Boris Cherny

Latent demand is your best product signal: if people are hacking or misusing your product to do something it wasn't designed for, build a product for that. Facebook Marketplace came from 40% of group posts being buy/sell listings.

Since introducing Claude Code, Anthropic has roughly 4X'd the engineering team — but productivity per engineer increased 200% in terms of pull requests.

Coding is virtually solved. At least for the kinds of programming I do, it's just a solved problem — Claude can do it. Now we're thinking about what's next.

At Meta working on code quality across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, a gain of a few percentage points of productivity in a year with hundreds of engineers was considered great. Now we're seeing gains of hundreds of percentage points.

Don't try to box the model in. Don't layer strict workflows on it. Give it tools, give it a goal, and let it figure out the rest. Almost always you get better results. A year ago you needed scaffolding — nowadays you really don't.

We saw people using Claude Code to grow tomato plants, analyze their genome, recover wedding photos from corrupted drives, read MRIs. Non-technical people jumping through hoops to use a terminal. That's latent demand — so we built Cowork.