
22 segments available
A very special guest on this episode of the Lightcone! Boris Cherny, the creator of Claude Code, sits down to share the incredible journey of developing one of the most transformative coding tools of the AI era. 00:00 Intro 01:45 The most surprising moment in the rise of Claude Code 02:38 How Boris came up with the idea for Claude Code 05:38 The elegant simplicity of terminals 07:09 The first use cases 09:00 What’s in Boris’ CLAUDE.md? 11:29 How do you decide the terminal’s verbosity? 15:44 Beginner’s mindset is key as the models improve 18:56 Hyper specialists vs hyper generalists 21:51 The vision for Claude teams 23:48 Subagents 25:12 A world without plan mode? 28:38 Tips for founders to build for the future 30:07 How much life does the terminal still have? 30:57 Advice for dev tool founders 32:11 Claude Code and TypeScript parallels 35:34 Designing for the terminal was hard 37:36 Other advice for builders 40:31 Productivity per engineer 41:36 Why Boris chose to join Anthropic 44:46 How coding will change 46:22 Outro Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply Work at a startup: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs
"At Enthropic, 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 like still my advice to to founders that are buildi..."
">> If you look back on uh those moments to now, like what would be like the most surprising thing about this moment right now? >> It's unbelievable that we're still using a terminal. That was supposed..."
">> Going back though, but when do you remember when you first got the idea? Can you just talk us through that? Like was it some like a spark or what was even the first version of it in your mind? >> Y..."
">> That's kind of fascinating. I mean it's very kind of contrarian that clocker works so well in such an elegant simple form factor. I mean terminals have been around for a really long time and that s..."
">> So in that 2024 period, what how were the engineers using it? Were they sort of shipping code with it yet or were they using it in a different way? >> The model is not very good at coding yet. I I ..."
"cloud MD >> okay so I I checked this before we came so my my cloud has two Um, one is, uh, there it's just two lines. So, the first line is whenever you put up a PR, enable automerge. Um, so as soon a..."
"like sort of the terminal to be like sometimes you have to go you know control O and check it out and is it like internal bike shed battles around like longer shorter I mean every user probably has a ..."
">> So what would be some advice for technical founders to really become maximalists at the latest model release? It sounds like people off of fresh off of school or that don't have any assumptions mig..."
"uh when I look at engineers on the team that I think are the most effective, there's essentially two, it's very biodal. Um there's one side where it's extreme specialists. Um and so like I named Jared..."
">> you know, like we just launched quad teams and, you know, this is a way to do it, but you can also just build your own way to do it. It's pretty easy. >> What's the vision for cloud teams? >> Just ..."
"this more for debugging so that I get like I spend a lot of time on debugging And it would just be better to have like multiple sub agents spin up and like debug something in parallel. And so then I j..."
"What would the world look like without plan mode? Do you just describe it at the prompt level and it would just do it? One shot it? Yeah, we've uh we've started experimenting with this because quad co..."
"how to build for the future? Sounds like everything is really changing. What are like some principles that will stay on and what will change? >> So I think some of these are pretty are pretty basic, b..."
"left to go just given with this world of swore multiple agents like do you think there's going to be a new a need for a different UI on top of it? >> It's funny if you asked me this a year ago I would..."
"founders? Like, someone's building a DevTool company today. Should they just like be building for engineers and humans or should they be thinking more about like what Claude going to think and want an..."
"10 years ago, you were a very heav heavy user and you wrote a book about TypeScript, right? Before Typescript was cool. This is when everyone was a deep in JavaScript. This is back in early 2010s righ..."
"Designing for the terminal honestly has been hard, right? It's like uh it's like 80 by 100 characters or whatever. you have like 256 colors, you have one font size, you don't have like mouse interacti..."
">> Boris, you had other advice for for builders and we kept interrupting you because we have so many questions, but >> I would say um so okay, so maybe two pieces of advice that are kind of weird beca..."
"internally if you if you look at like technical employees, they all use quad code every day. Um, and even non-technical employees, I think like half the sales team uses quad code. Um, they they've sta..."
"Anthropic? I mean basically as a builder you could go anywhere. What was the moment that made you say like actually this is the set of people or this is the approach. I was living in rural Japan and I..."
"think what will happen is coding will be generally solved for everyone. Um, and I think today coding is practically solved, you know, for me and I think it'll be the case for everyone. Um, you know, r..."
"outside is basically everyone went away over the holidays and then like found out about Claude code and it's just been crazy ever since. Is that how it was for you at like internally? Did you were you..."