Okay, 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, [clears throat] it's okay.

It's okay. Um my my my team lovingly

says I have Claude code psychosis, which

may or may not be true. Um we are

delighted to have Boris Cherny with us

today. Uh Boris is the creator, the

father of Claude code. Um and uh in the

process of doing that has just had a

front row seat to to reinventing uh the

modern way of of software development.

Um and we're we're really grateful to

you, Boris, for taking the time to speak

with us today. We know that um the

entirety of software development kind of

rests on your shoulders. So, thank you

for taking it out of your time to be

with us today. And interviewing Boris is

Lauren Reader from our team.

Thank you.

>> [applause]

>> Giving our chairs.

Um you took my you took my opening line,

Asia. We asked who here uses Claude

code. There's a lot of hands. That's

awesome.

Thank you for joining us, Boris. It's

very special to have you here. Um

as a roomful 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. Um but I'll give you a

me a tiny bit more background on you so

that everyone has a little bit more

context. So, beyond creating Claude

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 in TypeScript. Um and 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. Um There's

also a a little known thing back in

middle school, I wrote a guide about uh

writing BASIC for TI-83 Plus

calculators.

And I I just I I searched for it, it's

actually still on the internet. It's

extremely embarrassing, so please don't

search it. But it [laughter] exists. We

will definitely be finding that. Um 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 Claude 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, uh and would love to

turn it over to you all soon.

Yeah. Um and also real quick, so for

people that use Claude code, do people

use the CLI mostly? Like okay, majority

CLI?

Okay. That's a lot. Majority desktop?

Okay. Majority VS code or JetBrains IDE?

Okay. That's actually not a lot. Okay.

Other?

I'm like iOS mostly these days. Yeah.

>> [laughter]

>> Okay. Cool.

Um yeah, so I started Claude code kind

of accidentally in a in a lot of ways.

Um I joined this team back in late 2024.

It was a sort of this incubator within

Anthropic called Anthropic Labs.

And uh the team kind of served its

purpose. Um we created Claude code, uh

MCP, and the desktop app. It was a team

it was just a few of us.

So, very much like innovation team.

We built the thing that we wanted to

build, we disbanded the team. Uh now the

team's actually back together for round

two. Mike Krieger, who's the you know,

like the chief product officer at at

Anthropic and used to be one of the

founders at Instagram, so he's leading

that right now.

Um so the kind of the the the the reason

that I started to work on coding is we

felt like there was this product

overhang. And I I'm guessing people here

use that word a lot. Uh but we

definitely use this word a lot in kind

of within the lab.

Uh there's this idea that the model can

do all the 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. It was you open your IDE

and you press tab and you can like

complete like 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 6 months. It

was like not very good. It was barely

usable. I wrote it from I used it for

maybe 10% of my code or something like

that. And even after we released Claude

code initially, it was not a hit.

There's a lot of people that used it,

but it did not have this exponential

growth that it has today.

Um that started with Opus 4 in May. And

I I remember that very clearly. That's

like when the exponential growth

started, and then it kind of inflected

with every model release. Uh 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 6

months because we were building for the

next model. And that was the idea the

pretty much the whole time.

And you know, for Anthropic in general,

we've always just been very focused.

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 what

we wanted. So, this kind of ended up

being the the product bet.

It's an incredible story, especially

that it was an accident.

Um

so, you've said on the record that you

think coding is solved. Uh if this is

one of the three best from Anthropic,

can you tell us more about what you mean

by that, and what might still not be

solved, or what second-order problems

might come? All right. I can ask another

question for the room. Who writes 100%

of their code by hand?

Who writes 100% of their code using a

agent like Claude code?

Okay. Who's like somewhere in between?

Okay. So, like 50% solved.

>> [laughter]

>> I mean, for me it's for me it's like for

me it's 100%. Like the the Claude code

code base, um you know, it leaked, so

you know, people know. Uh it's pretty

simple. It's just like TypeScript and

it's React. Like there's no big secret.

There's there's nothing really

complicated. The 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 use something pretty on distribution.

