Boris Cherny created the AI agent Claude Code.
Creating Claude Code
Cherny spent long stretches writing code without project management interruptions during a temporary stay in Japan in 2022 due to his wife’s work. “For me, when I write code, I establish an emotional relationship with it; it’s something I constantly think about when I’m deeply immersed in a problem,” Cherny told “The Peterman Pod” in 2025. “I even dream about it.”
After joining Anthropic, he spent a month experimenting with company models, as he recounted on “Lenny’s Podcast.” A couple of months in, he developed a command-line interface tool for Claude that let the assistant interact with his operating system. When he asked it to figure out what music he was listening to, the tool wrote code to answer without explicit instructions.
“By giving the model this tool, it figured out on its own how to use it to answer a question that I myself wasn’t sure if I could solve,” Cherny said on “Lenny’s Podcast.” That side project laid the foundation for Claude Code, an AI programming agent that writes code, executes commands, and accesses files.
Claude Code Drives Corporate AI Spending and Productivity
The tool gained popularity among programmers and non-programmers in Silicon Valley, helping Anthropic secure an early foothold in the workplace. Corporate AI spending accelerated in late 2025 following the public launch of Claude Code in May, according to Ara Kharazian, senior economist at financial services firm Ramp. “That was the first commercially advanced AI version that directly improved productivity in a specific job segment,” Kharazian said.
The programming tool served as a starting point for Claude Cowork, an office-task agent built in just 10 days using Claude Code. At the Mid-Ohio Food Collective, non-technical employees use Claude Code regularly. Mark Mollenkopf, director of software engineering, said that their nutrition director used it to build a food-selection app based on an idea originally sketched on a whiteboard in 2017.
The rapid rise of AI agents has positioned Anthropic at the center of discussions regarding future employment. “I believe that for the labor market—and particularly for engineers—this will cause disruption,” Cherny said in an interview with CNN.
