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Key Takeaways Boris Cherny is the creator of Anthropic’s Claude Code tool, which writes code on behalf of developers based on a text prompt.
Cherny hasn’t handwritten code in eight months; instead, he manages anywhere from a few hundred to tens of thousands of AI agents that do the software work for him.
Cherny compares the development of AI coding agents to the impact of Gutenberg’s printing press.
The creator of Anthropic’s Claude Code tool, Boris Cherny, says he has not written a line of code by hand for about eight months. Instead, he spends his time overseeing AI agents, or AI programs that can act autonomously to perform tasks. He defines problems and reviews their work, overseeing “thousands” or “tens of thousands” of AI agents at a time.
“This morning I was managing maybe a few hundred,” he said at the 25th annual Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference in Aspen earlier this week. This is a noticeable change from even a year and a half ago, he claimed, when developers were using one tab of Claude Code in one window.
“Fast forward to today, it looks very different,” Cherny said. “You have a Claude Code, but it has subagents.” He explained that the human isn’t prompting Claude anymore — another Claude instance now generates the prompts instead, adding another layer of AI involvement.
Boris Cherny, lead developer of Claude Code at Anthropic. Photographer: Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg
What does Boris Cherny’s work entail at Anthropic?
At Anthropic, Cherny leads Claude Code, a coding environment where AI agents generate and edit code across large codebases based on text prompts. Since late 2025, AI has written 100% of his own code. On a typical day, he manages AI agents that create code, fix bugs and experiment with new features, often running overnight while he sleeps.
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