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.

Uh 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.

Um but yeah, it's like for me for me

it's just solved. Um 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. Um and you know, as everyone here

knows, it's 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. Um so, I shared my personal setup

like 6 months ago or something on on

Twitter. And it 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.

>> [laughter]

>> And it's changed since then. It's

changed. Um and so, now actually most of

my work I do from my phone.

Um and so,

I don't know if like you guys won't be

able to see this, but I have um

so, I have like the Claude app, and if

you open the Claude app,

on the left-hand side, there's this

little code tab,

and I just have a bunch of sessions

going.

Um

you you probably can't see it.

>> How many sessions?

Uh usually have like maybe like five to

10 sessions. Uh and then the sessions

usually have a bunch of agents, so I

think currently probably like a few

hundred agents going.

Um usually every night I have like a few

thousand that are doing kind of deeper

work. There's a few ways to manage it.

One is that you ask Claude to use a

bunch of sub-agents to do work.

Actually, the the thing that I've been

finding myself using more and more is

the 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, and it's a repeat job.

And it can run every every minute, every

5 minutes, every day, kind of however

often you want to schedule it.

And at [snorts] 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 it'll go and fix it. Um

I have another one that grabs uh

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. 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 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 to agents to make it

work?

Um I think so I you know, it's like it's

so hard to make predictions, but um

I'm here to make predictions, so I'll

try to make some.

I I I feel like the way that things are

going is generally there's going to be a

lot more generalists than there are

today.

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 generalist, it's like a you

know, 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.

Um

I don't know. It's it's something that

we're starting to see on our team. So,

actually like a lot of people on the

Claude code team

are generalists across disciplines.

Everyone on our team codes. So, like our

engineering manager, our product

manager, our designers, our data

scientist, our finance guy, our user

researcher, every single person on our

team writes code.

And so, you know, like they're

specialist 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 cuz I bet you're

seeing the same things.

Um [clears throat] I'll have one more

favorite questions then we'll open up to

the audience. So, 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.

Um

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 SAS apocalypse on

our hands? How do you think this plays

out? And again, you're going to have to

make another prediction.

The SAS apocalypse question is my

favorite question then.

Um

I think there's two things that are

going to happen and I 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.

Uh

I actually I I got to do a unplugged

with them the other week and I I just I

I felt like I got to like meet my heroes

cuz they're they're just like the hosts

are the best.

So, they have this idea of uh seven

powers and and this is a 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. And so, like for

example, one that gets less important is

uh 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,

Claude 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 will 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. So, this is

like network effects, uh 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, they have to

retrain everyone to use technology,

they're going to face a lot of internal

resistance to that.

But

you know, 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 I think it's the

best time to build. It's the best time

to be a startup. It's there's so much

disruption coming.

So, there is hope for us after all.

Thank you, Boris.

Um I would love to open up to audience

questions if anyone has anything they

would like to ask.

Dan?

I Yeah, I'm curious.

Um you said that you built uh

6 months before there was product market

fit, but now given that the models are

good enough, how much do you attribute

the success of Claude code to the model

versus like product decisions in the the

like

field of product?

Uh I think it's probably a mix.

Yeah, I think it's a mix. I think I

think if you asked me maybe a year ago,

the ratio was maybe something like

50/50.

Um maybe I don't know. If you asked me 6

months ago, the mix would be 50/50.

>> What about in 2 years?

Oh, 2 year I don't know, dude. We plan

in like we plan in 1 week out.

>> months. Sometime in the future.

>> [laughter]

>> And by the way, I think the reason it

was 50/50 is um

you know, I I I like I 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 you and then especially in YC

over and over is build something people

love.

And so, it 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 that's

why the product matters is we 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 I think like I think 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? Uh you know, beside you

know, like sub agents is one idea.

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

uh prompt injection and kind of static

verification of commands and uh

permission modes, human in the loop, all

this kind of stuff is just going to be

less important cuz the model will just

do the right thing.

Um So, yeah, that's that's my

prediction.

Thank you.

You want to toss the box, Dan?

