A lecture for Baruch MBA Club

From Tokens to Tasks

Ian Anderson · Principal PM, Audible · Lecturer, Baruch · Founder, Cornell Tech Alumni Syndicate

About me

  • Principal PM at Audible — Creator Products, including AI production tools.
  • Lecturer at Baruch — teaching graduate IT Strategy (CIS 9000).
  • Personal site: ianjoshua.com.

Tonight

  • Just enough mental model.
  • The agentic loop.
  • Live demo — build a personal site from a resume.
  • What you actually need to do this yourself.
  • Q&A — driven by Slido.
Slido QR code
slido.com · #3749 275

What is a token?

Text
Tokenization.
Tokens
Token
4435
ization
2065
.
13

The model doesn't see words. It sees numbers.

Transformer + scale

  • "Attention Is All You Need" — 2017.
  • GPT-2 (Feb 2019), GPT-3 (Jun 2020) — capability emerged from scale.
  • You don't need the architecture. You need the words.

The model didn't get smarter. It got steerable.

  • RLHF — reinforcement learning from human feedback.
  • ChatGPT, Nov 2022 — the moment everyone met the model.

The model can think before it speaks.

Test-time compute: letting the model spend more compute at the moment you ask the question, not just at training time.

  • OpenAI o1 — Sep 2024 — chain-of-thought as a product.
  • Claude pauses to think. The pause is capability, not lag.

The model becomes a thing that decides what to do next.

  • Function calling — the model picks a tool and calls it.
  • MCP — the standard for how Claude Code talks to other tools.
  • You don't need to know how it works. Just that it's how the loop reaches outside its head.

The agentic loop

Goal flows into a loop of Reason, Act, Observe; the loop repeats until done, then exits as Result.
ReAct (Yao et al., 2022) · Anthropic, "Building effective agents" (Dec 2024)

You are sitting inside this slope.

Three pipelines from research to product, getting steeper: 5 years from Transformer to ChatGPT, 2 years from ReAct to Cursor, 4 months from computer use to vibe coding viral.
Andrej Karpathy on X, Feb 2, 2025: "There
Andrej Karpathy on X, Oct 13, 2025: "Good question, it

The jagged frontier

Vibe coding works for some projects. For others, it doesn't. The line isn't where you'd expect.

An irregular boundary line dividing tasks into two regions: dots below the line are inside AI's capability frontier, dots above are outside. Adjacent tasks can land on opposite sides.
Boris Cherny · Claude Code lead, Anthropic

The best person to write the tool for your job is you.

~4% of public GitHub commits · 42,896× growth in 13 months · 135K+ commits/day.

Claude Code commit volume from launch in Feb 2025 through Feb 2026, ending at 134,646 commits per day.
Source: SemiAnalysis
The agentic loop diagram — Goal, Reason, Act, Observe, Result.
What you're about to see is just this loop, on the side of the line where it works.

What you actually need

  • A laptop.
  • An Anthropic account.
  • A terminal — and the willingness to type one install command.
npm install -g @anthropic-ai/claude-code

How to talk to it

  • Describe the goal — not the steps.
  • Let it ask questions.
  • Course-correct in plain English.

"Build me a personal website from this resume." → yes.
"Use React 18 with Tailwind, server-render the routes, …" → no.

You are the domain expert.

You'll know when it's wrong because you know the work.

What's the most annoying repetitive thing in your domain?

Build the tool for it.

Or: rewrite your resume as a website · build a tool that sorts your downloads · automate something annoying you do weekly.

Thank you

Now it's your turn.

ianjoshua.com · ian.anderson@baruch.cuny.edu