Anthropic's Boris Cherny: Coding's Printing Press Moment

0:01Okay, I'm excited to introduce our next speaker. Show of hands, who here uses Claude Code? Okay, show of hands, who here has Claude Code psychosis? Come on guys, it's okay. My team lovingly says I have Claude Code psychosis, which may or may not be true. We're delighted to have Boris Cherny with us today. Boris is the creator, the father of Claude Code, and in the process of doing that, has just had a front row seat to reinventing the modern way of software development. And we're really grateful to you, Boris, for taking the time to speak with us today. We know that the entirety of software development kind of rests on your shoulders, so thank you for taking an hour of your time to be with us today.

0:43And interviewing Boris is Lauren Reeder from our team. Thank you. Thank you.

0:52Getting our chairs.

0:55Boris Cherny:You took my opening line. I usually ask who here uses Cloud Code. That was a lot of hands. That's awesome. Thank you for joining us, Boris. It's very special to have you here. As a room full of builders, I think you are changing building entirely. And so I'm very curious to explore how you think about the future of software, coding, and what we should spend all of our free time on. But I'll give you a tiny bit more background on you so that everyone has a little bit more context. So beyond creating cloud code, Boris is very much an engineer's engineer. You were writing a lot of code through your whole career, writing textbooks about code, including programming and TypeScript.

1:36And I think last time we chatted, you hadn't written a single line of code in the last year, or at least so far in 2026, which is quite the change.

1:45Boris Cherny:There's also a little-known thing. Back in middle school, I wrote a guide about writing basic for TI-83-plus calculators. And I just, I searched it. It's actually still on the internet. It's extremely embarrassing, so please don't search it. But it exists. We will definitely be finding that. So we're going to do, I'm going to start with a few questions here. Maybe we'll start with a little bit of the history of Cloud Code, how you started it. And then we're going to have a lot of audience Q &A for this one. And so start thinking about your questions in the back of your head and would love to turn it over to you all soon.

2:15Yeah.

2:16Boris Cherny:And also real quick, so for people that use Cloud Code, do people use the CLI mostly? Like majority CLI? That's a lot. Majority desktop? Okay. Majority VS Code or Jeopardy's ID? Okay. That's actually not a lot. Okay. Other? I'm like iOS mostly these days. Yeah. Okay. Cool. Yeah. So I started Cloud Code kind of Accidentally in a lot of ways. I joined this team back in late 2024. It was sort of this incubator within Anthropic called Anthropic Labs. And the team kind of served its purpose. We created Quad Code, MCP, and the desktop app. It was a team. It was just a few of us. So very much like innovation team.

3:01Boris Cherny:We built the thing that we wanted to build. We disbanded the team. Now the team is actually back together for round two. Mike Krieger, who's the chief product officer at Anthropic and used to be one of the founders at Instagram, so he's leading that right now. So the reason that I started to work on coding is we felt like there was this product overhang. And I'm guessing people here use that word a lot, but we definitely use this word a lot within the lab. There's this idea that the model can do all this stuff that no product has yet captured. And in late 2024, when we were looking at coding, the way that we did coding, the state of the art at the time was type ahead.

3:41Boris Cherny:It was the opening your ID and you press tab, and you can complete one line at a time. And that was the thing that Sonnet 3.5 enabled for the first time. But the feeling was we could actually go a lot further than that. And the model was almost ready for the next big step. So we don't have to do type ahead anymore. We can just have the agent write all of the code. and so I built it and it just really didn't work for the first six months. It was like not very good. It was barely usable. I used it for maybe 10 % of my code or something like that and even after we released quad code initially, it was not a hit.

4:16Boris Cherny:There's a lot of people that used it but it did not have this exponential growth that it has today. That started with Opus 4 in May and I remember that very clearly. That's like when the exponential growth started and then it kind of inflected with every model released. Like it started with Opus 4, then 4.5, then 4.6, now 4.7. It just kind of keeps inflecting. But essentially we were trying to build this thing that was like pre-PMF. And we knew that it wouldn't have PMF for six months because we were building for the next model. And that was the idea pretty much the whole time. And, you know, for Anthropic in general, we've always just been very focused.

