# Trust helped Boris move Instagram from Python to Hack

Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/s/trust-helped-boris-move-instagram-from-python-to-hack/ 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 of Claude Code and former Meta principal engineer. · Created Claude Code at Anthropic and leads its team; previously spent about five years at Meta.
- Host: [Ryan Peterman](https://realalpha.app/people/ryan-peterman/) · Host, The Peterman Pod · Went from new grad to staff engineer at Instagram in three years.
- Show: The Peterman Pod
- Episode: [Boris Cherny (Creator of Claude Code) On What Grew His Career And Building at Anthropic](https://realalpha.app/v/AmdLVWMdjOk/), Dec 15, 2025
- Moment: 54:13 to 1:00:01 of the episode (6 min), playing on https://realalpha.app/s/trust-helped-boris-move-instagram-from-python-to-hack/; the episode from there: https://realalpha.app/v/AmdLVWMdjOk/?t=3253

## Quote

> “we got a bunch of beer and just **got to know them as people** before we even talked about the technical problem.”
> — [Boris Cherny](https://realalpha.app/builders/boris-cherny/) at [59:15](https://realalpha.app/v/AmdLVWMdjOk/?t=3555) · The Peterman Pod

## Takeaways

1. Coding time helped Boris earn trust in Instagram's new org.
2. He argued Python no longer fit a codebase with thousands of engineers.
3. He met skeptics first and found supporters who had stayed quiet.

## About this segment

After moving to Instagram in Japan, Boris Cherny rebuilt credibility by coding, then pushed a Python-to-Hack migration. He started with the strongest skeptics, built trust, and found quiet support for the change.

From “Boris Cherny (Creator of Claude Code) On What Grew His Career And Building at Anthropic”, Dec 15, 2025. [Watch the full episode](https://realalpha.app/v/AmdLVWMdjOk/)

## Transcript

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

[54:18](https://realalpha.app/v/AmdLVWMdjOk/?t=3258) great for everyone at this point in your career I mean you moved you didn't just move orgs you moved across the world to work at Instagram. And I think when you're such a senior tech lead with a lot of credibility in your existing org, it's much easier to get things done or at least influence others because they say, oh, I know Boris and I know his past work. But I'm curious, how did you build up credibility at Instagram when you were so far away from everyone else?

[54:50](https://realalpha.app/v/AmdLVWMdjOk/?t=3290) i think a lot of the credit early on this goes to like nam who was nam guyan he was the he's still the vp of avenge at instagram and and jeff huang um who was my director at the time but he now he's a vp um and you know will i think there was a lot of connections made by these people so you know for example nam was like hey you really like doing you know working on code quality and like tech at reduction, you know, which we call, you know, better engineering at meta. And he kind of connected me with the people working on it. And this was like Lucas Camera and Gabe and a bunch of this, a bunch of these other folks that were working on this stuff. So those connections were really useful. And then I think a lot of it was, I just had to earn the trust again. And honestly, this is a healthy thing to do. And I think this is one of the really awesome things about meta

[55:41](https://realalpha.app/v/AmdLVWMdjOk/?t=3341) engineering culture, that there are not titles. And so you kind of have to constantly re-earn your trust. And, you know, even if I was a great engineer in the past, I may not have been a great engineer at Instagram. And if I wasn't, then I don't deserve influence. I don't deserve to have a really loud voice that people listen to. So I had to earn. along with everyone else and so my first few weeks i spent a lot of time like meeting people mapping out the org mapping out goals writing a lot of code so i can get to know the code base but then in japan it was totally different because you know like 4 p.m tokyo time was like or it was like 9 a.m tokyo time was like 7 p.m new york time there was just like no time zone it was rough yeah um but it was also great because i think in the few years before i was doing so

[56:28](https://realalpha.app/v/AmdLVWMdjOk/?t=3388) many meetings and docs and all this stuff i just wasn't coding um so i just started to feel pretty unhappy because like as an engineer we code that's that's what we do like that's that's the reason we picked this job is you like for me like when i write code i have an emotional relationship with the code and it's something that i think about when i'm really deep in a problem i dream about it so it's just so important for me to code and when i wasn't doing this for years it was sort of rough And I think I was starting to burn out of it.

[56:56](https://realalpha.app/v/AmdLVWMdjOk/?t=3416) And so actually, it was a gift to be in this time zone where I literally couldn't do meetings because people weren't awake or didn't want to do 9 p.m. meetings just to talk. So I didn't do any more one-on-ones. And this is actually still something I don't do. So I still don't do any standing one-on-ones. And I just could spend a lot of time coding. And what I realized is I was one of a few engineers at Instagram at the time that was coding this much.

[57:19](https://realalpha.app/v/AmdLVWMdjOk/?t=3439) um you know people code but people don't code that much because there's all the stuff that fills up your time there there's meetings and you know docs and all these other obligations and i was able to do a lot of stuff that i think everyone else wanted to do but just didn't have time um and this was kind of a superpower in in that org and pretty early on nam connected me with uh with joe pamer who's still a good friend and and mentor and um he's he's at google now and we just started talking about like you know at the time the codebase was written in python and uh it was sort of rough for a lot of different reasons and really the codebase should have been moved over to hack which is the main facebook monolith that you know and this is where all the language support is there's so much infra hhvm is just this absolutely phenomenal web

[58:11](https://realalpha.app/v/AmdLVWMdjOk/?t=3491) serving stack. There's nothing else like it in terms of like efficiency. If you're using GraphQL, you absolutely have to use it because it's just so optimized for this stuff. And Instagram just wasn't using any of this and engineering was suffering. Like in the really early days, you know, like when like Mikey was at Instagram, really basic decisions were, the basic principle for decisions was do the simple thing that works. And this worked really well, but then at some point it stopped working. Once you get to like a thousand engineers, 2000 engineers working the code base and you know many many years of tech tech and products built on top of each other you kind of have to do you have you have to make slightly different decisions than you would have made at the start and so even if python was absolutely the right decision at the beginning

[58:53](https://realalpha.app/v/AmdLVWMdjOk/?t=3533) it was not the right decision by the time i was there and this was painfully obvious as an engineer and i think a lot of other people saw this but what stopped them was just the amount of work it would have taken to move this stuff over and so i just started like scoping this and kind of figuring out what it would take and so i started by finding the people that would disagree the most. And there's a bunch of these like infra old timers that just thought this was like a terrible idea and would never work. And so I went to talk to them first. I like food in New York.

[59:19](https://realalpha.app/v/AmdLVWMdjOk/?t=3559) And, you know, we got a bunch of beer and just got to know them as people before we even talked about the technical problem. You have to build trust. So I had to kind of get to know them as people. And this was so valuable. And this is still a lot of my friends today. And after building this trust, I also learned there was a bunch of other people that actually did want to do this and were kind of afraid to say it.

[59:40](https://realalpha.app/v/AmdLVWMdjOk/?t=3580) And so these people came out of the woodwork too. And eventually we started scoping this and this project kind of spun out and it's actually still going today and there's many engineers working on it. But it's funny because at Facebook, I think this kind of problem rarely happens because the org is so engineering driven. At Instagram, there were many problems of the shape because the org is very product driven.