[
  {
    "speaker": "Asia",
    "text": "Okay, I'm excited to introduce our next speaker."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Asia",
    "text": "Show of hands, who here uses Claude code?"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Asia",
    "text": "Okay, show of hands, who here has Claude code psychosis?"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Asia",
    "text": "Come on guys, [clears throat] it's okay."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Asia",
    "text": "It's okay."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Asia",
    "text": "Um my my my team lovingly says I have Claude code psychosis, which may or may not be true."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Asia",
    "text": "Um we are delighted to have Boris Cherny with us today."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Asia",
    "text": "Uh Boris is the creator, the father of Claude code."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Asia",
    "text": "Um and uh in the process of doing that has just had a front row seat to to reinventing uh the modern way of of software development."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Asia",
    "text": "Um and we're we're really grateful to you, Boris, for taking the time to speak with us today."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Asia",
    "text": "We know that um the entirety of software development kind of rests on your shoulders."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Asia",
    "text": "So, thank you for taking it out of your time to be with us today."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Asia",
    "text": "And interviewing Boris is Lauren Reader from our team."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Asia",
    "text": "Thank you."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Event",
    "text": "[applause]"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Lauren Reader",
    "text": "Giving our chairs."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Lauren Reader",
    "text": "Um you took my you took my opening line, Asia."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Lauren Reader",
    "text": "We asked who here uses Claude code."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Lauren Reader",
    "text": "There's a lot of hands."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Lauren Reader",
    "text": "That's awesome."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Lauren Reader",
    "text": "Thank you for joining us, Boris."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Lauren Reader",
    "text": "It's very special to have you here."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Lauren Reader",
    "text": "Um as a roomful of builders, I think you are changing building entirely."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Lauren Reader",
    "text": "And so, I'm very curious to explore how you think about the future of software, coding, and what we should spend all of our free time on."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Lauren Reader",
    "text": "Um but I'll give you a me a tiny bit more background on you so that everyone has a little bit more context."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Lauren Reader",
    "text": "So, beyond creating Claude code, Boris is very much an engineer's engineer."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Lauren Reader",
    "text": "You were writing a lot of code through your whole career, writing textbooks about code, including programming in TypeScript."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Lauren Reader",
    "text": "Um and I think last time we chatted you hadn't written a single line of code in the last year, or at least so far in 2026, which is quite the change."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Lauren Reader",
    "text": "Um There's also a a little known thing back in middle school, I wrote a guide about uh writing BASIC for TI-83 Plus calculators."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Lauren Reader",
    "text": "And I I just I I searched for it, it's actually still on the internet."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Lauren Reader",
    "text": "It's extremely embarrassing, so please don't search it."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Lauren Reader",
    "text": "But it [laughter] exists."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Lauren Reader",
    "text": "We will definitely be finding that."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Lauren Reader",
    "text": "Um so, we're going to do I'm going to start with a few questions here."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Lauren Reader",
    "text": "Maybe we'll start with a little bit of the history of Claude code, how you started it, and then we're going to have a lot of audience Q&A for this one."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Lauren Reader",
    "text": "And so, start thinking about your questions in the back of your head, uh and would love to turn it over to you all soon."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Lauren Reader",
    "text": "Yeah."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Lauren Reader",
    "text": "Um and also real quick, so for people that use Claude code, do people use the CLI mostly?"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Lauren Reader",
    "text": "Like okay, majority CLI?"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Lauren Reader",
    "text": "Okay."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Lauren Reader",
    "text": "That's a lot."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Lauren Reader",
    "text": "Majority desktop?"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Lauren Reader",
    "text": "Okay."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Lauren Reader",
    "text": "Majority VS code or JetBrains IDE?"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Lauren Reader",
    "text": "Okay."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Lauren Reader",
    "text": "That's actually not a lot."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Lauren Reader",
    "text": "Okay."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Lauren Reader",
    "text": "Other?"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Lauren Reader",
    "text": "I'm like iOS mostly these days."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Lauren Reader",
    "text": "Yeah."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Event",
    "text": "[laughter]"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Okay."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Cool."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Um yeah, so I started Claude code kind of accidentally in a in a lot of ways."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Um I joined this team back in late 2024."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "It was a sort of this incubator within Anthropic called Anthropic Labs."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "And uh the team kind of served its purpose."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Um we created Claude code, uh MCP, and the desktop app."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "It was a team it was just a few of us."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "So, very much like innovation team."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "We built the thing that we wanted to build, we disbanded the team."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Uh now the team's actually back together for round two."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Mike Krieger, who's the you know, like the chief product officer at at Anthropic and used to be one of the founders at Instagram, so he's leading that right now."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Um so the kind of the the the the reason that I started to work on coding is we felt like there was this product overhang."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "And I I'm guessing people here use that word a lot."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Uh but we definitely use this word a lot in kind of within the lab."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Uh there's this idea that the model can do all the stuff that no product has yet captured."