đ” OpenAI's Engineers have Cloned a SaaS Product
Plus: Why everyone's talking about this new AI-native challenger to Figma, Google impressive new Workspace tools, Anthropic's total domination.
Hi product people đ,
This week, it was reported that OpenAIâs engineers built their own version of GitHub after becoming frustrated with outages that impacted their productivity. Weâll take a closer look at what theyâve built and why this matters to product teams.
Plus, new data shows Anthropicâs dominance growing on all fronts despite the fallout with the US government, Google gives us some impressive new products that could transform how we use Workspace in tools like Claude Code and why everyone is talking about a new design alternative to Figma.
Have a great weekend!
Rich
Watch on YouTube | Follow on Substack Notes
Key reads and resources for product teams
New from the Department of Product Substack this week:
Knowledge Series - WebMCP Explained for Product Teams
WebMCP (Web Model Context Protocol) is a major new project developed in collaboration between Google, Microsoft and W3C. If all goes to plan, it could fundamentally change the way users interact with your product by making it easier for AI Agents in the browser to understand what features and tools your product offers - and then acting up on them.
AI library - Component gallery for prototypes / design prompting
Crafting designs with tools like Claude Code is more powerful when you know the exact components that are available to use in the design process. This component gallery is designed to be used in your vibe coding / prototype projects to learn more about each of the different components. Contains over 60 different components like date pickers, cards, switches and more with sample prompts and real world UI you can use as inspiration. (Department of Product)
Case study - How Miro scaled global UI translation with LILTâs Adaptive AI
Scaling global products is hard when generic AI models get your terminology wrong. See how Miro automated their localization workflow with LILT to match their sprint cycles. They achieved 17.5% higher translation accuracy and 20% cost savings, all while maintaining a native brand voice across 80 million users. (Lilt*)
Insights - How Claude Code transformed the engineering processes at Spotify, Wix, Ramp, Brex and more
Anthropicâs Claude Code PM Cat Wu shares how some of the worldâs leading companies are using Claude Code - and how it has transformed their engineering processes. Teams are reporting 3â4x productivity boosts, âmonthâs worth of work in a dayâ moments, and even nonâtechnical colleagues shipping internal tools and apps that used to require tickets and multiâday dev cycles. (Cat Wu, X)
Process - How Deep Industry Research Agents can transform your company
Most corporate investments in AI today are bets on new business models, transformed customer experiences, entirely new products. Those may come. But thereâs a much more immediate, concrete payoff that many leaders are overlooking: the use of AI to dramatically improve services productivity by eliminating wasted time. (Harvard Business Review)
Tools you can use - Glaze by Raycast
Create any desktop app you need in a few minutes. Internal tools for your team, personal utilities, menu bar apps, workflow automations, or just quick one-off things that make your life easier. If you can describe it, Glaze can build it. Freshly released this week from the team at Raycast. (Raycast)
Interview - Claude Codeâs creator discusses why PRDs are dead at Anthropic
The engineer who created Claude Code reveals why Anthropic barely writes PRDs and instead prototypes dozens of versions in days, and what skills still matter when anyone can âwrite code.â (YouTube)
Analysis - The SaaS clones are here: OpenAI has reportedly cloned GitHub
OpenAI's engineers have been quietly building their own in-house alternative to GitHub. We unpack what triggered it, what it means for SaaS, and why this could be the beginning of a major new playbook for tech companies.
*Miro case study sponsored by LILT
New product features and innovation this week
Google rolled out an impressive new feature in AI Mode to all users in the US. Itâs called Canvas and it gives users a dynamic space to organize plans and projects directly inside Googleâs AI Mode UI.
Googleâs product leader for AI Mode Rose Yao says that there are plans to add support for coding and creative writing tasks with custom dashboards and that her favorite use case right now is planning summer camps for her kids in SF. If Google continues to add more and more features to this Canvas, itâs easy to envisage a future where a user has no need to leave their Canvas for managing projects that are indirectly related to search results like planning trips. And with coding on the way, AI Mode could become even more powerful.
Google has also released a new Workspace command line tool which gives AI Agents access to Google Drive, Gmail, Calendar, and every Workspace API. This was announced on X by Google Cloud director Addy Osmani and in many ways, this is excellent news for Claude Code users. Claude Code engineer Felix Riesberg said heâs excited by just how powerful this could be for their shared users and on a practical level, this means that youâll now be able to do things like scan your inbox, search or organize files/folders at scale and Create or edit Google Docs programmatically.
