Inside Anthropic Labs

In late 2024, Boris Cherny — newly arrived at Anthropic from Meta — received an instruction from his manager, Ben Mann. Mann is an Anthropic co-founder, helped architect GPT-3 at OpenAI, and ran the company’s product engineering function at the time. The instruction is the single most compact description of frontier AI product development now in circulation:

Don’t build for today’s model. Build the model in six months.

Cherny followed it. He built Claude Code against a frontier that did not yet exist. For the first six months, the tool was barely usable — he used it for maybe 10% of his own code.

Then Opus 4 shipped in May 2025, and the curve inflected with every release thereafter. By late 2025, he had stopped writing code by hand entirely. By early 2026, he was producing up to 150 pull requests per day on his phone.