Boris Cherny: How We Built Claude Code

Building for Future Models00:00

At Anthropic, they build for the model six months from now, not today's model. Advice to founders building on LLMs: think about the frontier where the model is not very good at today because it's going to get good at it. All of Claude Code has been written and rewritten over and over. No part of Claude Code was around 6 months ago. Try a thing, give it to users, talk to users, learn, and eventually might end up at a good idea. Sometimes you don't. In 6 months, might not need to prompt explicitly; the model will figure it out on its own. Maybe no more need for plan mode in a month.

Introduction and Addiction to Claude Code00:30

Welcome to another episode of the Light Cone with Boris Cherny, creator engineer of Claude Code. Boris has created a thing that has taken away sleep for about 3 weeks; it's like rocket boosters. Felt like this for Boris when he first created Claude Code in September 2024, three straight months without a single day vacation, working weekends and nights because he thought it was going to be a thing, though it couldn't actually code yet.

Most Surprising Things01:30

Most surprising now: unbelievable that they're still using a terminal; it was supposed to be the starting point, not the ending point. Second: it's even useful because at the beginning it didn't write code. Even in February, it wrote maybe 10% of code; most code was still written by hand. Bets paid off and it got good at what they thought it would get good at, which wasn't obvious. Build for the model 6 months from now.