>> [snorts]

>> Great.

Um To zoom to zoom out a little bit from

software, I think Claude code did a

cultural change a few months ago where

it democratized like building software.

You can see uh shop owners building

their own

um software for themselves or even uh

programming microcontrollers to control

the light when someone opens the door.

Um do you see in the future um

building software becoming a skill like

uh I know uh Microsoft Office? Um so,

it's a thing that ev- everybody can do,

not just people in the tech industry? Oh

my god, yes. Yes. Yes. I I I think it's

going to be even more than that. I think

it's going to be I don't know. It's

going to be a skill like yeah, like I

know how to send a text message.

I I I think um

you know, like I I read a my my two

genres are essentially sci-fi and tech

history. This is what I read a lot of.

I 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

their job was to read and write and this

is not something that everyone knew how

to do.

>> [snorts]

>> 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.

And over the same period, the cost of

literature, the cost of a book went down

like a 100x. And then, you know, it took

a couple hundred years cuz 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 a

degree in reading and writing to know

how to read and write. Although still

there are professional writers and that

is a thing that you can do.

So, I 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.

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 coding is the easy part.

It's knowing the domain that's the hard

part. And I I think this is just

obviously the the future.

So, uh one of the things Greg said was

that you guys are living in the future a

little bit cuz you get to have access to

the models and the agents. Claude code

was an internal tool before you released

it. Um is the gap between where you guys

are in engineering and the rest of the

world, is that a month? Is it 3 months?

Is it 6 months? And is that is that gap

getting bigger or smaller over time?

Yeah, so so internally, we use the same

models everyone else does.

Um for us, the dog fooding is really

really important. So, we use the thing

that everyone else here does. Um you

know, we use like a little bit of mythos

to try it and then we use a lot of Opus

4.7 to to dog food it and to write most

of our code.

Um I think on the model side, there

isn't really a gap. Um 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. Like if you talk to people at

Anthropic, we use Claude for literally

everything. And our Claudes are talking

all day like as as I'm coding, as my

Claudes are coding in a loop, they will

communicate over Slack to talk to other

people's Claudes 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 uh by models. Everything

is just built by the models. So, I I I

think actually the place that we're

ahead is not the technology cuz the same

technology available to us is available

to everyone here because fundamentally,

we are building a platform. And so, for

us, it's really important that

developers can use the same thing that

we're using and that we we dog food

everything that we put out there.

But I think there's actually a far

bigger weed in kind of the

organizational structure and

organizational process. And this is a

place where you know, hopefully we can

talk about it in places like this and uh

everyone can kind of learn from it and

and also evolve.

Yeah, and I think that's one of the

advantages startups have. It's so much

easier to start there.

Jared?

Yeah, um last time we talked, I think I

think you'd mentioned we talked a little

bit about multi-agent and it was very in

code at the time at a prior Sequoia

event and you mentioned that there were

some things going down the pipeline and

thing you're talking you're thinking

about. Now obviously there's slash

batch, there's slash loop, there's sub

teams, there's teams. Can you speak some

to either at the model level and at the

harness level, how you're injecting

priors in the harness level, how the

objective function is changing the model

level to kind of make this experience

around delegating work, spinning up

agents better? Cuz so much of the work

is parallelizable. You can do so many

things so much faster and I feel like I

have to overlay my own intuition for

when to parallelize things rather than

the model kind of understanding that you

can spin up 10 sub agents for something.

Yeah, I mean on on the product side, it

really just comes down to prompting.

That's That's how it is. And so, you

know, we we tweak prompts to kind of

help the model do stuff in parallel

more.

But also, honestly, as the model gets

better, it just naturally does this. And

so, something like loop, I found

actually 4.7, it just starts doing. Uh

which is really cool. It's like it does

something like uh you know, I'll I'll

I'll tell it, "Go uh

pull this data query." And it's like,

"Hey, I noticed that the data is

changing over time. I'll start a loop

and I'll give you a report every 30

minutes." And I'm like, "Great. Can you

send it to me over Slack?" And then it

uses the Slack MCP to do that. So, so I

think actually over time, it's not on

users to figure out how to hold the

tools better. And if that's the case,

it's actually a product design problem

and like I'm not doing a good job.

