Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:13:58 · Boris Cherny
[00:13:58] S0: Yeah. It's really fast. Back at Code with Claude back in May, that was our first developer conference that we did as Anthropic, I did a short talk. And in the Q&A after the talk, people were asking, "What are your predictions for the end of the year?" And my prediction back in May of 2025 was, "By the end of the year, you might not need an IDE to code anymore. And we're going to start to see engineers not doing this." And I remember the room audibly gasped. It was such a crazy prediction. But I think at Anthropic, this is just the way ... The way we think about things is exponentials. And this is very deep in the DNA. Like, if you look at our co-founders, three of them were the first three authors on the scaling laws paper. So, we really just think in exponentials. And if you look at the exponential, the percent of code that was written by Claude at that point, if you just trace the line, it's pretty obvious we're going to cross 100% by the end of the year, even if it just does not match intuition at all. And so, all I did was trace the line. And, yeah. In November that happened for me personally. And that's been the case since. And we're starting to see that for a lot of different customers too.
00:15:01 · Lenny Rachitsky, Boris Cherny
[00:15:01] S1: I thought it was really interesting what you just shared there about the journey is this idea of just playing around and seeing what happens. This comes up with OpenClaw a lot, just, like, "Peter was playing around and a thing happened." And it feels like that's a central ingredient to a lot of the biggest innovations in AI is people just sitting around trying stuff, pushing the models further than most other people. [00:15:22] S0: That's the thing about innovation. Right? You can't force it. There's no road map for innovation. You just have to give people space. You have to give them ... Maybe the word is, like, safety. So, it's, like, psychological safety that it's okay to fail. It's okay if 80% of the ideas are bad. You also have to hold them accountable a bit. So, if the idea is bad, you cut your losses, move onto the next idea instead of investing more. In the early days of Claude Code, I had no idea that this thing would be useful at all, because even in February when we released it, it was writing maybe, like, I don't know, 20% of my code, not more. And even in May, it was writing maybe 30%. I was still using Cursor for most of my code. And it only crossed 100% in November. So, it took a while, but even from the earliest day, it just felt like I was onto something, and I was just spending every night, every weekend hacking on this. And, luckily, my wife was very supportive. But it just felt like it was onto something. It wasn't obvious what. And sometimes you find a thread, you just have to pull on it.
00:15:22 · Boris Cherny, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:15:22] S0: That's the thing about innovation. Right? You can't force it. There's no road map for innovation. You just have to give people space. You have to give them ... Maybe the word is, like, safety. So, it's, like, psychological safety that it's okay to fail. It's okay if 80% of the ideas are bad. You also have to hold them accountable a bit. So, if the idea is bad, you cut your losses, move onto the next idea instead of investing more. In the early days of Claude Code, I had no idea that this thing would be useful at all, because even in February when we released it, it was writing maybe, like, I don't know, 20% of my code, not more. And even in May, it was writing maybe 30%. I was still using Cursor for most of my code. And it only crossed 100% in November. So, it took a while, but even from the earliest day, it just felt like I was onto something, and I was just spending every night, every weekend hacking on this. And, luckily, my wife was very supportive. But it just felt like it was onto something. It wasn't obvious what. And sometimes you find a thread, you just have to pull on it. [00:16:17] S1: So, at this point, 100% of your code is written by Claude Code. Is that the current state of your coding? [00:16:23] S0: Yeah. So, 100% of my code is written by Claude Code. I am a fairly prolific coder. And this has been the case even when I worked back at Instagram. I was one of the top few most productive engineers. And that's still the case here at Anthropic. [00:16:38] S1: Wow. Even as head of the team?
00:16:38 · Lenny Rachitsky, Boris Cherny
[00:16:38] S1: Wow. Even as head of the team? [00:16:41] S0: Yeah. Yeah. Still od a lot of coding. And so, every day, I ship, like, 10, 20, 30 pull requests or something like that. [00:16:47] S1: Every day? [00:16:49] S0: Every day. Yeah. [00:16:50] S1: Good God. [00:16:51] S0: 100% written by Claude Code. I have not edited a single line by hand since November. And, yeah. I do look at the code. So, I don't think we're at the point at where you can be totally hands-off, especially, when there's a lot of people running the program. You have to make sure that it's correct, you have to make sure it's safe, and so on. And then we also have Claude doing automatic code review for everything. So, here at Anthropic, Claude reviews 100% of pull requests. There's still a layer of human review after it, but you still do want some of these checkpoints. Like, you still want a human looking at the code. Unless it's pure prototype code that it's not going to run anywhere. It's just a prototype. [00:17:32] S1: What's the next frontier? So, at this point, 100% of your code is being written by AI. This is, clearly, where everyone is going in software engineering. That felt like a crazy milestone. Now it's just like, "Of course. This is the world now." What's the next big shift to how software is written that either your team is already operating in or you think will head towards?
00:17:54 · Boris Cherny
[00:17:54] S0: I think something that's happening right now is Claude is starting to come up with ideas. So, Claude is looking for feedback. It's looking at bug reports. It's looking at telemetry, and things like this, and it's starting to come up with ideas for bug fixes, and things to ship. So, it's just starting to get a little more like a coworker or something like that. I think the second thing is we're starting to branch out of coding a little bit. So, I think, at this point, it's safe to say that coding is virtually solved. At least, for the kinds of programming that I do, it's just a solved problem, because Claude can do it. And so, now we're starting to think about, "Okay. What's next? What's beyond this?" There's a lot of things that are adjacent to coding, and I think this is [inaudible 00:18:35] becoming, but also just general to us. Like, I use Cowork every day now to do all sorts of things that are just not related to coding at all, and just to do it automatically. Like, for example, I had to pay a parking ticket the other day. I just had Cowork do it. All of my project management for the team, Cowork does all of it. It's, like, syncing stuff between spreadsheets, and messaging people on Slack, and email, and all this kind of stuff. So, I think the frontier is something like this. And I don't think it's coding, because I think coding, it's pretty much solved, and over the next few months, I think what we're going to see is just across the industry it's going to become increasingly solved for every kind of code base, every tech stack that people work on.
00:19:14 · Lenny Rachitsky, Boris Cherny
[00:19:14] S1: This idea of helping you come up with what to work on is so interesting. A lot of people listening to this are product managers and they're probably sweating. How do you use Claude for this? Do you just talk to it? Is there anything clever you've come up with to help you use it to come up with what to build? [00:19:30] S0: Honestly, the simplest thing is, like, open Claude or Cowork, and point it at a Slack thread. Like, for us, we have this channel that's all the internal feedback about Claude Code. Since we first released it, even in 2024, internally, it's just been this fire hose of feedback. It is the best. And in the early days, what I would do is any time that someone sends feedback, I would just go in, and I would fix every single thing as fast as I possibly could. So, like, within a minute, within five minutes, or whatever. And this just really fast feedback cycle, it encourages people to give more and more feedback. It's just so important, because it makes them feel heard. Because, usually, when you use a product, you get feedback, it just goes into a black hole somewhere, and then you don't get feedback again. So, if you make people feel heard, then they want to contribute, then they want to help make the thing better. And so, now I do the same thing, but, Claude, honestly, does a lot of the work. So, I pointed at the channel, and it's like, "Okay. Here's a few things that I can do. I just put up a couple PRs. Want to take a look at that one?" I'm like, "Yeah."