Head of Claude Code: What happens after coding is solved | Boris Cherny
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What is Claude Code and how did it start?
A hundred percent of my code is written by Quad Code. I have not edited it a single line by hand since November. Every day I ship 10, 20, 30 pull requests. So like at the moment I have like five agents running. While we're recording this? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do you miss writing code? I have never enjoyed coding as much as I do today because I don't have to deal with all the minutiae. Productivity per engineer has increased 200%. There's always this question: should I learn to code? In a year or two, it's not gonna matter. Coding is largely solved. I imagine a world or where everyone is able to program. Anyone can just build software anytime. What's the next big shift to how software is written? Quad is starting to come up with ideas.
It's looking through feedback, it's looking at bug reports, it's looking at telemetry for bug fixes and things to ship. A little more like a coworker or something like that.
of people listening to this are product managers and
uh they're
probably sweating.
I think by the end of the year everyone's gonna be a product manager and everyone codes. The title software engineer is gonna start to go away. It's just gonna be replaced by builder and it's gonna be painful for a lot of people.
Today, my guest is Boris Cherney, head of Claude Code at Anthropic. It is hard to describe the impact that Claude Code has had on the world. Around the time this episode comes out, will be the one year anniversary of Claude Code. And in that short time, it has completely transformed the job of a software engineer, and it is now starting to transform the jobs of many other functions in tech, which we talk about. Cloud Code itself is also. Also, a massive driver of Anthropic's overall growth over the past year. They just raised a round at over $350 billion. And as Boris mentions, the growth of Cloud Code itself is still accelerating. Just in the past month, their daily active users has doubled. Boris is also just a really interesting, thoughtful, deep-thinking human.
And during this conversation, we discover we were born in the same city in Ukraine. That is so funny I had no idea. A huge thank you to Ben Mann, Jenny Wen, and Mike Krieger for suggesting topics for this conversation. Don't forget to check out Lenny's ProductPast.com for an incredible set of deals available exclusively to Lenny's newsletter subscribers. Let's get into it after a short word from our wonderful sponsors. Today's episode is brought to you by DX, the developer intelligence platform designed by leading researchers. To thrive in the AI era, organizations need to adapt quickly. But many organization leaders struggle to answer pressing questions like: which tools are working? How are they being used?
What's actually driving value? DX provides the data and insights that leaders need to navigate this shift. With DX, companies like Dropbox, Book, Booking.com, Adin, and Intercom. Get a deep understanding of how AI is providing value to their developers and what impact AI is having on engineering productivity. To learn more, visit DX's website at getdx.com slash Lenny. That's getdx.com slash Lenny. Applications break in all kinds of ways. Crashes, slowdowns, regressions, and the stuff that you only see once real users show up. Sentry catches it all. See what happened, where, and why. Down to the commit that introduced the error, the developer who shipped it, and the exact line of code, all in one connected view.
I've definitely tried the five tabs and slack thread approach to debugging. This is Better. Sentry shows you how the request moved, what ran, what slowed down, and what users saw. Sear, Sentry's AI debugging agent, takes it from there. It uses all of that sentry context to tell you the root cause, suggest a fix, and even opens a PR for you. It also reviews your PRs and flags any breaking changes with fixes ready to go. Try Sentry and Sear for free at Sentry.io/slash. Lenny and use code Lenny for $100 in century credits. That's S C N T R Y dot IO slash Lenny. Boris, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is Claude Code and how did it start?
0:00–11:57
2
How did Claude Code grow to 4% of GitHub commits in a year?
11:57–23:29
3
What product principles drove Claude Code’s success?
23:29–35:22
4
How does Boris’s workflow look with 100% AI‑written code?
35:22–47:08
5
What is the next frontier beyond AI‑assisted coding?
47:08–58:13
6
What are the downsides of rapid AI innovation?
58:13–1:08:58
7
What core principles does the Claude Code team follow?
1:08:58–1:18:48
8
How can professionals succeed in the AI‑driven era?
1:18:48–1:27:42
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