Anthropic avoided building an IDE to target future AI model scaling
Boris Cherny · Claude Code: Anthropic's CLI Agent · May 7, 2025 · at 6:57
Boris Cherny explains why Anthropic launched Claude Code as a terminal CLI rather than an IDE like Cursor or Windsurf.
0:00 / 0:24exact quote · 24.1s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“If we want some product that has like very broad a product market fit today, we would build, you know, a cursor or a Windsurf or something like this. Like these are awesome products that so many people use every day. I use them. That's not the product that we want to build. We want to build something that's kind of much earlier on that curve and something that will Maybe be a big product, you know, a year from now, or, you know, however much time from now as the model improves.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Boris Cherny
Cherny: Anthropic is currently bordering on AI Safety Level 3 capabilities
“Yeah, we're kind of bordering on three right now.”
Cherny: AI prototyping informs engineering decisions faster than writing design docs
“Before I would write a big design doc, and I would think about a problem for a long time before I would build it sometimes for some set of problems, and now I'll just ask quad code to prototype, like, three versions of it, And I'll try the feature and see whic…”
Cherny: Foundation models will eventually subsume external memory and RAG architectures
“Everything is the model. Like that's the thing that wins in the end. And it just, as the model gets better, it's it subsumes everything else. So, you know, at some point the model will encode its own knowledge graph. It'll encode its own like KV story if you j…”
Cherny: Claude Code delivers up to 10x productivity gains for Anthropic engineers
“Anecdotally for me, it's probably two X my productivity. So I'm just like, I'm an engineer that codes all day, every day. For me, it's probably two X. Yeah. I think there's some engineers at Anthropic where It's probably 10 X their productivity”