Anthropic’s Boris Cherny has a simple list of principles for his team and, unsurprisingly, Claude is at the center.
“If you have Claude, you can really automate a lot of work, and that’s kind of what we see over and over,” Cherny said during a recent episode of “Lenny’s podcast.”
Host Lenny Rachitsky told Cherny that he heard one of the principles is, “What’s better than doing something? Having Claude do it.”
Cherny said one of his other principles is “underfunding things a little bit,” because it forces his team to really rely on AI tools like Claude.
“There’s this interesting thing when you underfund everything a little bit, because then people are kind of forced to Claude-ify,” he said.
While keeping teams small is important, Cherny said that he encourages CTOs not to “cost-cut at the beginning.”
“Start by just giving engineers as many tokens as possible,” he said.
Cherny pushed back on the notion that Anthropic would make huge profits with such an approach, especially if companies let only a few engineers experiment.
“Let’s say they build something awesome, and then it takes a huge amount of tokens, and then the cost becomes pretty big,” he said. “That’s the point at which you want to optimize it, but don’t do that too early.”
Token cost, which is part of what companies pay to use AI models, is becoming a major point of conversation at some tech companies. OpenCode creator Dax Raad recently wrote that some CFOs are experiencing sticker shock upon seeing how much extra money each engineer costs due to AI usage bills.
The last principle concerns speed: “Encouraging people to go faster.” It’s an axiom that makes sense when you consider that just weeks ago, Anthropic and rival OpenAI released major updates to their coding tools within minutes of each other. Before that, Anthropic used Claude to help build Claude Cowork, a non-technical Claude agent, in just 10 days.
“Early on, it was really important because it was just me, and so our only advantage was speed,” Cherny said. “That’s the only way that we could ship a product that would compete in this very crowded coding market.”
Now, Cherny said, he turns to Claude to help with speed.
“It’s still very much a principle we have on the team,” he said, “and if you want to go faster, a really good way to do that is to just have Claude do more stuff. So it just very much encourages that.”
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