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "And in late 2024, when we were looking at coding, the way that we did coding, the state of the art at the time was type ahead."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "It was you open your IDE and you press tab and you can like complete like one line at a time."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "And that was the thing that Sonnet 3.5 enabled for the first time."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "But the feeling was we could actually go a lot further than that."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "And the model was almost ready for the next big step."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "So, we don't have to do type ahead anymore, we can just have the agent write all of the code."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "And so, I built it, and it just really didn't work for the first 6 months."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "It was like not very good."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "It was barely usable."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "I wrote it from I used it for maybe 10% of my code or something like that."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "And even after we released Claude code initially, it was not a hit."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "There's a lot of people that used it, but it did not have this exponential growth that it has today."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Um that started with Opus 4 in May."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "And I I remember that very clearly."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "That's like when the exponential growth started, and then it kind of inflected with every model release."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Uh like it started with Opus 4, then 4.5, then 4.6, now 4.7."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "It just kind of keeps inflecting."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "But essentially, we were trying to build this thing that was like pre-PMF, and we knew that it wouldn't have PMF for 6 months because we were building for the next model."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "And that was the idea the pretty much the whole time."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "And you know, for Anthropic in general, we've always just been very focused."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "We've always cared about business and enterprise and safety and coding."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "That's just always been kind of the way that we wanted to build."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "And so, at some point we kind of knew that we wanted to build a product."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "We didn't know exactly what we wanted."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "So, this kind of ended up being the the product bet."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Lauren Reader",
    "text": "It's an incredible story, especially that it was an accident."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Lauren Reader",
    "text": "Um so, you've said on the record that you think coding is solved."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Lauren Reader",
    "text": "Uh if this is one of the three best from Anthropic, can you tell us more about what you mean by that, and what might still not be solved, or what second-order problems might come?"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "All right."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "I can ask another question for the room."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Who writes 100% of their code by hand?"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Who writes 100% of their code using a agent like Claude code?"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Okay."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Who's like somewhere in between?"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Okay."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "So, like 50% solved."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Event",
    "text": "[laughter]"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "I mean, for me it's for me it's like for me it's 100%."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Like the the Claude code code base, um you know, it leaked, so you know, people know."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Uh it's pretty simple."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "It's just like TypeScript and it's React."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Like there's no big secret."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "There's there's nothing really complicated."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "The the reason we picked TypeScript and React is it's very on distribution for the model."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "So, when we started, you know, building the code base, the model was not as intelligent as it is today, so the language and the framework mattered a lot."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Nowadays, you know, it can write whatever, and it can pick up new languages, new frameworks it hasn't seen."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "But back then, you wanted to use something pretty on distribution."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Because of that, I think fairly early we got to the point where the model just wrote 100% of the code."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "And for us, this happened sometime in October, November last year."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "And so, for me today, you know, like the model writes 100% of my code."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "I write somewhere, you know, usually a few dozen PRs every day."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Uh there was a day last week I did like 150 PRs in a day."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "That was like that was a record."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "I was just trying to kind of push to see how far I can get it."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Um but yeah, it's like for me for me it's just solved."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Um but this is not the case everywhere."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "There's very big complicated code bases."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "There's kind of weird languages the model's not good at yet."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Um and you know, as everyone here knows, it's it's getting there."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Usually the answer is just wait for the next model."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Lauren Reader",
    "text": "Can you actually tell us about your personal setup?"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Lauren Reader",
    "text": "You walked us through it the other day."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Lauren Reader",
    "text": "It is pretty wild."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Yeah."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Um so, I shared my personal setup like 6 months ago or something on on Twitter."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "And it it's funny, I actually I shared it I didn't realize that it would be surprising for anyone."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "That was just like the way that I coded."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Event",
    "text": "[laughter]"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "And it's changed since then."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "It's changed."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Um and so, now actually most of my work I do from my phone."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Um and so, I don't know if like you guys won't be able to see this, but I have um so, I have like the Claude app, and if you open the Claude app, on the left-hand side, there's this little code tab, and I just have a bunch of sessions going."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Um you you probably can't see it."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Lauren Reader",
