Boris Cherny
This is the world now." What's the next big shift to how software is written that either your team is already operating in or you think will head towards, covering engineering tradeoffs, product design, and AI product work.
Episode
Boris Cherny
Summary
Creator of Claude Code at Anthropic discusses how 100% of his code is now written by AI (with five agents running simultaneously during the podcast), how productivity per engineer at Anthropic has increased 200% since Claude Code launched, and how he built the product from a demo called 'Claude CLI' in late 2024. He shares principles like intentionally under-staffing projects to force AI adoption and giving engineers unlimited tokens.
Key Takeaways
Intentionally under-fund projects slightly: when an engineer is the only person on a project, they're forced to use AI to ship at pace. This creates intrinsic motivation to fully adopt AI tooling.
Give engineers unlimited token budgets at the start of a project. The most innovative ideas come from engineers who feel free to throw tokens at a problem.
Don't get stuck in old mental models of the model. Engineers who've used Claude for a year often debug manually out of habit when Claude could solve it in minutes.
Claude Code is moving beyond coding toward proactively identifying work by scanning Slack threads, bug reports, and telemetry for patterns.
Coding is 'virtually solved' for most standard codebases — the new frontier is adjacent tasks: project management, email triage, form-filling, and cross-tool automation.
Notable Quotes
“I think another principle is just encouraging people to go faster. So, if you can do something today, you should just do it today. And this is something we really, really encourage on the team. Early on, it was really important, because it was just me. And so, our only advantage was speed. That's the only way that we could ship a product that would compete in this very crowded coding market.”
“At an emotional level, I feel like I've always had to learn new things. And as a programmer, it doesn't feel that new, because there's always new frameworks. There's always new languages. It's just something that we're quite comfortable with in the field.”
“So, I think this is advice that I actually gave to a lot of folks, especially, people building startups. It's going to be uncomfortable, because your product market fit won't be very good for the first six months. But if you build for the model six months out, when that model comes out, you're just going to hit the ground running, and the product is going to click, and start to work.”