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Training Data · 2 min · May 4, 2026

Anthropic's workflow advantage is organizational, not model access

At Anthropic, agents message each other over Slack, while models write all code and SQL. Boris Cherny says the larger lead is how the company has changed its processes.

Boris Cherny

Boris Cherny is creator of Claude Code at Anthropic.

  • LR

    Lauren Reeder, Host · Partner, Sequoia

About this segment

At Anthropic, agents message each other over Slack, while models write all code and SQL. Boris Cherny says the larger lead is how the company has changed its processes.

From “Anthropic's Boris Cherny: Why Coding Is Solved, and What Comes Next”, May 4, 2026. Watch the full episode

“We have no more manually written code anywhere at the company. All of the SQL is written by models.”
Boris Chernyat 18:26 · Training Data18:26

Takeaways

  1. Anthropic uses the same models as its customers.
  2. Agents communicate with each other over Slack.
  3. Cherny says organizational process is the larger gap.

In this episode

Full episode
  1. 5:04Coding is solved for the code Boris writes3:42
  2. 10:22AI weakens some software moats but strengthens others2:34
  3. 14:57Software could become as ordinary as reading and writing2:25
  4. 2:33Claude Code was built before the model was ready2:36
  5. 13:03Product craft still matters as models improve1:55

  6. 17:18Anthropic's workflow advantage is organizational, not model access2:03

Up next · Lex Fridman PodcastWhy hand-written assembly beats compilers by 10x to 50x11:00

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

  1. 17:22

    So one of the things Greg said was that you guys are living in the future a little bit because you get to have access to the models and the agents. There's an internal tool before you released it. Is the gap between where you guys are in engineering and the rest of the world, is that a month? Is it three months, there's six months? And is that gap getting bigger or smaller over time? Yeah, so internally, we use the same model as everyone else does.

  2. 17:47

    For us, the dogfooding is really, really important. So we use the thing that everyone else here does. We use a little bit of Mythos to try it, and then we use a lot of Opus 4.7 to dogfood it and to write most of our code. I think on the model side, there isn't really a gap. It's pretty much mythos, and some descendant of that will become available at some point to everyone. I think on the product side, there's probably a far larger gap.

  3. 18:13

    And that's just related to us changing all of our processes. If you talk to people at Anthropic, we use Cloud for literally everything. And our clouds are talking all day. As my clouds are coding in a loop, they will communicate over Slack to talk to other people's clods that are also running in a loop to kind of figure out unknowns. We have no more manually written code anywhere at the company. All of the SQL is written by models.

  4. 18:36

    Everything is just built by the models. So I think actually the place that we're ahead is not the technology because the same technology available to us is available to everyone here because fundamentally we are building a platform. And so for us it's really important that developers can use the same thing that we're using and that we dog food everything that we put out there. But I think there's actually a far bigger lead in kind of the organizational structure and organizational process.

  5. 18:59

    And this is a place where, you know, hopefully we can talk about it in places like this and everyone can kind of learn from it and also evolve. Yeah, and I think that's one of the advantages startups have. It's so much easier to start there. Jaron? Yeah, last time we talked, I think you'd mentioned, we talked a little bit about multi-agent and it was very in-coated at the time at a prior Sequoia event.