Boris Cherny is at the office on a Wednesday afternoon in San Francisco tapping away at his laptop. He’s working but isn’t quite sure what to call the work he’s doing. Six months ago he would have called it coding.
This, however, is something different entirely. Instead of writing in any of the coding languages he’s spent a lifetime practicing, Cherny is typing into a text box in plain English to a bunch of Claudes. He tells one of these artificial intelligence assistants to edit some code it wrote earlier, then switches to a second tab to instruct another Claude to translate a different set of code from one programming language to another, then switches to yet another tab to instruct another Claude to fix a problem the humans on his team are encountering with the system they use to share and test code.