YouSaid · the spoken record

Boris Cherny

lines on the record: 116
first: 2026-02-19
most recent: 2026-02-19
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Facebook dating, I think, started in a pretty similar place. And I think that the observation was if you look at people looking at profile views, so people looking at each other's profiles on Facebook, 60% of profile views were people that are not friends with each other, that are opposite gender. And so this kind of like traditional dating setup, people are just like creeping on each other. So maybe if you can build a product for this, it might work And so this idea of weight and demand, I think, is just so powerful”
2026-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Claude Code: What happens after coding is solved | Boris Cherny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this is crazy. It's like people are abusing the Facebook group's product to buy and sell, and it's not abuse in kind of like a security sense. It's abuse in that no one designed the product for this, but they were kind of figuring it out because it's just so useful for this. And so it was pretty obvious if you build a better product to let people buy and sell, they're going to like it. And it was just very obvious that Marketplace would be a hit from this. And so the first thing was buy and sell groups, a kind of special purpose groups to let people do that. And the second product was marketplace.”
2026-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Claude Code: What happens after coding is solved | Boris Cherny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Latent demand is this idea that if you build a product in a way that can be hacked or can be kind of misused by people in a way it wasn't really designed for to do kind of something that they want to do Then this helps you as the product builder learn where to take the product next. So an example of this is Facebook Marketplace. So the manager for the team, Fiona, she was actually the founding manager for the marketplace team, and she talks about this a lot. Facebook Marketplace is sort of based on the observation back in this must have been like 2016 or something like this, that 40% of posts in Facebook groups are buying and selling stuff.”
2026-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Claude Code: What happens after coding is solved | Boris Cherny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this is a little more native, I think, for folks that are not engineers. And really, this is back to bringing the product to where the people are. You don't want to make people use a different workflow. You don't want to make them go out of their way to earn a new thing. It's whatever people are doing, if you can make that a little bit easier, then that's just going to be a much better product that people enjoy more. And this is just this principle of latent demand, which I think is just the single most important principle in product.”
2026-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Claude Code: What happens after coding is solved | Boris Cherny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We do see that people use also different tools. So, for example, our designers use the Cloud Desktop app a lot more to do their coding. So you just download the desktop app, there's a code tab. It's right next to CoWork. And it's actually the same exact quad code. So it's like the same agent and everything. We've had this for many, many months. And so you can use this to code in a way that you don't have to open a bunch of terminals, but you still get the power of QuadCode. And the biggest thing is you can just run as many quad sessions in parallel as you want. We call this multi-clotting.”
2026-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Claude Code: What happens after coding is solved | Boris Cherny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I'm saying this a little bit with an anthropic. I think everyone is fairly technical. This is something that we screen for when people join. There's a lot of technical interviews that people go through, even for non-technical functions. In our designers of Archu code. So I think for them, this is something that they have enjoyed from what I've seen because now instead of bugging engineers, they can just like go in and code. And even some designers that didn't code before have just started to do it. And for them, it's great because they can unblock themselves. But I'd be really interested just to hear more people's experiences because I bet it's not uniform like that.”
2026-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Claude Code: What happens after coding is solved | Boris Cherny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's super interesting. I'd love to talk to these people, both in the more bucket and the less bucket, just to understand. Did you get to follow up with any of them?”
2026-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Claude Code: What happens after coding is solved | Boris Cherny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stakeholder alignment. Exactly. I do think that there is a future where I think by the end of the year, what we're going to start to see is these start to get even murkier, where I think in some places that tedal software engineer is going to start to go away. And it's just going to be replaced by builder, or maybe it's just everyone's going to be a product manager and everyone codes or something like this.”
2026-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Claude Code: What happens after coding is solved | Boris Cherny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think in the short time it opers, but one thing that we're starting to see is there's maybe a 50% overlap in these roles where a lot of people are actually just doing the same thing and some people have specialties. For example, I code a little bit more versus cat RPM does a little bit more coordination or planning or forecasting or things like this.”