It's really on the model to do this

stuff better and on us kind of prompting

it so it naturally does this.

Um so, right now it seems like a lot of

us use um like Claude or Codex or these

uh tools in the cloud to do a lot of our

computing. But then, there are some very

vocal advocates of uh having your AI be

local. And I could imagine over time as

um open way models and other things

catch up that this could be more of a

possibility for people get really

high-quality coding assistance. So, I'm

curious your vision of say over the next

like

years or something like that. Do you see

the trajectory of everyone still really

relying on the like cloud centralized

compute or uh is there a pivot to oh, we

all just have our local agents that we

can rely on and they don't get throttled

and other benefits?

Yeah, I think it um

I don't know. There's maybe a few ways

to answer that. I think maybe like kind

of the the most fundamental way to

answer that is it doesn't matter.

Cuz Cuz I think now we're getting to the

point where the model is just able to

figure it out. So, I think like by a

couple years from now, the model is just

going to be doing all the code. It's

going to be starting the agents. It's

going to be building the environments.

And so, like if it decides like actually

I'll use like local models to do this,

then you know, that's what it'll do.

These I I don't think these will be

decisions that we are making as

engineers anymore.

We have time for a couple more

questions, so I can toss this out.

Jamie.

Nester. Thank you.

It feels like one of the great uh

decisions with Claude Code was making

use of the fact that a lot of

developers' tools and workflows are

local.

But um that isn't necessarily always the

case for sort of general knowledge work

with, you know, cloud tools. I'm curious

how you're thinking about this with

Co-work of how do you give Co-work

enough access to the tools that we use

to be powerful the same way that Claude

Code is for developers?

Yeah, it's That's a really great

question. Um I know I know when I was uh

when I was at a big company, we took

like 5 years moving all the environments

to remote. It's just like so much work,

especially at a big scale.

Um but for knowledge work, largely, it's

there already with like Salesforce and

Docs and things like that.

Um for us, it's always just the simplest

answer. It's just MCP.

So, the same MCP connector that you have

in Claude AI, you hook up like, you

know, Salesforce, you hook up Google

Docs, Google Calendar. Uh and then

Co-work can use that. Claude CLI can use

it. Claude Code everywhere can use it.

And for the for the systems that don't

have MCPs, like do you think that's

where computer use is going to be a big

opportunity?

Yeah, I think computer use is kind of a

catchall. Um so, I think currently, for

as far as I know, I think Anthropic is

like pretty far ahead on computers. And

so, like if you use it through Co-work,

it's quite good. Um so, it's able to use

pretty much any piece of software that

you have on your computer. It's very

slow, but it does it quite well now,

especially with 4.7.

Um Yeah, but I think I think otherwise

like MCP is is kind of the answer. It's

And you know, all this stuff just

doesn't matter that much. It could be

MCPs, APIs, just some sort of

programmatic access cuz the the model

doesn't care. It's to mo- To the model,

it's just tokens.

All right, we have time for one more

question.

Um Ryan.

Sean, do you want to toss the Thank you.

Um you've kind of alluded to this, but

if like sometime ago you saw the

probabil- the product overhang and

thought to build a product that would

then become more interesting once models

got better,

could you just talk even in vague terms

about the shape of a product you'd build

today that you think could becomes a

much more interesting as models get

better in 6 months to a year?

Yeah, Claude design I I think is a

really good example. It's uh it's pretty

good today. It's going to get a lot

better.

Um there's also a few things that we're

cooking up for Claude Code uh that are

going to be landing over the coming

weeks. So, you'll see those.

Um and then I think uh I think loop and

batch and things like this around like

massively parallelizing agents, that's

going to get better.

And computer use is another good one.

All right, Boris. Thank you so much for

joining us. I think we'll be here for a

little longer if anyone has questions.

>> [applause]

>> Thanks, guys.