Boris Cherny Anthropic update

by Vojtech: Claude Code

Boris Cherny, principal engineer at Meta and author of the O'Reilly book on TypeScript, joined Anthropic to build a side project that became Claude Code. It got so popular across Silicon Valley that half the developers were using it before he left for Cursor and came back two weeks later. A new Opus model dropped right then, but users started writing massive prompts that actually hurt performance. Boris had to cut most of the system prompt because those detailed instructions now work against the model. He even suggested deleting CLAUDE.md files every few months just to test what the AI can do without them. The creator reportedly uses way less prompting than everyone else. There's a full 12-minute explanation available if you want the whole breakdown.