Jack Clark

speaker

541 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Mar 2026 last heard 27 Mar

Jack Clark’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 1.

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Hard Fork · The Ezra Klein Show: How Fast Will A.I. Agents Rip Through the Economy? · 27 Mar 2026 podcast

Jack Clark, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me on, Ezra.

The best way to think of it is like a language model or a chatbot that can use tools and work for you over time.

So when you talk to a chatbot, you're there in the conversation, you're going back and forth with it.

An agent is something where you can give it some instruction and it goes away and does stuff for you, kind of like working with a colleague.

So I've got an example where...

A few years ago, I taught myself some basic programming and I built a species simulation in my spare time that had predators and prey and roads and almost like a 2D strategy game.

I recently asked over Christmas Claude Code to just implement this for me.

And in about 10 minutes, it went and wrote not only a basic simulation, but all of the different packages that it needed and all of the visualization tools that it might need to be prettier and better than the thing I'd written.

And what came back was something that I know would probably take a skilled programmer several hours or maybe even days because it was quite complicated.

And the system just did it in a few minutes.

And it did that by

not only being intelligent about how to solve the task, but also creating and running a range of subsystems that were working for it, other agents that worked on its behalf.

In the case of Claude code, for me, it's having multiple different tabs, running multiple different agents.

But I've seen colleagues who write what you might think of as a specification file for a version of Claude that runs other Claudes.

And so they're like, I've got my five agents and they're being minded over by this other agent, which is monitoring what they do.

I think that that's just going to become the norm.

I think so much of it is making the mistake of thinking Claude Code is like a knowledgeable person versus an extremely literal person that you can only talk to over the internet.

And I had this example myself where I, when I did my first pass of writing the species simulation with Claude Code, I just sort of asked it to do the thing in extremely crappy language over the course of a paragraph.

And it produced some horribly buggy stuff that just kind of worked.

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