Boris Cherny loves to code. So much so that he once said that coding is the reason most people choose to become engineers.
This is also why many techies may never need to write a line of code again.
Cherny, 35, is the creator of Claude Code, the wildly popular Anthropic coding agent that has made the company a driving force in AI. The agent can write code, execute commands, and access files to perform work on behalf of a user. Claude Code enjoyed great success with programmers and non-programmers alike in Silicon Valley, allowing Anthropic to quickly gain a foothold in the job market. The tool also paved the way for Anthropic’s AI tools to play a bigger role in industries like finance, legal work, marketing and more.
Anthropic’s success has plunged the company into the midst of both anxiety and optimism about AI’s impact on future jobs, and Cherny has taken its place in that discussion.
“I think it’s going to disrupt the job market, especially for engineers,” Cherny said in an interview with CNN earlier this year. “I hope in the long run it will be great for humanity and what it will unlock.”
Anthropic’s IPO, expected to fetch more than a trillion dollars, depends on its ability to make Claude indispensable to office work.
And it all started with Claude Code from Cherny.
“When people think about IPO, they ask, ‘Okay, how much room does Claude Code have left to grow?'” Willy Lee, principal at venture capital firm Neostellar, whose portfolio includes OpenAI and CoreWeave, told CNN.
Here’s how Cherny, whose official title is head of applications, became a vital part of Anthropic and the broader debate about AI’s impact on jobs.
Cherny joined Anthropic in 2024 after spending nearly seven years at Meta, where he worked across various divisions including Instagram, Facebook Groups and the code quality team, according to his LinkedIn.
In 2022, during his Meta tenure, he and his wife temporarily moved to Japan for her work. Around the world, among his colleagues in California, Cherny loved being able to code all day without interruption from meetings and project management tasks, he said in an episode of the tech industry podcast “The Peterman Pod” in 2025.
He was one of the few engineers in Meta’s Instagram division who did so much coding.
“For me, when I’m writing code, I have an emotional relationship with it, and it’s something I think about when I’m really immersed in a problem,” he said on the podcast. “I dream of it.”
He spent a month experimenting with Anthropic’s models after joining the company, he told “Lenny’s Podcast,” a show about product development. In his early days at Anthropic, he mainly built prototypes to test the limits of what Claude’s creator’s AI could do.
But he reached a turning point a few months later when he created a command-line interface tool for Claude, which allowed the AI assistant to interact directly with his computer’s operating system. Cherny made a simple request: to know what music he was listening to.
He was shocked when the tool wrote code to answer this question without being specifically asked to do so.
“The model was given this tool and he figured out how to use it to answer this question that I had that I wasn’t even sure I could answer,” he said on “Lenny’s Podcast.”
This side project laid the groundwork for Claude Code, which surpassed $2.5 billion in current revenue in February. Anthropic does not disclose Claude Code usage figures, but a chart in the company’s S-1 filing before its IPO shows that revenues increase after the release of Claude Code.
For Cherny, expanding Claude Code’s reach involves talking to real people about how they use the product. On X, Cherny answers questions from Claude users on a weekly, sometimes almost daily basis.
It’s a habit he developed long before joining Anthropic. When he worked at Meta in California, he often showed new features to cafeteria workers to see if they could understand them quickly, he told “The Peterman Pod.”
“What I’m passionate about is talking to people and understanding how we can improve the product,” he told CNN in March. “I’m completely focused on that.”
Corporate spending on AI accelerated in late 2025 after Claude Code was released to the general public in May, said Ara Kharazian, senior economist at financial services firm Ramp, who tracks corporate spending on AI.
“This was the first commercially advanced version of AI that directly improved the productivity of a specific segment of jobs,” he said of Claude Code and other coding agents.
Anthropic’s coding tool served as the starting point for Claude Cowork, the company’s AI agent for general office work that can manage files and automate tasks. The idea for Cowork came after Cherny observed people and companies using Claude Code for non-technical tasks. Cherny himself uses it to pay parking tickets and for his team’s project management work at Anthropic, he said on “Lenny’s Podcast.”
Mid-Ohio Food Collective’s non-technical employees frequently use Claude Code, according to Mark Mollenkopf, the organization’s director of software engineering. Its nutrition director used Claude Code to create a Tinder for food-style game, aimed at helping families choose healthier options based on their preferences.
They had the idea for almost a decade; Mollenkopf says he still has photos of a whiteboard with the initial concept from 2017. But the team was too busy with higher priority tasks until they could let Claude Code take care of them.
“We’re not going to put it into production yet today, but it’s an opportunity for us to be able to democratize the big ideas that we’ve always had,” Mollenkopf said.
Anthropic built Claude Cowork in 10 days using Claude Code. This shows how important Cherny’s original idea has been to Anthropic’s own growth, not just attracting more customers.
Still, the company faces a host of challenges, including increased competition from OpenAI, reliance on a limited number of customers, and pressure to live up to its sky-high valuation.
During this time, Anthropic played a fundamental but complex role in the AI boom.
The company has warned of the risks of AI, saying it is capable of catastrophic consequences, but it continues to launch new models. He worries that the economy is not ready to deal with the impact of AI on employment, but he creates and uses tools like Claude Code and Claude Cowork to automate work.
Cherny is at the center of this paradox. Some software engineers are increasingly wary of the role of AI in their jobs, with six in 10 tech workers saying they actively try to avoid using AI, according to a recent survey of 30,000 programmers by technology site Stack Overflow. Some believe that the technology is not as good as it is made out to be, while others believe that AI’s role in technology has led to burnout due to the pressure to perform and stay up to date on the latest technology.
Cherny has a lot of thoughts on what the future will look like. The job of a software engineer already involves doing much more than just coding; it involves working with designers and other teams, and determining what to build next. As AI takes over most coding tasks, engineers will be freed to focus on these other parts of the job, he said.
That’s why he said in March that he thought software engineering jobs would start disappearing by the end of this year.
“Maybe the (job) title will be ‘builder,'” he told CNN. “Maybe we’ll still call them software engineers, but they’ll do a lot more than today’s engineers.”
Cherny has become something of an icon among developers and engineers like Mollenkopf, who said he watches podcasts featuring the creator of Claude Code and others in similar positions to learn about AI. That’s how Mollenkopf discovered Claude Tag, a feature that allows users to connect business data to Claude and then tag the AI assistant in Slack.
Mollenkopf said he would be “a total fanboy” if he ever got to meet Cherny.
What Cherny can’t predict is how long this change might take. We’re almost at the end of 2026 and software engineering jobs still exist, although they’re probably different than they were several years ago.
But if there’s one thing he learned during his time in Japan, it’s how to think long term.
He remembers learning to make miso, a traditional Japanese seasoning made from the fermentation of grains like soybeans and barley, to bond with his neighbors. It’s a hobby that stands in stark contrast to the fast-paced technological world Cherny was accustomed to: a single batch could take months to make.
“Miso is an interesting thing that teaches you to think about long-held skills,” he said. “…You just have to be very patient.”