4:50Boris Cherny:We've always cared about business and enterprise and safety and coding. That's just always been kind of the way that we wanted to build. And so at some point, we kind of knew that we wanted to build a product. We didn't know exactly when. So this kind of ended up being the product bet. It's an incredible story, especially that it was an accident. So you've said on the record that you think coding is solved. If this is one of the three bets for Anthropic, can you tell us more about what you mean by that and what might still not be solved or what secondary problems might come? All right. I can ask another question for the room.

5:22Boris Cherny:Who writes 100 % of their code by hand?

5:27Boris Cherny:Who writes 100 % of their code using an agent, like quad code? Okay, who's like somewhere in between? Okay, so like 50 % solved.

5:41Boris Cherny:I mean, for me it's like, for me it's 100%. Like the quad code code base, you know, it leaked, so people know. It's pretty simple. It's just like TypeScript and it's React. Like there's no big secret. There's nothing really complicated. it. The reason we picked TypeScript and React is it's very on distribution for the model. So when we started, you know, building the code base, the model was not as intelligent as it is today. So the language and the framework mattered a lot. Nowadays, you know, it can write whatever, and it can pick up new languages, new frameworks it hasn't seen. But back then you wanted to do something pretty on distribution.

6:12Boris Cherny:Because of that, I think fairly early, we got to the point where the model just wrote 100 % of the code. And for us, this happened sometime in October, November, last year. And so for me today, you know, like the model writes 100 % of my code. I write somewhere, you know, usually a few dozen PRs every day. There was a day last week I did like 150 PRs in a day. That was like, that was a record. I was just trying to kind of push to see how far I can get it. But yeah, it's like for me, for me, it's just solved. But this is not the case everywhere. There's very big, complicated code bases. There's kind of weird languages the model's not good at yet.

6:44Boris Cherny:And, you know, as everyone here knows, it's getting there. Usually the answer is just wait for the next model. Can you actually tell us about your personal setup? You walked us through it the other day. It is pretty wild. Yeah. So I shared my personal setup like six months ago or something on Twitter. And it's funny. I actually, I shared it. I didn't realize that it would be surprising for anyone. That was just like the way that I coded. And it's changed since then. It's changed. And so now actually most of my work I do for my phone. And so I don't know if like You guys won't be able to see this, but I have the Cloud app.

7:22And if you open the Cloud app, on the left-hand side, there's this little code tab.

7:28Boris Cherny:And I just have a bunch of sessions going. You probably can't see it. How many sessions? Usually I have maybe five to ten sessions. And then the sessions usually have a bunch of agents. So I think currently probably a few hundred agents going. Usually every night I have a few thousand that are doing deeper work. There's a few ways to manage it. One is that you ask Claude to use a bunch of subagents to do work. Actually, the thing that I've been finding myself using more and more is loop. So this is slash loop. And it's just like the coolest thing. It's like the simplest thing that works. All it is is you have Claude use cron to schedule a job for some point in the future.

8:08Boris Cherny:And it's a repeat job. And it can run every minute, every five minutes, every day, however often you want to schedule it. And at this point, I have like dozens of loops that are running for stuff. So I have one that's babysitting my PRs, like fixing CI, auto rebasing. I have another one that keeps CI healthy. So like if there's like a flaky test or whatever, it'll go and fix it. I have another one that grabs feedback from Twitter and kind of clusters it for me every 30 minutes. So I just have a bunch of these loops running at any time. I sort of feel like loops are the future at this point. If you haven't experimented with it, highly, highly recommend it.

8:41Boris Cherny:And we also just launched routines, which is the same thing, but kind of on the server. So even if you close your laptop, it keeps going. So that's your personal setup. Tell us about what you think teams will look like in the future. How do you extrapolate from all the work you're doing to keep everyone on the team moving forward, understanding the context? Or do you think we need to let go of a lot more agents to make it work? I think, you know, it's so hard to make predictions, but I'm here to make predictions, so I'll try to make some. I feel like the way that things are going is generally there's going to be a lot more generalists than there are today.

