Building Claude Code with Boris Cherny
The Pragmatic Engineer
Mar 04
Building Claude Code with Boris Cherny
Building Claude Code with Boris Cherny

The Pragmatic Engineer
Mar 04
In this episode, Boris Cherny—creator of Claude Code and former Principal Engineer at Meta—shares firsthand insights into how AI is fundamentally transforming software engineering workflows, team structures, and the very definition of engineering excellence.
Boris details how Claude Code evolved from a bash-based internal experiment into Anthropic’s primary coding tool—now responsible for ~80% of company code. Its architecture leverages parallel agents, agentic search (not RAG), and a multi-layer 'Swiss cheese' security model to balance speed and safety. His daily workflow relies on plan-mode checkouts, on-device development, and deterministic linting alongside AI review—catching ~80% of bugs before human eyes. Crucially, the tool catalyzed a cultural shift: flat titles ('Member of Technical Staff'), blurred role boundaries, and rapid prototyping (e.g., 20 to-do app variants in 1.5 days). The emergence of Claude Cowork—built in 10 days for non-engineers—underscores how AI expands technical agency beyond traditional developers. As coding becomes more accessible, Boris argues that skills like intellectual humility, cross-domain curiosity, hypothesis-driven iteration, and systems thinking matter more than ever—while outdated distinctions around language preferences or code style fade. The printing press analogy frames this not as job loss, but as a centuries-long redefinition of expertise, literacy, and labor.
00:00
00:00
His first hand-written PR at Anthropic was rejected
16:03
16:03
Code quality significantly impacts engineering productivity through causal analysis
22:09
22:09
They wanted to understand the public Anthropic API as they had never used it before
27:44
27:44
Claude Code writes about 80% of the code at Anthropic on average
35:04
35:04
Learn mode is recommended for new members of the Claude Code team and Anthropic
36:29
36:29
Using '/config' in Claude Code to pick output styles, suggesting 'explanatory' for new code bases
40:27
40:27
Claude Code catches about 80% of bugs in CI before human review
49:53
49:53
Agentic Search—a fancy term for glob and grep—outperformed RAG for code search
52:40
52:40
Everyone at Anthropic is a 'Member of Technical Staff' to reflect generalist roles across coding, design, and user research
1:04:25
1:04:25
Claude Cowork was built in 10 days to serve non-engineers who were already using Claude Code for creative real-world tasks like monitoring tomato plants
1:05:18
1:05:18
Claude Cowork was built in about 10 days with Claude Code, adding guardrails like a virtual machine for safety
1:12:48
1:12:48
Claude Cowork has been an instant hit, unlike Claude Code which had a slow start
1:14:47
1:14:47
Uncorrelated context windows allow sub-agents to operate with fresh context, yielding better results than expanding the main agent's context
1:26:11
1:26:11
Just as kings employed scribes and business owners hire software engineers, the current technological shift may reduce the need for middle-men
1:30:17
1:30:17
Safety has become the most important concern after seeing new risks in the past year
1:34:47
1:34:47
A book serves as a product roadmap for the next 50 years, covering AI takeoff, singularity, and group consciousness orbiting Jupiter
1:35:24
1:35:24
Software engineers' roles may change like medieval scribes after the printing press