    "text": "How many sessions?"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Uh usually have like maybe like five to 10 sessions."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Uh and then the sessions usually have a bunch of agents, so I think currently probably like a few hundred agents going."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Um usually every night I have like a few thousand that are doing kind of deeper work."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "There's a few ways to manage it."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "One is that you ask Claude to use a bunch of sub-agents to do work."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Actually, the the thing that I've been finding myself using more and more is the loop."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "So, this is {slash} loop, and it's just like the coolest thing."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "It's like the simplest thing that works."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "All it is is you have Claude use cron to schedule a job for some point in the future, and it's a repeat job."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "And it can run every every minute, every 5 minutes, every day, kind of however often you want to schedule it."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "And at [snorts] this point, I have like dozens of loops that are running for stuff."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "So, I have one that's babysitting my PRs, like fixing CI, auto-rebasing."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "I have another one that keeps CI healthy."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "So, like if there's like a flaky test or whatever, it'll it'll go and fix it."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Um I have another one that grabs uh feedback from Twitter and kind of clusters it for me every 30 minutes."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "So, I just have a bunch of these loops running at any time."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "I sort of feel like loops are the future at this point."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "If you haven't experimented with it, highly highly recommend it."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "And we also just launched routines, which is the same thing but kind of on the server."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "So, even if you close your laptop, it it keeps going."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Lauren Reader",
    "text": "So, that's your personal setup."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Lauren Reader",
    "text": "Tell us about what you think teams will look like in the future."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Lauren Reader",
    "text": "How do you extrapolate from all the work you're doing to keep everyone on the team moving forward, understanding the context, or do you think we need to let go of a lot more to agents to make it work?"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Um I think so I you know, it's like it's so hard to make predictions, but um I'm here to make predictions, so I'll try to make some."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "I I I feel like the way that things are going is generally there's going to be a lot more generalists than there are today."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "And today when we talk about generalists, I think largely we're talking about people that are still engineers."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "So, they're still writing code, but maybe they're kind of product engineers."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "So, maybe when we say generalist, it's like a you know, they do iOS and web and server, for example."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "That's like a generalist in engineering."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "But I think the thing that we're going to start to see a lot more of is generalists that are cross-disciplinary."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "So, this is engineers that are really good at product engineering, but also really great at design."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Or really great at product and data science and engineering."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Um I don't know."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "It's it's something that we're starting to see on our team."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "So, actually like a lot of people on the Claude code team are generalists across disciplines."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Everyone on our team codes."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "So, like our engineering manager, our product manager, our designers, our data scientist, our finance guy, our user researcher, every single person on our team writes code."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "And so, you know, like they're specialist in something, but now also everyone's just coding."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "And you know, I'm seeing some nods, but I bet also it's actually not that surprising to people in this room cuz I bet you're seeing the same things."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Um [clears throat]"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Lauren Reader",
    "text": "I'll have one more favorite questions then we'll open up to the audience."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Lauren Reader",
    "text": "So, we talked a bit about what's changing with coding."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Lauren Reader",
    "text": "I'm curious about what you see changing in the world of software or software products."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Lauren Reader",
    "text": "Um I think as we see AI making writing code 10 or 100x cheaper, what happens to the value of the products that are produced with software?"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Lauren Reader",
    "text": "Do we have a SAS apocalypse on our hands?"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Lauren Reader",
    "text": "How do you think this plays out?"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Lauren Reader",
    "text": "And again, you're going to have to make another prediction."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "The SAS apocalypse question is my favorite question then."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Um I think there's two things that are going to happen and I I don't think either of them is the thing that people have been talking about."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "I think one is Is anyone here an acquired listener?"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Like the acquired podcast?"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Yeah, it's like the best podcast."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Uh I actually I I got to do a unplugged with them the other week and I I just I I felt like I got to like meet my heroes cuz they're they're just like the hosts are the best."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "So, they have this idea of uh seven powers and and this is a this is like Hamilton."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "He kind of wrote he wrote a book about this and this is kind of the seven modes in business."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "And I think what's going to happen is because of AI, some of these modes are going to get more important and some are going to get less important."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "And so, like for example, one that gets less important is uh switching costs because you can just use the model and you can kind of port from one thing to a different thing."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Another one that gets less important is process power because for companies whose mode is like workflows and process and things like this, Claude is getting really good at figuring out process."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "And especially with 4.7, it can just hill climb anything."