9:20Boris Cherny:And today when we talk about generalists, I think largely we're talking about people that are still engineers. So they're still writing code, but maybe they're kind of product engineers. So maybe when we say generalists, it's like they do iOS and web and server, for example. That's like a generalist in engineering. But I think the thing that we're going to start to see a lot more of is generalists that are cross-disciplinary. So this is engineers that are really good at product engineering, but also really great at design. Or really great at product and data science and engineering. I don't know.

9:50Boris Cherny:It's something that we're starting to see on our team. So actually, like, a lot of people on the Cloud Code team are generalists across disciplines. Everyone on our team code. So, like, our engineering manager, our product manager, our designers, our data scientists, our finance guy, our user researcher. every single person on our team writes code. And so, you know, like they're specialists in something, but now also everyone's just coding. And, you know, I'm seeing some nods, but I bet also it's actually not that surprising to people in this room because I bet you're seeing the same things. I'll have one more thread of questions and we'll open up to the audience.

10:26So we talked a bit about what's changing with coding. I'm curious about what you see changing in the world of software or software products. I think as we see AI making writing code 10 or 100X cheaper, what happens to the value of the products that are produced with software? Do we have a SaaSpocalypse on our hands? How do you think this plays out? And again, you're going to have to make another prediction.

10:48Boris Cherny:The SaaSpocalypse question is my favorite question.

10:54Boris Cherny:I think there's two things that are going to happen, and I don't think either of them is the thing that people have been talking about. I think one is, is anyone here an acquired listener, like the acquired podcast? Yeah, it's like the best podcast. I actually, I got to do an Unplugged with them the other week. And I just, I felt like I got to like meet my heroes because they're just like the hosts are the best. So they have this idea of seven powers. And this is like Hamilton, he kind of wrote, he wrote a book about this. And this is kind of the seven modes in business. And I think what's going to happen is because of AI, some of these modes are going to get more important and some are going to get less important.

11:33Boris Cherny:And so like, for example, one that gets less important is switching costs because you can just use the model and you can kind of port from one thing to a different thing. Another one that gets less important is process power because for companies whose mode is like workflows and process and things like this, Quad is getting really good at figuring out process. And especially with 4.7, it can just hill climb anything. So if you give it a target and you tell it to iterate until it's done, it'll just do it. I think this is the first model like that. So I think these are going to get less important, but I think the previous modes actually still matter.

12:05Boris Cherny:So this is like network effects, scale economies, cornered resources, things like that. These are not really changing with AI. I think the second thing is if you look at the number of startups today or like maybe in the next, you know, the past 10 years, I think the number of startups in the next 10 years that are just going to like disrupt everything is going to increase like 10x. Because right now you can be a tiny startup, you could build a thing that's as valuable as a large company, and you can actually compete head to head. Because the large company has to evolve their business process. They have to evolve the way they work.

12:36Boris Cherny:They have to retrain everyone to use technology. They're going to face a lot of internal resistance to that. But no one here has that problem. If you're starting fresh, then you can kind of build with AI natively from the ground up. So I don't know. I think it's the best time to build. It's the best time to be a startup. There's so much disruption coming. So there is hope for us after all. Thank you, Boris. I would love to open up to audience questions if anyone has anything they would like to ask. Dan?

13:07Hi. Yeah, I'm curious. You said that you built six months before there was product market fit, but now, given that the models are good enough, how much do you attribute the success of Cloud Code to the model versus product decisions in the feel of the product?

13:25Boris Cherny:I think it's probably a mix. Yeah, I think it's a mix. I think if you asked maybe a year ago, the ratio was maybe something like 50-50. Maybe, I don't know, if you asked me six months ago, the mix would be 50-50. What about in two years? Oh, two, I don't know, dude. We plan on like, we plan one week out. Six months, sometime in the future. And by the way, I think the reason it was 50-50 is, you know, I like, I did YC back in the day. I was like the first hire at a YC company and like I did a bunch of startups. And in startups, like the thing that they drill into and especially in YC over and over is build something people love.

