Anthropic’s Boris Cherny, creator of Claude Code, says there are days he manages tens of thousands of AI agents at once

Boris Cherny, the creator and head of Anthropic’s Claude Code, hasn’t handwritten a line of code in eight months. But that doesn’t mean he’s stopped building software—it just means he now manages a massive fleet of AI agents to do much of the work. “This morning I was managing maybe a few hundred,” he said during the opening session of the 25th annual Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference in Aspen, Colorado on Monday. “Some days it’s…thousands, or tens of thousands.” This is a big change than even just a year and a half ago, he explained, when developers were running one instance of Claude Code in one terminal window. “Fast forward to today, it looks very different,” he said. “You have a Claude Code, but it has subagents that are other Claudes.” The user is no longer prompting Claude, he added: “It’s actually another Claude that does the prompting.” This massive speedup in coding will be as consequential as the printing press, he explained, which was developed by Johannes Gutenberg around 1440 and dramatically lowered the cost of producing books and expanded literacy. Just as the printing press ultimately enabled transformative societal changes such as the Renaissance and Industrial Revolution, Cherny said he believes AI coding assistants are lowering the barriers to software creation and could unlock a similarly profound wave of innovation whose full implications we are only beginning to understand. Last week, Anthropic published a blog post titled “When AI Builds Itself,” outlining how it is increasingly using AI systems to help develop future AI models. Taken far enough, and with enough compute, the blog post said such an approach could lead to recursive self-improvement—an AI system capable of autonomously designing, building, and improving its own successors. Cherney said that with Claude Code writing all the code for Anthropic—leading to an 8X increase in the amount of code written at the company since the beginning of the year—“I think this might be