropic, though, we’ve restricted the range by screening for extremely high-percentile technical ability, so the remaining differences, while they still matter, aren’t quite as critical. Instead, people's biggest bottleneck eventually becomes their ability to get leverage—i.e., to find and execute work that has a big impact-per-hour multiplier.

For example, here are some types of work at Anthropic that tend to have high impact-per-hour, or a high impact-per-hour ceiling when done well (of course this list is extremely non-exhaustive!):

• Improving tooling, documentation, or dev loops. A tiny amount of time fixing a papercut in the right way can save [...]

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Outline:

(03:28) 1. Agency

(03:31) Understand and work backwards from the root goal

(05:02) Don't rely too much on permission or encouragement

(07:49) Make success inevitable

(09:28) 2. Taste

(09:31) Find your angle

(11:03) Think real hard

(13:03) Reflect on your thinking

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First published:
April 19th, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DiJT4qJivkjrGPFi8/impact-agency-and-taste

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.