2026-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Claude Code: What happens after coding is solved | Boris Cherny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Product engineers with really great design sense, and they're able to do design also. Or an engineer that has a really good sense of the business and can use that to figure out what to do next, or an engineer that also loves talking to users and can just really channel what users want to figure out what's next. So I think a lot of the people that will be rewarded the most over the next few years, there won't just be AI native and they don't just know how to use these tools really well, but also they're curious and they're generalists and they cross over multiple disciplines and can think about the broader problem they're solving rather than just the engineering part of it.”
2026-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Claude Code: What happens after coding is solved | Boris Cherny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's pretty much it. Experiment with the tools, get to know them, don't be scared of them, just dive in, try them beyond the bleeding edge, beyond the frontier. Maybe the second piece of advice is try to be a generalist more than you have in the past. For example, in school, a lot of people that study CS, they learn to code and they don't really learn much else. Maybe they learn a little bit of systems architecture or something like this. But some of the most effective engineers that I work with every day and some of the most effective, you know, like product managers and so on, they cross over disciplines. So on the quad code team, everyone codes. Our product manager codes, our engineering manager codes, our designer codes, our finance guy codes, or data scientist codes, like everyone on the team codes. And then if I look at particular engineers, people often cross different disciplines. So some of the strongest engineers are hybrid product and infrastructure engineers.”
2026-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Claude Code: What happens after coding is solved | Boris Cherny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or anything like this There was no internet at the time. So it's about what does this enable next? And I think that's the very optimistic version of it for me. And that's the part that I'm really excited about. It's just unimaginable. We couldn't be talking today if the printing press hadn't been invented. Like our microphones wouldn't exist. None of the things around us would exist. It just wouldn't be possible to coordinate such a large group of people if that wasn't the case. And so I imagine a world, you know, a few years in the future where everyone is able to program. And what does that unlock? Anyone can just build software anytime. And I have no idea. It's just the same way that, you know, in the 1400s, no one could have predicted this, I think it's the same way. But I do think in the meantime, it's going to be very disruptive. And it's going to be painful for a lot of people. And again, as a society, this is a conversation that we have to have. And this is the thing that we have to figure out together.”
2026-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Claude Code: What happens after coding is solved | Boris Cherny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, for our team, we're hiring. So quad core team is hiring. If you're interested, just check out the jobs page on Anthropic. Personally, all this stuff has just made me enjoy my work more. I have never enjoyed coding as much as I do today because I don't have to deal with all the minutiae. So for me personally, it's been quite exciting. This is something that we hear from a lot of customers, where they love the tool, they love Quad Code, because it just makes coding delightful again. And that's just so fun for them. But it's hard to know where this thing is going to go. And again, I just like, I have to reach for these historical analogs. And I think the printing press is just such a good one. Because what happened is this technology that was locked away to a small set of people like knowing how to read and write became accessible to everyone. It was just inherently democratizing. Everyone started to be able to do this. And if that wasn't the case, then something like the Renaissance just could never have happened. Because a lot of the Renaissance, it was about knowledge spreading. It was about written records that people use to communicate, you know, because there were no phone.”
2026-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Claude Code: What happens after coding is solved | Boris Cherny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is something we have to kind of figure out as a society. This is something we have to figure out as an industry. And I think for me also, this is one of the things. Because I think we take this very, very seriously. And so now, you know, we have economists, we have policy folks, we have social impact folks. This is something we just want to talk about a lot. So as a society, we can kind of figure out what to do because it shouldn't be up to us”
2026-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Claude Code: What happens after coding is solved | Boris Cherny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you look at the kinds of AI that people are using, it's always these conversational AI. It's like a chat bot or whatever. But no one really has used an agent before. And this word agent just gets thrown around all the time. And it's just like so misused. It's like lost all meaning. But agent actually has a very specific technical meaning, which is an AI. It's a LLM that's able to use tools. So it doesn't just talk. It can actually act and it can interact with your system. And, you know, this means like it can use your Google Docs and it can send email, it can run commands on your computer and do all this kind of stuff. So I think like any kind of job where you use computer tools in this way, I think this is going to be next.”