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "So, if you give it a target and you tell it to iterate until it's done, it will just do it."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "I think this is the first model like that."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "So, I think these are going to get less important, but I think the previous modes actually still matter."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "So, this is like network effects, uh scale economies, cornered resources, things like that."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "These are not really changing with AI."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "I think the second thing is if you look at the number of startups today or like maybe in the next you know, the past 10 years, I think the number of startups in the next 10 years that are just going to like disrupt everything is going to increase like 10x."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Because right now you can be a tiny startup, you could build a thing that's as valuable as a large company and you can actually compete head-to-head because the large company has to evolve their business process, they have to evolve the way they work, they have to retrain everyone to use technology, they're going to face a lot of internal resistance to that."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "But you know, no one here has that problem."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "If you're starting fresh, then you can kind of build with AI natively from the ground up."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "So, I don't know."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "I I think it's the best time to build."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "It's the best time to be a startup."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "It's there's so much disruption coming."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Lauren Reader",
    "text": "So, there is hope for us after all."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Lauren Reader",
    "text": "Thank you, Boris."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Lauren Reader",
    "text": "Um I would love to open up to audience questions if anyone has anything they would like to ask."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Lauren Reader",
    "text": "Dan?"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Dan",
    "text": "I Yeah, I'm curious."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Dan",
    "text": "Um you said that you built uh 6 months before there was product market fit, but now given that the models are good enough, how much do you attribute the success of Claude code to the model versus like product decisions in the the like field of product?"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Uh I think it's probably a mix."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Yeah, I think it's a mix."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "I think I think if you asked me maybe a year ago, the ratio was maybe something like 50/50."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Um maybe I don't know."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "If you asked me 6 months ago, the mix would be 50/50."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Lauren Reader",
    "text": "What about in 2 years?"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Oh, 2 year I don't know, dude."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "We plan in like we plan in 1 week out."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Lauren Reader",
    "text": "months."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Lauren Reader",
    "text": "Sometime in the future."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Event",
    "text": "[laughter]"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "And by the way, I think the reason it was 50/50 is um you know, I I I like I I did YC back in the day."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "I was like the first hire at a YC company and like I did a bunch of startups."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "And in startups like the thing that they drill into you and then especially in YC over and over is build something people love."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "And so, it it doesn't matter what the product is, it doesn't matter like the model and all this stuff."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "You still in the end have to build a thing that people love."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "And I think that's that's why the product matters is we we pay so much attention to the little details so that as you use it all day, it's a really great experience."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "I think as the model's gotten better, the harness kind of gets less important."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "And I I think like I think that we're thinking about right now is like how do we evolve the harness?"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "So, like how do we make loops more of a first class thing?"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "How do we make it easier to run a lot of agents?"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Uh you know, beside you know, like sub agents is one idea."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "There's a bunch more stuff that we're cooking."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "But I think in a year, the model will be much better aligned."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "And so, all the safety mechanisms that we have today around uh prompt injection and kind of static verification of commands and uh permission modes, human in the loop, all this kind of stuff is just going to be less important cuz the model will just do the right thing."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Um So, yeah, that's that's my prediction."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Lauren Reader",
    "text": "Thank you."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Lauren Reader",
    "text": "You want to toss the box, Dan?"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Event",
    "text": "[snorts]"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Lauren Reader",
    "text": "Great."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Lauren Reader",
    "text": "Um To zoom to zoom out a little bit from software, I think Claude code did a cultural change a few months ago where it democratized like building software."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Lauren Reader",
    "text": "You can see uh shop owners building their own um software for themselves or even uh programming microcontrollers to control the light when someone opens the door."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Lauren Reader",
    "text": "Um do you see in the future um building software becoming a skill like uh I know uh Microsoft Office?"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Lauren Reader",
    "text": "Um so, it's a thing that ev- everybody can do, not just people in the tech industry?"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Oh my god, yes."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Yes."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Yes."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "I I I think it's going to be even more than that."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "I think it's going to be I don't know."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "It's going to be a skill like yeah, like I know how to send a text message."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "I I I think um you know, like I I read a my my two genres are essentially sci-fi and tech history."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "This is what I read a lot of."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "I I think in tech history, there's one thing which I think to me is the clearest parallel for what's happening right now."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "And this is in the 1400s, the printing press in Europe."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "And what what happened was before the printing press, essentially 10% of the European population was literate."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "They knew how to read and write."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "They were often employed by like kings and lords that were not literate."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "And their job was to you know, their their job was to read and write and this is not something that everyone knew how to do."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Event",
