Boris Cherny is the creator of Claude Code at Anthropic. He started it inside an incubator called Anthropic Labs in late 2024, and has said he hasn't written a line of code in his job for months because Claude Code does it.

Why is Claude Code a terminal (CLI) tool?

Cherny says he built it in a terminal because for the first couple of months it was just him, so the CLI was the easiest thing to build. The team kept it because the model was improving so fast that no heavier form factor could keep up.

What is Boris Cherny's top product principle?

Late demand. He says the single biggest principle in product is building for demand that shows up after you ship something small, and that nearly every part of Claude Code was built that way — CLAUDE.md, for example, came from users writing their own markdown files for the model to read.

What was the first real use case for Claude Code?

Writing unit tests. Cherny says it was an early use case because it was lower risk while the model was still improving, alongside automating Git and bash commands.

Boris Cherny on Claude Code: Lessons From Its Creator

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