2026-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Claude Code: What happens after coding is solved | Boris Cherny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's the thing that I think brings AI, agentic AI to people that haven't really used it before. And people are starting to just to get a sense of it for the first time. When I think back to engineering a year ago, no one really knew what an agent was. No one really used it. But nowadays it's just the way that we do our work. And then when I look at non-technical work today, so maybe semi-technical product work and data science and things like this.”
2026-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Claude Code: What happens after coding is solved | Boris Cherny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's going to be a lot of the roles that are adjacent to engineering. So, yeah, it could be like product managers, it could be design, it could be data science is going to expand to pretty much any kind of work that you can do on a computer because the model is just going to get better and better at this. And this is, the cowork product is kind of the first way to get at this, but it's just the first one.”
2026-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Claude Code: What happens after coding is solved | Boris Cherny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, exactly. I was talking to an engineer earlier today. They're like, they're writing some service in Go. And, you know, it's been like a month already. And they built up the service. It's working quite well. And then I was like, okay, so like, how do you feel writing? And he was like, you know, I still don't really know Go. And I think we're going to start to see more and more of this. It's like if you know that it works correctly and efficiently, then you don't actually have to know all the details”
2026-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Claude Code: What happens after coding is solved | Boris Cherny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's interesting as an engineer, I sort of felt like apparel with this. Like this is sort of how I feel where I don't have to do the tedious work anymore of coding because this has always been sort of the detail of it. It's always been the tedious part of it and kind of like messing with like git and kind of using all these different tools. That was not the fun part. The fun part is figuring out what to build and coming up with this. It's talking to users. It's thinking about these big systems. It's thinking about the future. It's collaborating with other people on the team. And that's what I get to do more of now.”
2026-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Claude Code: What happens after coding is solved | Boris Cherny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so the volume of printed material just went way up. The cost went way down. It went down something like 100x over the next 50 years. And if you look at literacy, it actually took a while because learning to read and write is quite hard. It takes an education system that takes free time. It takes not having to work on a farm all day so that you actually have time for education and things like this. But over the next 200 years, it went up to like 70% globally. I think this is the kind of thing that we might see is a similar kind of transition. And there was actually this interesting historical document where there was an interview with some scribe in the 1400s about how do you feel about the printing press. And they were actually very excited because they were like, actually, the thing that I don't like doing this copying between books, the thing that I do like doing is drawing the art in books and then doing the book binding. And I'm really glad that now my time is freed up.”
2026-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Claude Code: What happens after coding is solved | Boris Cherny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so, you know, if you look at Europe and in the mid-1400s, literacy was actually very low. There was sub 1% of the population. It was scribes that they were the ones that did all the writing. They were the ones that did all the reading. They were employed by lords and kings that often were not literate themselves. And so, you know, it was their job of this very tiny percent of the population to do this. And at some point, Gutenberg and the printing press came along. And there was this crazy stat that in the 50 years after the printing press was built, there was more printed material created than in the thousand years before.”
2026-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Claude Code: What happens after coding is solved | Boris Cherny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My take is, I think for people that are using Quad code, that are using agents to code today, you still have to understand the layer under. But yeah, in a year or two, it's not going to matter. I was thinking about what is the right historical analog for this? Because somehow we have to situate this thing in history and kind of figure out when have we gone through some more transitions, what's the right kind of mental model for this? I think the thing that's come closest for me is the printing press.”
2026-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Claude Code: What happens after coding is solved | Boris Cherny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At an emotional level, I feel like I've always had to learn new things. And as a programmer, it's actually not, 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. But at the same time, this isn't true for everyone. And I think for some people, they're going to feel a greater sense of, I don't know, maybe like loss or nostalgia or atrophy or something like this.”
