The Creator of Claude Code on The Hottest Piece of Software in the World

**Boris Cherny** (0:02)
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio, news.

**Joe Weisenthal** (0:18)
Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.

**Tracy Alloway** (0:22)
And I'm Tracy Alloway.

**Joe Weisenthal** (0:24)
Tracy, so I think the most embarrassing moment for me in-

**Tracy Alloway** (0:28)
Go on. What's the most exciting way you've ever started a podcast, Joe?

**Joe Weisenthal** (0:32)
Maybe not the most embarrassing way, the moment I felt like I'm making myself a little stupider or something like that in 2026, was I asked Claude Code to clean up all the many screenshots that I had on my desktop.
So I was like, just put the, I have all these, you have all these screenshots on my desktop, various charts and stuff, and I was like, Claude Code, can you do this? In that moment, I realized that I was essentially outsourcing my computer to another computer. There's big data centers, etc. that Anthropic has, and rather than just taking a few seconds, drag and drop some screenshots, I was like, no, I'm going to have another computer use my computer for me.

**Tracy Alloway** (1:12)
That just seems efficient. But here's the big question, did it do it correctly?

**Joe Weisenthal** (1:16)
Absolutely, yeah, it was perfect.

**Tracy Alloway** (1:18)
All right, because you hear the stories about agents going off the rails, like there was some software company or like car rental software company, and I think they had an agent that deleted their entire database, and then admitted that it had violated its core principles in doing so, but didn't have an explanation as to why.

**Joe Weisenthal** (1:36)
There's definitely been times in my Claude Code usage, which is not very sophisticated, where it'll just ask me like, do I do this or this? And I have no idea what it's asking for, and I just like hit yes.

**Tracy Alloway** (1:48)
Hesitantly pressing the enter button.

**Joe Weisenthal** (1:50)
No, I wish I could say hesitantly. I don't even think about it. I just like hit yes. So far, no disasters from that, but I just like, yeah, I assume it's right and maybe it's playing.
What's the reverse slot machine? Where it's good every time, but every once in a while, it's really disastrous.

**Tracy Alloway** (2:07)
Yeah.

**Joe Weisenthal** (2:07)
I guess Russian Roulette kind of would be the example of that. But yes, obviously, setting all this aside, I think 2026 has been, in terms of software, do you ever want to talk about Claude Code?

**Tracy Alloway** (2:20)
Absolutely. We also had the big market scare where we saw a lot of software companies get hit because there was this perception that Claude Code would basically be able to do everything. Yeah.

**Joe Weisenthal** (2:29)
There was a day where Anthropic announced, here's something new and I don't even think people, people were so trigger happy, they didn't even look and see what it was. It's like, here's a new thing for financial services. You just see all the financial services stocks fall, etc. But it does raise some questions like, here's a big AI company, what will be the limits of where they go, what kind of businesses they can get into and so forth. But then even without that, what is the future of software engineering? What is the future for people with a laptop job?

**Tracy Alloway** (3:00)
The future of workflow, because it's plausible in the future, I'm just going to interact with my computer in every single way through some sort of agent.

**Joe Weisenthal** (3:09)
Yeah. All right. Well, let's talk more about Claude Code. We really do have literally the perfect guest because we are going to be speaking with the creator, the head of Claude Code at Anthropic, Boris Cherny. Boris, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

**Boris Cherny** (3:22)
Yeah, thanks for having me.

**Joe Weisenthal** (3:24)
Why don't you give us the very short version of how did Claude Code came about, or what is it and where did it come from?

**Boris Cherny** (3:32)
So, okay, here's the shortest version. So, you know, Claude Code came from Anthropic. Anthropic is the AI lab that was created to make AI safe. So, we've been working on AI safety for many years now, and there's a lot of hard problems. And when we first started, we knew some of the hard problems, but we didn't know all of them. One of the really hard problems is how do you figure out if the model is actually safe in the ways that you want? And there's essentially a lot of ways to answer this. You can do evals. So, essentially, you look at the model and kind of like a petri dish in a laboratory setting. You can peer inside the model's neurons. So, this is like a mechanistic interpretability to figure out what it's actually doing at a mechanistic level.