Evidence receipt / evaluation
Published · transcript-backedBoris Cherny: evaluation
19 Feb 2026 Lenny's Podcast Head of Claude Code: What happens after coding is solved | Boris Cherny
“I think as soon as I got there what I started to realize is what I really missed about Ant was the mission.”
Source trail
Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Boris Cherny
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- evaluation
- Recorded
- 19 Feb 2026
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
Transcript context
…I want to start with a spicy question. About six months ago, I don't know if people even remember this, you actually left Anthropic. You joined Cursor. And then two weeks later you went back to Anthropic. What happened there? I don't think I've ever heard the actual story. It was the fastest job change that I've ever had. I joined Cursor, because I'm a big fan of the product. And, honestly, I met the team and I was just really impressed. They're an awesome team. I still think they're awesome, and they're just building really cool stuff. And they saw where AI coding was going I think before a lot of people did. So, the idea of building good product was just very exciting for me. I think as soon as I got there what I started to realize is what I really missed about Ant was the mission. And that's actually what originally drove me to Ant also, because before I joined Anthropic I was working in Big Tech, and then, at some point, I wanted to work at a lab to just help shape the future of this crazy thing that we're building in some way. And the thing that drew me to Anthropic was the mission. And it's all about safety. And when you talk to people at Anthropic, just, like, find someone in the hallway, if you ask them why they're here, the answer is always going to be, "Safety." And so, this mission-driven [inaudible 00:05:14] just really, really resonated with me. And I just know, personally, it's something I need in order to be happy. And that's just a thing that I really missed, and I found that whatever the work might be, no matter how exciting, even if it's building a really cool product, it's just not really a substitute for that. So, for me, it was pretty obvious that I was missing that pretty quick. Okay. So, let me follow the thread of just coming back to Anthropic and the work you've done there. This podcast is going to come out around the year anniversary of launching Claude Code. So, I want to spend a little time just reflecting on the impact that you've had. There's this report that recently came out that I'm sure you saw by Semi-Analysis that showed that 4% of all GitHub commits are authored by Claude Code now. And they predicted it'll be a fifth of all code commits on GitHub by the end of the year. The way they put it is, "While we blinked, AI consumed all software development." The day that we're recording this Spotify just put out this headline that their best developers haven't written a line of code since December thanks to AI. More and more of the most advanced senior engineers, including you, are sharing the fact that you don't write code anymore, that it's all AI-generated, and many aren't even looking at code anymore is how far we've gotten. In large part, thanks to this little project that you started, and that your team has scaled over the past year. I'm curious just to hear your reflections on this past year, and the impact that your work has had.…
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