Claude Code's product chief says people have serious FOMO over AI's relentless pace

• Claude Code's head of product said that AI release frequency is causing user FOMO.
• AI labs are shipping new features rapidly, causing user overwhelm and product overlaps.
• This month, Claude Code faced user criticism for lower-quality output.

Claude Code's head of product said she knows the frequency of AI releases is stressing people out.

On an episode of "Lenny's" podcast published on Thursday, Cat Wu, the head of product for Claude Code and Cowork at Anthropic, said that users are experiencing the fear of missing out on new AI products.

"With these agentic tools, not just Claude Code and Cowork, but across the whole ecosystem, people feel this need to like check Twitter every single day to see what the absolute latest thing is," Wu said. "There's more we can do to help people feel less like they're on this ever increasingly fast treadmill."

Wu, who joined the AI lab in 2024, said that companies usually ship a feature every month or quarter, making it easy for users to check in once a month and stay up to date.

But in the race to build the best AI tools, labs, Big Tech, and startups are shipping faster than ever — and in increasingly overlapping areas.

Wu said she wants to see products that will reduce some of this overwhelm.

"I would love people to feel like they can just open these tools. The tools will educate or teach them what they want to know and that they can just feel more brought along," she said.

On Thursday's podcast, the head of product added that the industry's pace is affecting Anthropic.

"With AI moving so quickly and with so many ideas that we need to test out, we do sometimes have features that overlap with each other," she said.

Over the past few months, the frontier model lab has pushed to strengthen its position in AI coding, with a stream of model releases and product updates to Claude Code and more "agent"- style workflows. Claude Code, which launched in February 2025, started off as a terminal-based coding assistant and has evolved into an AI-powered workspace with features such as plugins, memory, and multiple agents.

A tech blog that tabulates Anthropic's launches said the company shipped over 45 new features in the first three months of the year.

This string of new releases has come with hiccups.

In the last few weeks, users complained that Claude Code's responses had severely deteriorated. The company denied that it had intentionally degraded the tool and said that it identified a trio of issues likely contributing to a worse user experience.

The Anthropic tool competes with Cursor and Codex, made by chief rival OpenAI. It also shares the AI-assisted coding market with startups like Lovable, Bolt, and Emergent.