Building Claude Code with Boris Cherny

BlogGergely OroszJul 4, 2026

AI Summary

Gergely Orosz's Pragmatic Engineer interview with Boris Cherny (creator and Head of Claude Code) covering how Boris ships 20-30 PRs a day by running 5 parallel Claude instances, why plain grep/glob-driven 'agentic search' beat RAG and vector-DB approaches, how Claude Cowork was built in about 10 days, and why PRDs have effectively been replaced by working prototypes on the Claude Code team.

Original excerpt

Published March 4, 2026. Boris Cherny is the creator and Head of Claude Code at Anthropic; he previously spent five years at Meta as a Principal Engineer and wrote the book "Programming TypeScript." The episode covers how Claude Code was built, what it means when engineers no longer write most of the code themselves, parallel agents, PR structure, deterministic review patterns, how the system retrieves context from large codebases, and how Claude Cowork was built.

1. Boris ships 20-30 PRs a day by running 5 parallel Claude instances across separate terminal tabs/checkouts, starting each in plan mode, iterating on the plan, then letting it one-shot the implementation: "once there is a good…

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Gergely Orosz's Pragmatic Engineer interview with Boris Cherny (creator and Head of Claude Code) covering how Boris ships 20-30 PRs a day by running 5 parallel Claude instances, why plain grep/glob-driven 'agentic search' beat RAG and vector-DB approaches, how Claude Cowork was built in about 10 day…

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"Building Claude Code with Boris Cherny" was written by Gergely Orosz. It is curated in the Claude Code vault on Burn 451, which covers agentic coding with claude.

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