Boris Cherny on Building Claude Code at Anthropic

A very special guest on this episode of the Lightcone! @bcherny, 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’ http://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