Boris Cherny: Coding Is Largely Solved

How Claude Code Went From Two Likes to 4% of All GitHub Commits

Boris Cherny, Head of Claude Code at Anthropic, joins Lenny Rachitsky for a deep conversation on the one-year anniversary of Claude Code. What started as a solo hack in a terminal got two likes when announced internally. Today it authors 4% of all public GitHub commits — and the growth is still accelerating.

The accidental product: Boris built Claude Code in a terminal not by design, but because he was the only person on the team. "No one thought that this thing could be terminal based. That's sort of a weird way to design it, and that wasn't really the intention." The constraint became the advantage — no other form factor could keep up with the model's rate of improvement.

Coding is solved, building is not: Boris makes the most provocative claim in the interview: "Coding is largely solved. I imagine a world where everyone is able to program. Anyone can just build software anytime." He compares it to the printing press — literacy was once locked to scribes, then became universal and enabled the Renaissance. Programming is undergoing the same democratization.

The generalist advantage: The most effective people on the Claude Code team cross disciplines. Product managers code, engineers design, the finance person codes. "The title software engineer is going to start to go away. It's just going to be replaced by builder." Being AI-native isn't enough — the winners will be curious generalists who combine technical fluency with product sense, design thinking, and user empathy.

Co-work is Claude Code for everyone: Boris reveals that Co-work — Anthropic's new agentic product for non-technical users — is growing faster than Claude Code did at the same stage. It paid his traffic fine, canceled subscriptions, and manages his team's weekly status updates via Slack. "I have it running all the time. The amount of tedious work it gets out of the way is awesome."

5 Takeaways from Boris Cherny on the Future of Software

• 200% productivity increase — Anthropic's own engineers have seen productivity per engineer increase 200%. Boris hasn't hand-edited a line of code since November, shipping 10-30 PRs daily.
• Private repos are higher — The 4% figure is public GitHub only. Private repository adoption is significantly higher, suggesting enterprise usage is outpacing what's visible.
• Growth is accelerating — Claude Code's daily active users doubled in just the past month. Semi Analysis predicts 20% of all GitHub commits by year-end.
• $2B revenue from Claude Code — Claude Code alone generates roughly $2B in revenue, contributing significantly to Anthropic's $15B total.
• Common sense over process — Boris's core advice: use common sense. The biggest failures he sees are people following processes without thinking, building products that aren't good ideas, or riding momentum without questioning direction.

What Claude Code's Trajectory Means for Knowledge Work

Boris's framing of coding as "largely solved" isn't hyperbole — it's a statement about where the frontier has moved. When 4% of all code commits are AI-authored and the growth rate is accelerating, the scarce resource shifts from "can write code" to "knows what to build." For organizations deploying AI agents, the lesson is clear: the value isn't in replacing individual tasks, but in enabling everyone to become a builder. The teams that win will be those where product managers ship features, designers implement interfaces, and the entire organization operates at the speed of thought.