đ§ Ideas on how you can use Googleâs new Workspace Command line tool
Googleâs new Workspace CLI is a unified command-line tool that lets you work with Gmail, Drive, Calendar, Docs, Sheets, Chat, Admin and more without writing full client integrations.
Hereâs some ideas for product teams to experiment with in Claude Code:
Pull feature requests from a âFeedbackâ Gmail label and a Drive folder of meeting notes, then append structured rows into a product ideas Sheet.
Auto-create and update a âWhat changed this weekâ Doc by aggregating links to recently modified Drive files in specific project folders.
Scan your Calendar for upcoming customer or leadership meetings, then assemble a briefing Doc by pulling recent emails, key Docs, and relevant Sheets
After a meeting, append action items captured in a shared Doc into a central âPM actionsâ Sheet and optionally create follow-up calendar events or tasks
And if youâre a NotebookLM user, this week it got new cinematic video overviews which make videos richer and more detailed - which could come in handy for times when you want more than a basic presentation overview for your NotebookLM assets.
Voice modes come to Claude Code and Perplexity computer; multi-modality is a trend
Multimodality adoption in modern UX is continuing at pace; this week, Claude Code and Perplexity both announced new voice modes for some of their flagship products.
Claude Code is getting voice mode which means that when you have Claude Code open, you can toggle voice mode on by typing â`/voice` in the interface. That turns on a listening state so the assistant can accept spoken commands. Once itâs active, you speak your request (for example, ârefactor the authentication middlewareâ or âadd input validation to this functionâ), and Claude Code interprets your speech, converts it to text, and runs it as if you had typed that instruction into the coding chat.
Perplexity Computer also got voice mode which looks very impressive. In this example, Perplexity shows how you can use voice as an ambient assistant that will work on tasks in the background for you and provide updates as it goes:
Perplexityâs CEO said in a LinkedIn post that:
âVoice is the natural interface for talking to a computer, when it can just do things for you on its own autonomouslyâ.
Paper is taking on Figma to become the new AI-native tool for designers; new desktop app announced
Paper seems to be one of the hottest new design products in tech right now and is posing a real challenge to Figmaâs dominance. Unlike Figma which creates designs in vector-based graphics, Paper is positioned to work directly with code and the DOM and AI agents in the canvas - removing the need for a middleman between Claude Code and design. Its founders describe it as a âcanvas for Cursor, Claude Code and Codexâ. And as this designer says, for him at least, it represents exactly what he wants his design workflow to look like.
Their new desktop app was released last week which comes with MCP capabilities, and is framed as the place where that continuous loop with your actual codebase and agents is the default workflow rather than just viewing or editing designs in isolation. Hereâs a demo of it in action if youâre interested.
đ Product data and trends to stay informed
Anthropic continues to dominate API model spend, at least according to Rampâs latest Economics Lab report. The report looks at corporate card and bill payment data from 50,000 US businesses and shows that after a brief decline in share towards the end of 2025, Anthropicâs AI models continue to be the preferred models of choice for US businesses:
After the fallout from the US Department of War debacle this week, Anthropic also saw downloads of its consumer app grow. Claudeâs U.S. downloads jumped 37% Friday and 51â88% Saturday, surpassing ChatGPTâs daily U.S. downloads for the first time. ChatGPT uninstalls in the U.S. spiked 295% day-over-day on Feb 28, versus a typical 9% change.
Traditionally, Anthropic is a company that has struggled with the consumer side of things but, as this post shows, it is now winning on all fronts. App downloads are up, their revenue run rate is approaching $20 billion, and Google trends shows it overtaking ChatGPT for the firs time. One commentator has described this as a âTotal Anthropic Victoryâ.
OpenAI has published a new research project called Signals that will measure ChatGPT usage insights over time. One of the interesting insights from the report is that the share of work-related messages has dropped from over 51% in 2024 to just 31% at the end of 2025.
Organic traffic to tech publications is getting hammered since the rollout of Google AI overviews, with some down over 90%.
Meta is creating a flat âApplied AI Engineeringâ org that will be made up of two teams: one responsible for building interfaces and tooling, and a second responsible for executing tasks, generating data and providing evaluations that flow back to their modeling teams. The new internal org is recruiting people from software engineering design, product management, data science and data engineering.
Perplexity has made it back into the top 10 fasting growing SaaS companies following the release of Computer.
Paid subscribers get the full DoP Substack including: The Knowledge Series for sharpening your tech / AI skills, the AI Prompt and Skills library and DoP Deep dive reports for in-depth analysis to learn lessons from the worldâs top tech companies.