In a candid conversation on Lenny’s Podcast, Boris Cherny (Head of Claude Code at Anthropic), dropped a series of revelations that should make every engineering leader sit up straight. His insights show how productivity gains from AI coding tools are transforming engineering teams across the industry. One year after Claude Code’s launch, the numbers are staggering:
Coding, as we knew it, is solved.
Here are the most important insights from the episode, and what they mean for engineering teams in 2026 and beyond.
Boris declared: “At this point, it is safe to say that coding is largely solved.”
Claude Code doesn’t just write code anymore. It:
Implication: Product managers who once relied on engineers to translate ideas into code are now competing with an AI that can do both. The new bottleneck isn’t “Can we build it?”, it’s “What should we build?”
Boris predicts that by the end of 2026 the title “software engineer” will start disappearing, replaced by “builder”.
Everyone on the Claude Code team (PMs, designers, finance, data scientists) codes. Roles are blurring: 50%+ overlap between engineering, product, and design.
For leaders: Stop hiring for narrow specialties. Look for generalists who can think across disciplines and use AI fluently.
One of Boris’s core team principles: underfund projects on purpose.
When you give one great engineer a big problem and unlimited tokens, they ship faster because they’re forced to leverage AI maximally.
His advice to CTOs:
This directly contradicts traditional “optimize headcount” thinking. In the AI era, the winning strategy is often fewer people, more compute.
Claude Code started as a terminal hack because the team bet on exponential model improvement. They deliberately built for where the model would be, not where it was.
Result? When Opus 4 and Sonnet 4 dropped, growth went vertical.
Actionable advice for AI product builders:
Claude Code’s biggest breakthroughs came from watching how people misused it:
This “latent demand” led directly to Co-work (the agentic desktop product built in just 10 days).
Waydev takeaway: The same principle applies to measuring productivity. Stop guessing what’s working: connect your Git, tickets, Slack, and AI tools and let the data reveal where engineers are actually finding value.
Boris’s historical parallel: the printing press turned scribes (1% of the population) into a world where 70% became literate in 200 years.
AI is doing the same for programming. In a few years, “anyone can just build software anytime.” The Renaissance-level explosion of creativity that follows will be unimaginable.
Short-term pain is real, but the long-term upside is civilization-changing.
Lenny’s informal Twitter poll showed ~70% of engineers and PMs enjoy their jobs more since adopting AI tools.
Boris: “I have never enjoyed coding as much as I do today because I don’t have to deal with all the minutia.”
The tedious parts (git wrangling, dependency hell, boilerplate) are gone. Engineers get to focus on architecture, user problems, and big ideas.
Boris repeatedly emphasized that the team learns fastest from real user feedback and real-world usage.
That’s exactly why platforms like Waydev exist.
With Waydev’s Engineering Intelligence Platform you can now:
No more manual surveys. No more guessing. Just truth.
The numbers Boris shared aren’t science fiction, they’re happening right now at Anthropic and spreading to every serious engineering organization.
The question isn’t whether AI will reshape your team. It’s whether you’ll have the visibility to lead the change or be surprised by it.
Request a Waydev demo and get instant insights into your team’s AI adoption, productivity lift, and where to double down.
The future of engineering isn’t coming. It’s already here – and it ships 30 PRs a day.
Get the full story on Lenny’s Podcast.
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