Cherny: Dev tool startups should enable what AI models naturally attempt
Boris Cherny · Inside Claude Code With Its Creator Boris Cherny · Y Combinator · Feb 17, 2026 · at 31:12
Boris Cherny, creator of Claude Code at Anthropic, answers how founders building developer tools should design for both human developers and autonomous AI agents.
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“The way I would frame it is think about the thing that the model wants to do and figure out how do you make that easier? And that's something that we saw, you know, like when I first started hacking on Claude code, I realized like this thing just wants to use tools. It just wants to interact with the world. And how, how do you enable that? Well, the way you don't do it is you put it in a box. And you're like, here's the API. Here's how you interact with me. And here's how you interact with the world. The way you do it is you see what tools it wants to use. You see what it's trying to do. And you enable that the same way that you do for your users.”
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