Head of Claude Code: What happens after coding is solved | Boris Cherny

100% of my code is written by quad code.

I have not edited a single line by hand

since November. Every day I ship 10, 20,

30 p requests. So at the moment I have

like five [music] agents running while

we're recording this.

>> Yeah. Yeah. Do you miss writing code?

>> I have never enjoyed coding as much as I

do today because I don't have to deal

with all the minutia. Productivity per

engineer has increased 200%.

>> There's always this question, should I

learn to code? In a year or two, it's

not [music] going to matter. Coding is

largely solved. I imagine a world where

everyone is able to program. Anyone can

just build software anytime. What's the

next big shift [music] to how software

is written?

>> Quad is starting to come up with ideas.

It's looking through feedback. It's

looking at bug reports. It's looking at

telemetry for bug fixes and things to

ship a little more like a co-orker or

something like that.

>> A lot of people listening to this are

product managers and they're probably

sweating. I think by the end of the

year, everyone's going to be a product

manager and everyone codes. The title

software engineer is going to start

[music] to go away. It's just going to

be replaced by builder and it's going to

be painful for a lot of people.

Today my guest is Boris Churnney, head

of Claude Code at Anthropic. It is hard

to describe the impact that Claude Code

has had on the [music] world. Around the

time this episode comes out will be the

one-year anniversary of Claude Code. And

in that short time, it has completely

transformed the job of a software

engineer and it is now starting to

transform the jobs of many other

functions in tech which we talk about.

Cloud code itself is also a massive

driver of anthropic overall growth over

the past year. They just raised a round

at over [music] $350 billion. And as

Boris mentions, the growth of Claude

Code itself is still accelerating. Just

in the past month, their daily active

users has doubled. Boris is also just a

really interesting, thoughtful,

deepinking human. And during this

conversation, we discover we were born

in the same city in Ukraine. That is so

funny. I had no idea. A huge thank you

to Ben Man, Jenny Wen, and Mike Griger

for suggesting topics for this

conversation. Don't forget to check out

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for an incredible set of deals available

exclusively to Lenny's newsletter

subscribers. Let's get into it after a

short word from our wonderful sponsors.

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Boris, thank you so much for being here

and welcome to the podcast. [music]

>> Yeah, thanks for having me on.

>> I want to start with a a spicy question.

About 6 months ago, I don't know if

people even remember this, you actually

left Anthropic. You joined Curser and

then two weeks later, you went back to

Anthropic. What happened there? I don't

think I've ever heard the actual story.

>> [laughter]

>> It's the fastest job change that I've

ever had.

Um, I joined Cursor because I'm a big

fan of the product and honestly I met

the team and I was just really

impressed. Uh, they're an awesome team.

Uh, I still I still think they're

awesome and they're just building really

cool stuff and kind of they they saw

where AI coding was going I think before

a lot of people did. So the idea of

building good product was just very

exciting for me. I think as soon as I

got there, what I started to realize is

what I really missed about Ant was the

mission. And that's actually what

originally drove me to Ant also cuz uh

but before I joined Anthropic, I was,

you know, I was working in big tech and

then I was at some point I wanted to

work at a at a lab to just help shape

the future of this crazy thing that that

we're building in some way. And the

thing that drew me to anthropic was the

mission. And it was, you know, it's all

about safety. And when you talk to

people at Enthropic, just like find

someone in the hallway, if you ask them

why they're here, the answer is always

going to be safety. Um, and so this kind

of like missiondrivenness just really

really resonated with me. And I just

know personally it's something I need in

order to be happy. Um, and I that's just

a thing that I really missed. And I

found that, you know, whatever the work

might be, no matter how exciting, even

if it's building a really cool product,

it's just not really a substitute for

that. Um, so for me it was actually u it

was pretty obvious that that I was

missing that pretty quick.

>> Okay. So let me follow the thread of

just coming back to anthropic and the

work you've done there. This podcast is

going to come out around the year

anniversary of launching cloud code. So

I'm going to spend a little time just

reflecting on the impact that you've

had. There's um this report that

recently came out that I'm sure you saw

by semi analysis that showed that 4% of

all GitHub commits are authored by cloud

code now. and they predicted it'll be a

fifth of all code commits on GitHub by

the end of the year. The way they put it

is while we blinked, AI consumed all

software development.

The day that we're recording this,

Spotify just put out this uh headline

that their best developers haven't

written a line of code since December

thanks to AI. More and more of the most

advanced senior engineers, including

you, are sharing the fact that you don't

write code anymore, that it's all AI

generated. and many aren't even looking

at code anymore is how far we've gotten

in large part thanks to this little

project that you started and that your

team has scaled over the past year. I'm

curious just to hear your reflections on

on this past year and the impact that

your work has had. These numbers are

just totally crazy, right? Like four 4%

of all commits in the world is just way

more than I imagined and like like you

said, it still feels like the starting

point. Um these are also just public

commits. So we actually think if you