Boris Cherny, head of Claude Code at Anthropic, on Lenny’s Podcast:
I think at this point it’s safe to say that coding is largely solved. At least for the kind of programming that I do, it’s just a solved problem because Claude can do it. And so now we’re starting to think about what’s next, what’s beyond this. Claude is starting to come up with ideas. It’s looking through feedback. It’s looking at bug reports. It’s looking at telemetry for bug fixes and things to ship—a little more like a co-worker or something like that.
“Largely solved” is a big claim from the person running the tool that’s solving it. And then he goes further—Claude is starting to decide what to build. That’s product management work.
Cherny on what his team at Anthropic already looks like:
On the Claude Code team, everyone codes. Our product manager codes, our engineering manager codes, our designer codes, our finance guy codes, our data scientist codes.
And on where the role boundaries are heading:
There’s maybe a 50% overlap in these roles where a lot of people are actually just doing the same thing and some people have specialties. I think by the end of the year the title software engineer is going to start to go away and it’s just going to be replaced by builder. Or maybe everyone’s going to be a product manager and everyone codes.
But where does design fit in all this? A PM can define the problem, maybe even come up with a good solution. But does Cherny think that AI will be the designer?
Lenny ran polls asking engineers, PMs, and designers whether they enjoy their jobs more or less since adopting AI. Engineers and PMs: 70% said more. Designers went the other direction with only 55% who said they were enjoying their job more, and 18%—nearly twice as many as engineers—said they were enjoying their job less.
Cherny’s reaction:
Our designers largely code. So I think for them this is something that they have enjoyed because they can unblock themselves.
That’s an engineer’s answer to a design question. Designers at Anthropic are happy because they can ship without waiting on a developer. But “unblocking yourself” isn’t the same as “AI can do the design.” Cherny doesn’t touch the user experience, visual thinking, the spatial reasoning.
My theory: Designers are visual people. Typing to design doesn’t really compute. And who can blame us?
