# The printing press multiplied output before literacy spread

Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/s/the-printing-press-multiplied-output-before-literacy-spread/ on Real Alpha, the best minutes from long interviews with the people building AI. Cite and link the page, not this copy.

- Speaker: [Boris Cherny](https://realalpha.app/builders/boris-cherny/) · Boris Cherny is creator and Head of Claude Code at Anthropic. · Created Claude Code at Anthropic and leads its team; previously spent about five years at Meta.
- Host: [Gergely Orosz](https://realalpha.app/people/gergely-orosz/) · Host, The Pragmatic Engineer · Spent four years at Uber heading mobile, web and backend teams; shipped part of its payments system.
- Show: The Pragmatic Engineer
- Episode: [Building Claude Code with Boris Cherny](https://realalpha.app/v/julbw1JuAz0/), Mar 4, 2026
- Moment: 1:25:45 to 1:30:04 of the episode (4 min), playing on https://realalpha.app/s/the-printing-press-multiplied-output-before-literacy-spread/; the episode from there: https://realalpha.app/v/julbw1JuAz0/?t=5145

## Quote

> “The quantity of printed materials went up like **10,000x in the next 50, 100 years**.”
> — [Boris Cherny](https://realalpha.app/builders/boris-cherny/) at [1:26:57](https://realalpha.app/v/julbw1JuAz0/?t=5217) · The Pragmatic Engineer

## Takeaways

1. Printed material grew roughly 10,000-fold within 50–100 years.
2. Mass literacy took centuries to follow.
3. New kinds of writing work emerged as access expanded.

## About this segment

Boris Cherny compares AI coding to the printing press: printed material multiplied before literacy became widespread. He argues that new roles and markets may emerge in ways we cannot yet predict.

From “Building Claude Code with Boris Cherny”, Mar 4, 2026. [Watch the full episode](https://realalpha.app/v/julbw1JuAz0/)

## Transcript

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

[1:25:50](https://realalpha.app/v/julbw1JuAz0/?t=5150) we're in is the the printing press in you know like the the 1400s or whatever because at that moment it was actually quite similar right like there was a group of scribes that you know knew how to write and it it was as i understand of course we never lived it but as i imagine it was it was a hard process to learn you need to run you need to get the equipment you probably needed some sponsorship or being selected yeah practicing because you needed to produce the same thing over and over again and few people could do that and i assume it was either high prestige or highly paid or who knows let's assume it was but then the printed press came along yeah yeah and at least in europe like you have to like a lord or a king or something had to had to employ you and then you had to go through you know years of training and there was this class of scribes that knew how to

[1:26:36](https://realalpha.app/v/julbw1JuAz0/?t=5196) write they were employed by someone like this often the king themselves like or you know the queen it was it was not literate so it was this very very niche skill and it was like less than one percent of the population was literate in Europe, you know, back then. And then the printing crust came out. And what happened? So the cost of printed material went down something like 100x over the next, I think, 30 years, 50 years or something. The quantity of printed materials went up like 10,000x in the next 50, 100 years. This was the first effect. Literacy, it took a little while for it to catch up. So I think global literacy, it went up to something like 70%, but That took like another 200 years, 300 years, because learning to read is just very hard.

[1:27:19](https://realalpha.app/v/julbw1JuAz0/?t=5239) Learning to write is hard. It takes a lot of effort. It takes education system. It takes, you know, infrastructure to have paper and ink and the free time to do this instead of working on a farm. So it kind of it took early stage of industrialization to actually get there. But but I think this effect of making it so this thing that was locked away in ivory tower and now it's accessible to everyone.

[1:27:40](https://realalpha.app/v/julbw1JuAz0/?t=5260) This is just, you know, like none of the things around us would exist today without this. Like if we weren't literate, if the people that built, you know, this microphone weren't literate, it would have just been very hard to have a modern economy. None of these things would exist. And I just kind of think about back then, if people had to predict what would happen when the printing press came out, no one would have predicted that the microphone would become a thing.

[1:28:04](https://realalpha.app/v/julbw1JuAz0/?t=5284) So I just feel like this is the best analog for the moment that we're in right now. And it's interesting that you say that some of the kings were illiterate who are employing the scribes because if we're being honest with ourselves, we have business owners who know what they want to build and they are employing software engineers because they themselves cannot write code. And I think we like to mock the CEOs who are coming there, coming to the team.

[1:28:33](https://realalpha.app/v/julbw1JuAz0/?t=5313) They might even have a drawn prototype or whiteboard and saying this should be easy. But of course, they don't understand how difficult it is. But there seems to be a bit of analogy where there's a person who wants what they want. But until now, they needed to hire a software, a specialist who can build that. And there's always that disconnect between the idea and the person. And just like with the printing press, like what would happen if they could actually express and like the king could actually read or write their own letters, they wouldn't need that middleman.

[1:29:02](https://realalpha.app/v/julbw1JuAz0/?t=5342) And things become more efficient. I mean, of course, for the scribe, it's not the best news necessarily, but I mean, smart scribes can also do, so someone needs to write the books, run the press, et cetera. Yeah, exactly. And if you think about what happened to the scribes, they ceased to become scribes, but now there's a category of writers and authors. These people now exist. And the reason they exist is because the market for literature just expanded a ton.

[1:29:28](https://realalpha.app/v/julbw1JuAz0/?t=5368) and i guess also if we think about like back then a scribe's work was read by a few people and with the printing press and author there's a lot more authors and some of them are not really read but some of them have wider reach than than they could imagine there's new careers that that exists because of that yeah i love the analogy and the most exciting thing for me is it's just so impossible to say today what will happen after this happens and after this transition happens just you know the the economy as we know it would not have existed without it so