    "text": "[snorts]"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "The printing press was invented, then there were two more presses and in the 50 years after the first printing press, there was more literature published in Europe than in the thousand years before."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "And over the same period, the cost of literature, the cost of a book went down like a 100x."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "And then, you know, it took a couple hundred years cuz you know, learning to read and write is hard."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "You need education systems and government and everyone can't be working on farms and so on."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "But over the next few hundred years, literacy globally went up to like 70%."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "And so, you know, now we can all read and write and you don't need a a degree in reading and writing to know how to read and write."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Although still there are professional writers and that is a thing that you can do."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "So, I I think the thing that's about to happen and it's going to be much faster than 50 years is software will be a thing that is fully democratized, that anyone can do."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "And you know, there's a lot of corollaries to this."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "So, for example, let's say you're writing accounting software."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "The best person to write accounting software, I think maybe even today, is not an engineer, it's a really good accountant because they know the domain really well and coding is the easy part."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "It's knowing the domain that's the hard part."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "And I I think this is just obviously the the future."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "So, uh one of the things Greg said was that you guys are living in the future a little bit cuz you get to have access to the models and the agents."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Claude code was an internal tool before you released it."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Um is the gap between where you guys are in engineering and the rest of the world, is that a month?"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Is it 3 months?"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Is it 6 months?"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "And is that is that gap getting bigger or smaller over time?"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Yeah, so so internally, we use the same models everyone else does."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Um for us, the dog fooding is really really important."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "So, we use the thing that everyone else here does."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Um you know, we use like a little bit of mythos to try it and then we use a lot of Opus 4.7 to to dog food it and to write most of our code."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Um I think on the model side, there isn't really a gap."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Um you know, it's like it's pretty much mythos and you know, that will become some version of some descendant of that will become available at some point to everyone."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "I think on the product side, there's probably a far larger gap."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "And that's just related to us changing all of our processes."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Like if you talk to people at Anthropic, we use Claude for literally everything."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "And our Claudes are talking all day like as as I'm coding, as my Claudes are coding in a loop, they will communicate over Slack to talk to other people's Claudes that are also running in a loop to kind of figure out unknowns."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "We have no more manually written code anywhere at the company."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "All of the SQL is written by uh by models."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Everything is just built by the models."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "So, I I I think actually the place that we're ahead is not the technology cuz the same technology available to us is available to everyone here because fundamentally, we are building a platform."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "And so, for us, it's really important that developers can use the same thing that we're using and that we we dog food everything that we put out there."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "But I think there's actually a far bigger weed in kind of the organizational structure and organizational process."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "And this is a place where you know, hopefully we can talk about it in places like this and uh everyone can kind of learn from it and and also evolve."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Lauren Reader",
    "text": "Yeah, and I think that's one of the advantages startups have."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Lauren Reader",
    "text": "It's so much easier to start there."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Lauren Reader",
    "text": "Jared?"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Jared",
    "text": "Yeah, um last time we talked, I think I think you'd mentioned we talked a little bit about multi-agent and it was very in code at the time at a prior Sequoia event and you mentioned that there were some things going down the pipeline and thing you're talking you're thinking about."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Jared",
    "text": "Now obviously there's slash batch, there's slash loop, there's sub teams, there's teams."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Jared",
    "text": "Can you speak some to either at the model level and at the harness level, how you're injecting priors in the harness level, how the objective function is changing the model level to kind of make this experience around delegating work, spinning up agents better?"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Jared",
    "text": "Cuz so much of the work is parallelizable."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Jared",
    "text": "You can do so many things so much faster and I feel like I have to overlay my own intuition for when to parallelize things rather than the model kind of understanding that you can spin up 10 sub agents for something."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Yeah, I mean on on the product side, it really just comes down to prompting."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "That's That's how it is."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "And so, you know, we we tweak prompts to kind of help the model do stuff in parallel more."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "But also, honestly, as the model gets better, it just naturally does this."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "And so, something like loop, I found actually 4.7, it just starts doing."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Uh which is really cool."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "It's like it does something like uh you know, I'll I'll I'll tell it, \"Go uh pull this data query.\""
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "And it's like, \"Hey, I noticed that the data is changing over time."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "I'll start a loop and I'll give you a report every 30 minutes.\""
