Scaffolding gains get wiped out by next-generation AI models
Boris Cherny · Inside Claude Code With Its Creator Boris Cherny · Y Combinator · Feb 17, 2026 · at 8:10
Boris Cherny, creator of Claude Code at Anthropic, discusses product design philosophy when building developer tools on top of rapidly improving foundational AI models.
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“There's this other general principle that I think is maybe interesting where you can build for the model and then you can build scaffolding around the model in order to improve performance a little bit. And depending on the domain, you can improve performance, maybe 10, 20%, something like that. And then essentially the gain is wiped out with the next model. So either you can build, build the scaffolding and then, you know, get some performance gain and then rebuild it again, or you just wait for the next model and then you kind of get it for free.”
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