Claude Code creator Boris Cherny shares five practical Agent principles in a Stanford class

I asked @bcherny how many Claude agents he's running right now as he sat next to me. "A few thousand." Boris (creator of Claude Code) came back to my Stanford course The Modern Software Developer last Thursday. His main takeaways: - Automate your bottleneck: Claude has written 100% of his team's code since November and output is up ~10x per engineer. So much code shipped that people stopped reading it carefully and started skimming, so they automated code review. Approvals are next. The team identified the main things impeding their development velocity and built systems to unblock themselves. - Build for the model 6 months out: early Claude Code revenue was flat for months because the model wasn't smart enough yet. Then Opus 4 came out and growth became astronomic. His method is to read your agent transcripts and see where the model fails. That's where it will improve in the next model release. - Small teams go faster: for months Claude Code was basically just him. With AI, one or two people can outship a team 100 times their size. Constraints breed creativity. - Think in loops: his grandpa programmed punch cards in the Soviet Union. Boris writes loops that run for days or weeks and spawn many agents. He expects that typing code by hand is heading where punch cards went. - Domain-specific builders are the future: he expects the best accounting software of 2027 to be built by an accountant. When code is cheap, knowing the problem deeply is the only alpha In the 50 years after the printing press, Europe produced more literature than in the previous 1,000. He thinks coding is about to undergo a similar explosion of creation.

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I asked @bcherny how many Claude agents he's running right now as he sat next to me. "A few thousand." Boris (creator of Claude Code) came back to my Stanford course 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗠𝗼𝗱𝗲𝗿𝗻 𝗦𝗼𝗳𝘁𝘄𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗗𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗹𝗼𝗽𝗲𝗿 last Thursday. His main takeaways: - 𝗔𝘂𝘁𝗼𝗺𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗯𝗼𝘁𝘁𝗹𝗲𝗻𝗲𝗰𝗸: Claude has written 100% of his team's code since November and output is up ~10x per engineer. So much code shipped that people stopped reading it carefully and started skimming, so they automated code review. Approvals are next. The team identified the main things impeding their development velocity and built systems to unblock themselves. - 𝗕𝘂𝗶𝗹𝗱 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗺𝗼𝗱𝗲𝗹 𝟲 𝗺𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗵𝘀 𝗼𝘂𝘁: early Claude Code revenue was flat for months because the model wasn't smart enough yet. Then Opus 4 came out and growth became astronomic. His method is to read your agent transcripts and see where the model fails. That's where it will improve in the next model release. - 𝗦𝗺𝗮𝗹𝗹 𝘁𝗲𝗮𝗺𝘀 𝗴𝗼 𝗳𝗮𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗿: for months Claude Code was basically just him. With AI, one or two people can outship a team 100 times their size. Constraints breed creativity. - 𝗧𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗸 𝗶𝗻 𝗹𝗼𝗼𝗽𝘀: his grandpa programmed punch cards in the Soviet Union. Boris writes loops that run for days or weeks and spawn many agents. He expects that typing code by hand is heading where punch cards went. - 𝗗𝗼𝗺𝗮𝗶𝗻-𝘀𝗽𝗲𝗰𝗶𝗳𝗶𝗰 𝗯𝘂𝗶𝗹𝗱𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗳𝘂𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲: he expects the best accounting software of 2027 to be built by an accountant. When code is cheap, knowing the problem deeply is the only alpha In the 50 years after the printing press, Europe produced more literature than in the previous 1,000. He thinks coding is about to undergo a similar explosion of creation.