Boris Cherny: prediction

Transcript context

…So, you just talked about tips for building AI products. Any tips for someone just using Claude Code, say, for the first time or just someone already using Claude Code that wants to get better. What are a couple pro-tips that you could share? I will give a caveat, which is there's no one right way to use Claude Code. So, I can share some tips, but, honestly, this is a dev tool. Developers are all different. Developers have different preferences. They have different environments. So, there's just so many ways to use these tools. There's no one right way. You have to find your own path. Luckily, you can ask Claude Code. It's able to make recommendations. It can edit your settings. It knows about itself. So, it can help with that. A few tips that, generally, I find pretty useful. So, number one is just use the most capable model. Currently, that's Opus 4.6. I have maximum effort enabled always. The thing that happens is sometimes people try to use a less expensive model like Sonnet, or something like this, but because it's less intelligent, it actually takes more tokens in the end to do the same task. And so, it's actually not obvious that it's cheaper if you use a less expensive model. Often, it's actually cheaper and less token-intensive if you use the most capable model, because it can just do the same thing much faster with less correction, less hand holding, and so on. So, that's the first step is just use the best model. The second one is use plan mode. I start almost all of my tasks in plan mode, maybe, like 80%, and plan mode is actually really simple. All it is is we inject one sentence into the model's prompt to say, "Please don't write any code yet." That's it. There's actually nothing fancy going on. It's just the simplest thing. And so, for people that are in the terminal it's just shift tab twice. And that gets you into plan mode. For people in the desktop app, there's a little button on the web, there's a little button. It's coming pretty soon to mobile also. And we just launched it for the Slack integration too. So, plan mode is the second one. And, essentially, the model would just go back and forth with you. Once the plan looks good then you let the model execute. I auto-accept edits after that, because if the plan looks good, it's just going to one shot it. It'll get it right the first time almost every time with Opus 4.6. And then maybe the third tip is just play around with different interfaces. I think a lot of people when they think about Claude Code, they think about a terminal. And, of course, we support every terminal, we support Mac, Windows, whatever terminal you might use, it works perfectly. But we actually support a lot of other form factors too. Like, we have iOS and Android apps. We have a desktop app. There's the Slack integration. There's all sorts of things that we support. So, I would just play around with these. And, again, it's, like, every engineer is different. Everyone that's building is different. Just find the thing that feels right to you, and use that. You don't have to use a terminal. It's the same Claude agent running everywhere. Amazing. Okay. Just a couple more questions to round things out. What's your take on Codex? How do you feel about that product? How do you feel about where they're going? Just competing in this very competitive space in coding agents.…

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