2026-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Claude Code: What happens after coding is solved | Boris Cherny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's just the way that it happens. I don't worry about it too much personally. I think for me, programming is on a continuum. Way back in the day, software actually is relatively new, right? If you look at the way programs are written today, like using software that's running on a virtual machine or something, this has been the way that we've been running programs since probably the 1960s. So, you know, it's been like 60 years or something like that. Before that, it was punch cards. Before that, it was switches. Before that, it was hardware. And before that, it was just literally pen and paper. It was like a room full of people that were doing math on paper. And so programming has always changed in this way. In some ways, you still want to understand the layer under the layer because it helps you be a better engineer. And I think this will be the case maybe for the next year or so. But I think pretty soon it just won't really matter. It's just going to be kind of like the assembly code running under the program or something like this.”
2026-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Claude Code: What happens after coding is solved | Boris Cherny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That said, not everyone feels this way. So, for example, there's one engineer on the team, Lina, who was still writing C++ on the weekends by hand. Because for her, she just really enjoys writing C++ by hand. And so everyone that's different. And I think even as this field changes, even as everything changes, there's always space to do this. There's always space to enjoy the art and to kind of do things by hand if you want.”
2026-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Claude Code: What happens after coding is solved | Boris Cherny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At some point, I personally fell into the rabbit hole of kind of the beauty of programming. So I wrote a book about TypeScript. Actually at the time it was the world's biggest TypeScript meetup just because I fell in love with the language itself. And I kind of got deep into like functional programming and all this stuff. I think a lot of coders, they get distracted by this. For me, it was always sort of There is a beauty to programming and especially to functional programming. There's a beauty to type systems. There's a certain kind of like this buzz that you get when you solve a really complicated math problem. It's kind of similar when you kind of balance the types or the program is just like really beautiful. But it's really not the end of it. I think for me coding is very much a tool and it's a way to do things.”
2026-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Claude Code: What happens after coding is solved | Boris Cherny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I program the answers in and then the next math test, whatever, like the next year it was just too hard. I couldn't program all the answers in because I didn't know what the questions were. And so I had to write a little solver so that it was a program that would just like solve these algebra questions or whatever. And then I figured out you can get a little cable, you can give the program to the rest of the class. And then the whole class gets A's. But then we all got caught and the teacher told us to knock it off. But from the very beginning, it's always just been very practical for me where programming is a way to build a thing. It's not the end in itself.”
2026-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Claude Code: What happens after coding is solved | Boris Cherny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Funny for me, you know, like when I learned engineering, for me it was very practical. I learned engineering so I could build stuff. And for me, I was self-taught. I studied economics in school, but I didn't study CS. But I taught myself engineering kind of early on. I was programming in middle school. And from the very beginning, it was very practical. So I actually learned to code so that I can cheat on a math test. That was like the first thing we had these graphing calculators and I just programmed the answer Yeah, yeah, exactly”
2026-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Claude Code: What happens after coding is solved | Boris Cherny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, anthropic, we're starting to see some engineers that are spending hundreds of thousands a month in tokens. So we're starting to see this a little bit. There's some companies that we're starting to see similar things. Yeah.”
2026-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Claude Code: What happens after coding is solved | Boris Cherny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and I think the reality is at small scale, you're not going to get a giant bill or anything like this. It's an individual engineer experimenting. The token cost is still probably relatively low relative to their salary or other cost of running the business. So it's actually not a huge cost. As the thing scales up, so let's say they built something awesome and then it takes a huge amount of tokens and then the cost becomes pretty big. That's the point at which you want to optimize it. But don't do that too early.”
2026-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Claude Code: What happens after coding is solved | Boris Cherny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, if you hire great engineers, they'll figure out how to do it, especially if you empower them to do it. This is something I actually talk a lot about with CTOs and all sorts of companies. My advice generally is don't try to optimize. Don't try to cost cut at the beginning. Start by just giving engineers as many tokens as possible. And now you're starting to see companies like, you know, Edanthropic, everyone can use a lot of tokens. We're starting to see this come up as a perk at some companies. If you join, you get unlimited tokens. This is a thing I very much encourage because it makes people free to try these ideas that would have been too crazy. And then if there's an idea that works, then you can figure out how to scale it. And that's the point to kind of optimize and to cost cut, figure out, maybe you can do it with haiku or with Sona instead of Opus or whatever. But at the beginning, you just want to throw a lot of tokens at it and see if the idea works and give engineers the freedom to do that.”
