Building Claude Code with Boris Cherny

Building Claude Code with Boris Cherny

From The Pragmatic Engineer by Gergely Orosz

March 4, 2026 · 1h 37m

About this episode

Boris Cherny discusses the development and implications of Claude Code at Anthropic, exploring the evolving role of engineers in coding.

Brought to You By: • Statsig — ⁠ The unified platform for flags, analytics, experiments, and more. • Sonar – The makers of SonarQube, the industry standard for automated code review • WorkOS – Everything you need to make your app enterprise ready. — Boris Cherny is the creator and Head of Claude Code at Anthropic. He previously spent five years at Meta as a Principal Engineer and is the author of the book Programming TypeScript . In this episode of Pragmatic Engineer , we went through how Claude Code was built and what it means when engineers no longer write most of the code themselves. We discuss how Claude Code evolved from a side project into a core internal tool at Anthropic and how Boris uses it day-to-day. We go deep into workflow details, including parallel agents, PR structure, deterministic review patterns, and how the system retrieves context from large codebases. We also get into how Claude Cowork was built. As coding becomes more accessible, the role of engineers shifts rather than shrinks. We examine what that shift means in practice, which skills become more important, and why the lines between product, engineering, and design are blurring. — Timestamps (00:00)…

People in this episode

Host: Gergely Orosz

Guest: Boris Cherny

Topics covered

  • Claude Code
  • engineering workflow
  • code reviews
  • engineering culture
  • role of engineers
  • product and design integration

Keywords

  • Claude Code
  • Boris Cherny
  • engineering workflow
  • code reviews
  • Anthropic
  • Meta
  • programming
  • TypeScript
  • engineering culture

Sponsors

Statsig, Sonar, WorkOS

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Anthropic, Meta

Products: Claude Code, Programming TypeScript

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