13:59Boris Cherny:And so it doesn't matter what the product is. It doesn't matter, like, the model and all this stuff. You still, in the end, have to build a thing that people love. And I think that's why the product matters, is we pay so much attention to the little details so that as you use it all day, it's a really great experience. I think as the model's gotten better, the harness kind of gets less important. And I think, like, a thing that we're thinking about right now is, like, how do we evolve the harness? So, like, how do we make loops more of a first-class thing? How do we make it easier to run a lot of agents, you know, Besides sub-agents is one idea.

14:30Boris Cherny:There's a bunch more stuff that we're cooking. But I think in a year, the model will be much better aligned. And so all the safety mechanisms that we have today around prompt injection and kind of static verification of commands and permission modes, human in the loop, all this kind of stuff, is just going to be less important. Because the model will just do the right thing. So, yeah, that's my prediction. Thanks. Thank you. You want to toss the box, Dan?

14:59Great. To zoom out a little bit from software, I think Cloud Code did a cultural change a few months ago where it democratized building software. You can see shop owners building their own software for themselves or even programming microcontrollers to control the light when someone opens the door. Do you see in the future building software becoming a skill like I know Microsoft Office? So it's a thing that everybody can do, not just people in the tech industry?

15:31Boris Cherny:Oh my god, yes, yes, yes. I think it's gonna be even more than that. I think it's gonna be, I don't know, it's gonna be a skill like, yeah, like I know how to send a text message. I think, you know, like I read, my two genres are essentially sci-fi and tech history. This is what I read a lot of. And I think in tech history, there's one thing which I think to me is the clearest parallel for what's happening right now. and this is in the 1400s the printing press in Europe and what what happened was before the printing press essentially 10 % of the European population was literate they knew how to read and write they were often employed by like kings and lords that were not literate and their job was to you know their job was to read and write and this is not something that everyone knew how to do the printing press was invented then there were two more presses and in the 50 years after the first printing press, there was more literature published in Europe than in the thousand years before.

16:25Boris Cherny:And over the same period, the cost of literature, the cost of a book went down like 100x. And then, you know, it took a couple hundred years because, you know, learning to read and write is hard. You need education systems and government and everyone can't be working on farms and so on. But over the next few hundred years, literacy globally went up to like 70%. And so, you know, now we can all read and write and you don't need a degree in reading and writing to know how to read and write. Although still, there are professional writers, and that is the thing that you can do. So I think the thing that's about to happen, and it's going to be much faster than 50 years, is software will be a thing that is fully democratized, that anyone can do.

17:00Boris Cherny:And, you know, there's a lot of corollaries to this. So for example, let's say you're writing accounting software. The best person to write accounting software, I think maybe even today, is not an engineer. It's a really good accountant, because they know the domain really well, and And coding is the easy part. It's knowing the domain that's the hard part. And I think this is just obviously the future. So one of the things Greg said was that you guys are living in the future a little bit because you get to have access to the models and the agents. Cloud Code was an internal tool before you released it.

17:32Is the gap between where you guys are in engineering and the rest of the world, is that a month? Is it three months? Is it six months? And is that gap getting bigger or smaller over time?

17:43Boris Cherny:Yeah, so internally we use the same models everyone else does. For us, the dogfooding is really, really important. So we use the thing that everyone else here does. You know, we use like a little bit of mythos to try it. And then we use a lot of Opus 4.7 to dogfood it and to write most of our code. I think on the model side, there isn't really a gap. You know, it's like it's pretty much mythos. And, you know, that will become some version of some descendant of that will become available at some point to everyone. I think on the product side, there's probably a far larger gap. And that's just related to us changing all of our processes.

18:16Boris Cherny:Like if you talk to people at Anthropic, we use Cloud for literally everything. And our clouds are talking all day. Like as I'm coding, as my clouds are coding in a loop, they will communicate over Slack to talk to other people's clouds that are also running in a loop to kind of figure out unknowns. We have no more manually written code anywhere at the company. All of the SQL is written by models. Everything is just built by the models. So I think actually the place that we're ahead is not the technology, because the same technology available to us is available to everyone here. Because fundamentally, we are building a platform.