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "And I'm like, \"Great."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Can you send it to me over Slack?\""
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "And then it uses the Slack MCP to do that."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "So, so I think actually over time, it's not on users to figure out how to hold the tools better."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "And if that's the case, it's actually a product design problem and like I'm not doing a good job."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "It's really on the model to do this stuff better and on us kind of prompting it so it naturally does this."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Um so, right now it seems like a lot of us use um like Claude or Codex or these uh tools in the cloud to do a lot of our computing."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "But then, there are some very vocal advocates of uh having your AI be local."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "And I could imagine over time as um open way models and other things catch up that this could be more of a possibility for people get really high-quality coding assistance."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "So, I'm curious your vision of say over the next like years or something like that."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Do you see the trajectory of everyone still really relying on the like cloud centralized compute or uh is there a pivot to oh, we all just have our local agents that we can rely on and they don't get throttled and other benefits?"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Yeah, I think it um I don't know."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "There's maybe a few ways to answer that."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "I think maybe like kind of the the most fundamental way to answer that is it doesn't matter."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Cuz Cuz I think now we're getting to the point where the model is just able to figure it out."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "So, I think like by a couple years from now, the model is just going to be doing all the code."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "It's going to be starting the agents."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "It's going to be building the environments."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "And so, like if it decides like actually I'll use like local models to do this, then you know, that's what it'll do."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "These I I don't think these will be decisions that we are making as engineers anymore."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Lauren Reader",
    "text": "We have time for a couple more questions, so I can toss this out."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Lauren Reader",
    "text": "Jamie."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Lauren Reader",
    "text": "Nester."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Jamie Nester",
    "text": "Thank you."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Jamie Nester",
    "text": "It feels like one of the great uh decisions with Claude Code was making use of the fact that a lot of developers' tools and workflows are local."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Jamie Nester",
    "text": "But um that isn't necessarily always the case for sort of general knowledge work with, you know, cloud tools."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Jamie Nester",
    "text": "I'm curious how you're thinking about this with Co-work of how do you give Co-work enough access to the tools that we use to be powerful the same way that Claude Code is for developers?"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Yeah, it's That's a really great question."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Um I know I know when I was uh when I was at a big company, we took like 5 years moving all the environments to remote."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "It's just like so much work, especially at a big scale."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Um but for knowledge work, largely, it's there already with like Salesforce and Docs and things like that."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Um for us, it's always just the simplest answer."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "It's just MCP."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "So, the same MCP connector that you have in Claude AI, you hook up like, you know, Salesforce, you hook up Google Docs, Google Calendar."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Uh and then Co-work can use that."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Claude CLI can use it."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Claude Code everywhere can use it."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Jamie Nester",
    "text": "And for the for the systems that don't have MCPs, like do you think that's where computer use is going to be a big opportunity?"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Yeah, I think computer use is kind of a catchall."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Um so, I think currently, for as far as I know, I think Anthropic is like pretty far ahead on computers."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "And so, like if you use it through Co-work, it's quite good."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Um so, it's able to use pretty much any piece of software that you have on your computer."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "It's very slow, but it does it quite well now, especially with 4.7."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Um Yeah, but I think I think otherwise like MCP is is kind of the answer."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "It's And you know, all this stuff just doesn't matter that much."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "It could be MCPs, APIs, just some sort of programmatic access cuz the the model doesn't care."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "It's to mo- To the model, it's just tokens."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Lauren Reader",
    "text": "All right, we have time for one more question."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Lauren Reader",
    "text": "Um Ryan."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Lauren Reader",
    "text": "Sean, do you want to toss the Thank you."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Ryan Sean",
    "text": "Um you've kind of alluded to this, but if like sometime ago you saw the probabil- the product overhang and thought to build a product that would then become more interesting once models got better, could you just talk even in vague terms about the shape of a product you'd build today that you think could becomes a much more interesting as models get better in 6 months to a year?"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Yeah, Claude design I I think is a really good example."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "It's uh it's pretty good today."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "It's going to get a lot better."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Um there's also a few things that we're cooking up for Claude Code uh that are going to be landing over the coming weeks."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "So, you'll see those."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Um and then I think uh I think loop and batch and things like this around like massively parallelizing agents, that's going to get better."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "And computer use is another good one."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Lauren Reader",
    "text": "All right, Boris."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Lauren Reader",
    "text": "Thank you so much for joining us."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Lauren Reader",
    "text": "I think we'll be here for a little longer if anyone has questions."
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Event",
    "text": "[applause]"
  },
  {
    "speaker": "Boris Cherny",
    "text": "Thanks, guys."
  }
]