2026-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Claude Code: What happens after coding is solved | Boris Cherny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's the only way that we could ship a product that would compete in this very crowded coding market. But nowadays, it's still very much a principle we have on the team. And if you want to go faster, a really good way to do that is to just have Claude do more stuff. So you just very much encourages that.”
2026-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Claude Code: What happens after coding is solved | Boris Cherny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's an interesting thing that happens also when you underfund everything a little bit, because then people are kind of forced to clodify. And this is something that we see. So, you know, for work where sometimes we just put one engineer on a project, and the way that they're able to ship really quickly, because they want to ship quickly, this is like an intrinsic motivation that comes from within. It's just wanting to do a good job. One, if you have a good idea, you just really want to get it out there. No one has to force you to do that. That comes from you. And so if you have Claude, you can just use that to automate a lot of work. And that's kind of what we see over and over. So I think that's kind of like one principle is underfunding things a little bit. 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.”
2026-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Claude Code: What happens after coding is solved | Boris Cherny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Traditionally, the way that you do it is you take a heap snapshot, you put it into a special debugger, you kind of figure out what's going on, you know, use these special tools to see what's happening. And I was doing this and I was kind of like looking through these traces and trying to figure out what was going on. And the engineer that was newer on the team just had Quad Code do it. And it was like, hey, Claude, it seems like there's a leak. Can you figure it out? And so Quad Code did exactly the same thing that I was doing. It took the heap snapshot. It wrote a little tool for itself so it can kind of like analyze it itself. It was sort of like a just-in-time program. And it found the issue and put up a pull request faster than I could. So it's something where for those of us that have been using the model for a long time, you still have to kind of transport yourself to the current moment and not get stuck back in an old model because it's not Sonnet 3.5 anymore. The new models are just completely, completely different. And just this mindset shift is very different.”
2026-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Claude Code: What happens after coding is solved | Boris Cherny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is this something I have to remind myself once in a while? There's sort of like a downside of this because the model changes downsides that we could talk about. But I think one of them on a personal level is the model changes so often that I sometimes get stuck in this old way of thinking about it. And I even find that new people on the team or even new grads that join do stuff in a more kind of AGI forward way than I do. So like sometimes, for example, I had this case a couple months ago where there was a memory week. And so what this is is, you know, like quad”
2026-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Claude Code: What happens after coding is solved | Boris Cherny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And a lot of that was about productivity because if you make the code higher quality, then engineers are more productive. And things that we saw is, you know, in a year with hundreds of engineers working on it, you would see a gain of like a few percentage points of productivity, something like this. And so nowadays, seeing these gains of just hundreds of percentage points, it's just absolutely insane.”
2026-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Claude Code: What happens after coding is solved | Boris Cherny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, it's improved a lot. I think some of it is kind of like training that we do specific to coding. So obviously best coding model in the world and it's getting better and better. Like 4.6 is just incredible. But also actually a lot of the training that we do outside of coding translates pretty well too. So there was this kind of like transfer where you teach the model to do X and it kind of gets better at Y. Yeah, the gains have just been insane. Like identic Over the last year, like since we introduced Quad Code, we've probably, I don't know the exact number, we probably like 4x the engineering team or something like this. But productivity per engineer has increased 200% in terms of pull requests. And this number is just crazy for anyone that actually works in the space and works on deaf productivity. Because back in a previous life, I was at Meta and one of my responsibilities was code quality for the company. So this is like all of our code bases. That was my responsibility, like Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp.”
