Inside Claude Code With Its Creator Boris Cherny

**Boris Cherny** (0:00)
At Anthropic, the way that we thought about it is, we don't build for the model of today, we build for the model six months from now. That's actually still my advice to founders that are building on LLMs. Just try to think about what is that frontier where the model's not very good at today, because it's gonna get good at it. All of Claude Code has just been written and rewritten and rewritten and rewritten over and over and over. There is no part of Claude Code that was around six months ago. You try a thing, you give it to users, you talk to users, you learn, and then eventually you might end up at a good idea. Sometimes you don't.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:27)
Are you also in the back of your mind thinking that maybe like in six months you won't need to prompt that explicitly, that the model should be good enough to figure out how it's owned?

**Boris Cherny** (0:34)
Maybe in a month.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:36)
No more need for plan mode in a month?

**SPEAKER_4** (0:38)
Oh my god. Welcome to another episode of The Lightcone, and today we have an extremely special guest, Boris Cherny, the creator, engineer of Claude Code. Boris, thanks for joining us.

**Boris Cherny** (0:58)
Thanks for having me.

**SPEAKER_4** (0:59)
Thanks for creating a thing that has taken away my sleep for about three weeks straight. I am very addicted to Claude Code, and it feels like rocket boosters. Has it felt like this for people, like for months at this point? I think it was like end of November is where a lot of my friends said like something changed.

**Boris Cherny** (1:19)
I remember for me, I felt this way when I first created Claude Code and I didn't yet know if I was on to something, I kind of felt like I was on to something, and then that's when I wasn't sleeping. When was that? And that was just like three straight months. This was September 2024 Yeah, it was like three straight months. I didn't take a single day of vacation, worked through the weekends, worked every single night. I was just like, oh my God, I think this is going to be a thing. I don't know if it's useful yet, because it couldn't actually code yet.

**SPEAKER_4** (1:45)
If you look back on those moments to now, what would be the most surprising thing about this moment right now?

**Boris Cherny** (1:52)
It's unbelievable that we're still using a terminal. That was supposed to be the starting point. I didn't think that would be the ending point. And then the second one is that it's even useful, because at the beginning, it didn't really write code. Even in February when we created it, it wrote maybe like 10 percent of my code or something like that. I didn't really use it to write code. It wasn't very good at it. I still wrote most of my code by hand. So the fact that it actually like our bets paid off, and it got good at the thing that we thought it was going to get good at, because it wasn't obvious. At Anthropic, the way that we thought about it is we don't build for the model of today, we build for the model six months from now. And that's actually like still my advice to founders that are building on LLMs is, you know, just try to think about like, what is that frontier where the model is not very good at today? Because it's going to get good at it. And you just have to wait.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:38)
Going back, do you remember when you first got the idea? Can you just talk us through that? Like, was it like a spark? Or what was even the first version of it in your mind?

**Boris Cherny** (2:46)
You know, it's funny, it was like, it was so accidental that it just kind of evolved into this. You know, as Anthropic, I think for ANT, the bed has been coding for a long time. And the bed has been the path to save AGI is through coding. And this has kind of always been the idea. And the way you get there is you teach the model how to code, then you teach it how to use tools, then you teach it how to use computers. And you can kind of see that because the first team that I joined at Anthropic, it was called the Anthropic Labs team. And it produced three products. It was Claude Code, MCP and the Desktop App. So you can kind of see how these like weave together. The particular product that we built, you know, like no one asked me to build a CLI.