Claude team member's tutorial: four types of ambition for using AI models well
petesena · x · 2026-10-26
Felix Rieseberg, who works on Claude at Anthropic, published a long essay, "How to be more ambitious: A tutorial for humans with models." He argues model capabilities grow unevenly—"astounding in some directions, while inadequate in others" (Terence Tao)—so some users fly while others still ask basic questions. He breaks ambition into four types:
- Speed: same work in less time—the bread and butter of AI's economic value, requiring little creativity
- Altitude: moving up in abstraction, focusing on the outcome rather than individual tasks
- Depth: approaching a task the way a field-leading expert would
- Range: pulling in fields the task doesn't seem to need
The replying user adds a practical trick: turn the noun into a verb—a quarterly review becomes "getting busy people to believe a cause-and-effect story and decide in 30 minutes"; a brand refresh becomes "getting a stranger to trust you in 3 seconds." Then ask what a behavioral psychologist or a stand-up comic would do with it.
Related event: Anthropic Engineer's Four Ambitions Prompting Guide Gains Attention(5 posts)→
More from coding & agent
- Traks: free MIT-licensed self-hosted analytics on Cloudflare with an MCP server for agents — moeinteractive · 2026-10-26
- AI adoption up to 78% but developer trust down to 33%, Stack Overflow surveys show — agh_murad · 2026-10-26
- Open-source AI design skills for Claude Code and Cursor earn 5.1k stars — moeinteractive · 2026-10-26
- RExBench: best coding agent solves only 33% of autonomous research extension tasks — najoungkim · 2026-10-26
- Remotion ships official Agent Skills for Claude Code, Codex and Cursor — lmoroney · 2026-10-26
- Making motion graphics with Claude and Remotion: video as editable React code — lmoroney · 2026-10-26