2026-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Claude Code: What happens after coding is solved | Boris Cherny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Honestly, the simplest thing is like open quad code or cowork and point it at a Slack thread. For us, we have this channel that's all the internal feedback about Quad Code. Since we first released it, even in like 2024 internally, it's just been this fire hose of feedback. And it's the best. And in the early days, what I would do is anytime that someone sends feedback, I would just go in and I would fix every single thing as fast as I possibly could. So like within a minute, within five minutes or whatever. And it's just really fast feedback cycle. It encourages people to give more and more feedback. It's just so important because it makes them feel heard. Because, you know, like usually when you use a product, you give feedback. It just goes into a black hole somewhere and then you don't get feedback again. So if you make people feel heard, then they want to contribute and they want to help make the thing better. And so now I kind of do the same thing, but Quad honestly does a lot of the work. So I pointed at the channel and it's like, okay, here's a few things that I can do. I just put a book a couple PRs, want to take a look at them. I'm like, yeah.”
2026-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Claude Code: What happens after coding is solved | Boris Cherny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For the team. Co work does all of it. It's like syncing stuff between spreadsheets and messaging people on Slack and email and all this kind of stuff. So I think the frontier is something like this. And I don't think it's coding because I think coding is, you know, it's pretty much solved. And over the next few months, I think what we're going to see is just across the industry, it's going to become increasingly solved for every kind of code base, every text talk that people work on.”
2026-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Claude Code: What happens after coding is solved | Boris Cherny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think something that's happening right now is Quad is starting to come up with ideas. So Quad is looking through feedback, it's looking at bug reports, it's looking at telemetry and things like this, and it's starting to come up with ideas for bug fixes and things to ship. So it's just starting to get a little more like a coworker or something like that. I think the second thing is we're starting to branch out of coding a little bit. So I think at this point it's safe to say that coding is largely solved, at least for the kinds of programming that I do is just a solve problem because Quad can do it. And so now we're starting to think about, okay, like what's next? What's beyond this? There's a lot of things that are kind of adjacent to coding. And I think this is going to be coming. But also just, you know, general tasks. I use cowork every day now to do all sorts of things that are just not related to coding at all and just to do it automatically. For example, I had to pay a parking ticket the other day. I just had cowork do it. All of my project managers.”
2026-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Claude Code: What happens after coding is solved | Boris Cherny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hunt every day. 100% written by QAT code. I have not edited a single line by hand since November. And yeah, that's been it. I do look at the code. So I don't think we're kind of at the point yet where you can be totally hands off, especially when there's a lot of people running the program. You have to make sure that it's correct. You have to make sure it's safe and so on. And then we also have Claude doing automatic code review for everything. So here at Anthropic Cloud reviews 100% of pull requests. There's still layer of like human review after it, but you kind of like you still do want some of these checkpoints. You still want a human looking at the code unless it's like pure prototype code that it's not going to run anywhere. It's just a prototype.”
2026-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Claude Code: What happens after coding is solved | Boris Cherny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so 100% of my code is written by Clot Code. I am a fairly prolific coder. And this has been the case even when I worked back at Instagram. I was like one of the top few most productive engineers. And that's actually the case here at Anth”
2026-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Claude Code: What happens after coding is solved | Boris Cherny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, that's the thing about innovation, right? Like you can't force it, there's no roadmap for innovation, you just have to give people space. You have to give them, maybe the word is like safety. So it's like psychological safety that it's okay to fail. It's okay if 80% of the ideas are bad. You also have to hold them accountable a bit. So if the idea is bad, you cut your losses, move on to the next idea instead of investing more in the early days of Quad Code, I had no idea that this thing would be useful at all because even in February when we released it, it was writing maybe, I don't know, like 20% of my code, not more. And even in May, it was writing maybe 30%. I was still using, you know, Kurzer for most of my code. And it only crossed 100% in November, so it took a while. But even from the earliest day, it just felt like I was onto something and I was just spending like every night, every weekend hacking on this. And luckily my, you know, my wife was very supportive. But it just felt like it was onto something. It wasn't obvious what. And sometimes, you know, you find a thread. You just have to pull on.”
