Boris Cherny, Head of Claude Code at Anthropic, reveals internal developer token consumption when asked whether AI inference costs are surpassing engineering salaries.
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Cherny predicts coding will be increasingly solved across all stacks within months
“And over the next few months, I think what we're going to see is just across the industry, it's going to become increasingly solved, you know, for every kind of code base, every tech stack that people work on.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Cherny: Claude Code boosted Anthropic engineer PR productivity by 200%
“Over the last year, like, since we introduced quad code, we probably, I don't know the exact number, we probably, like, forex the engineering team or something like this, but productivity per engineer has increased 200% in terms of, like, pull requests.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Cherny: Understanding underlying code layers won't matter in one to two years
“My take is, I think for people that are using that are using quad code, that are using agents to code today, you still have to understand the layer under. But yeah, in a year or two, it's not gonna matter.”
Insight
Anthropic's AGI roadmap: First coding, then tool use, then computer use
“We were building the models in this way that kind of fit our mental model of the way that we built SafeHEI, where the model starts by being really good at coding, then it gets really good at tool use, then it gets really good at computer use. Roughly, this is …”
Assertion Supported
Cherny: IDEs might not be needed for software engineering by end-of-2025
“And my prediction back in May of 2025 was, by the end of the year, you might not need an IDE to code anymore, and we're gonna start to see engineers not doing this.”
Disclosure
Cherny has not edited a single line of code since November
“I have not edited a single line by hand since November.”