Boris Cherny, an engineer at Anthropic, discusses the company's Autonomous Safety Levels (ASL) framework with Swix.
Disclosure
Anthropic avoided building an IDE to target future AI model scaling
“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 …”
Insight
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…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
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…”
Opinion
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”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Cherny: Prompt engineering skills for coding may become obsolete within 3 months
“But I also agree that, you know, maybe in a month or two months or three months, you won't need this anymore because, you know, the bitter lesson always wins.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Cherny: Some Anthropic engineers rack up thousands daily running Claude Code automations
“And there's some people at Anthropic that have been racking up like thousands of dollars a day with this kind of automation.”