2026-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Claude Code: What happens after coding is solved | Boris Cherny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Such a crazy prediction. But I think identic, this is just the way we think about things as exponentials. And this is very deep in the DNA. If you look at our co-founders, three of them were the first three authors on the Skaling Laws paper. So we really just think in exponentials. And if you kind of look at the exponential of the percent of code that was written by Clad at that point, if you just trace the line, it's pretty obvious we're going to cross 100% by the end of the year, even if it just does not match intuition at all. And so all I did was trace the line. And yeah, in November, that happened for me personally. And that's been the case since. And we're starting to see that for a lot of different customers.”
2026-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Claude Code: What happens after coding is solved | Boris Cherny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's really fast. Backett code with Quad back in May. That was like our first developer conference that we did as Anthropic. I did a short talk and in the Q&A after the talk, people were asking, what are your predictions for the end of the year? And my prediction back in May of 2025 was by the end of the year, you might not need an ID to code anymore. And we're going to start to see engineers not doing this. And I remember the room audibly gasped.”
2026-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Claude Code: What happens after coding is solved | Boris Cherny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But that wasn't the starting point. So, yeah, I mean, at the beginning, it was kind of a surprise that this thing was even useful. And, you know, as the team grew, as the product grew, as it started to become more and more useful to people, just people around the world, from small startups to the biggest fang companies started using it and they started giving feedback. And I think just reflecting back, it's been such a humbling experience because we keep learning from our users. And just the most exciting thing is like, you know, none of us really know what we're doing. And we're just trying to figure out along with everyone else. And the single best signal for that is just feedback from users. So that's just been the best. I've been surprised so many times.”
2026-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Claude Code: What happens after coding is solved | Boris Cherny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Until the chart just went vertical pretty immediately. And then in February, we released it externally. Actually, something that people don't really remember is CloudCode was not initially a hit when we released it. It got a bunch of users. There was a lot of early adopters that got it immediately. But it actually took many months for everyone to really understand what this thing is. Just again, it's like, it's just so different. And when I think about it, kind of part of the reason quad code works is this idea of latent demand. where we bring the tool to where people are and it makes existing workflows a little bit easier. But also because it's in a terminal, it's like a little surprising. It's a little alien in this way. So you have to kind of be open-minded and you have to learn to use it. And of course, now quad code is available in the iOS and Android Quad app. It's available in the desktop app. It's available on the website. It's available as ed extensions and Slack and GitHub. You know, all of these places where engineers are. It's a little more familiar.”
2026-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Claude Code: What happens after coding is solved | Boris Cherny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And yeah, it ended up catching on after I released it pretty quickly, it became a hit at Anthropic and the Daily Active users just went vertical. And really early on, actually, before I launched it at Ben Man nudged me to make a DAU chart. And I was like, you know, it's kind of early. Maybe, you know, should we really do it right now? And he was like, yeah.”
2026-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Claude Code: What happens after coding is solved | Boris Cherny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then we started thinking about what other form factors we should build. And we actually decided to stick with the terminal for a while. And the biggest reason was the model is improving so quickly. We felt that there wasn't really another form factor that could keep up with it. And honestly, this was just me kind of like struggling with what should rebuild for the last year has just been all I think about. And so just like late at night, this is just something I was thinking about like, okay, the model is continuing to improve. What do we do? How can we possibly keep up? And the terminal was honestly just the only idea that I had.”
2026-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Claude Code: What happens after coding is solved | Boris Cherny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so I started prototyping this a little bit more. I made a post about it and I announced it internally and I got two likes. That was a sense of the reaction at the time. Because I think people internally, when you think of coding tools, you think of IDEs, you think about all these pretty sophisticated environments. No one thought that this thing could be terminal-based. That's sort of a weird way to design it, and that wasn't really the intention. But from the start, I built it in a terminal because for the first couple months, it was just me. So it was just the easiest way to build. And for me, this is actually a pretty important product lesson, right? It's like you want to under-resource things a little bit at the start.”
2026-02-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Claude Code: What happens after coding is solved | Boris Cherny · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source