The Peterman Pod Boris Cherny (Creator of Claude Code) On How His Career Grew
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Dec 15, 2025 
Boris Cherny, the Creator of Claude Code and former Principal Engineer at Meta, shares insights from his prolific career in tech. He discusses his journey from early projects at Facebook, emphasizing the value of generalist engineering culture. Boris explains how Claude Code succeeded by enhancing productivity and adapting for non-developers. He also gives advice on finding impactful side projects and highlights the importance of building trust in organizations. His reflections on competition and user focus are enlightening for anyone in tech!
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Building Chats And Groups From Scratch
- Boris Cherny describes building Chats and Groups at Facebook by prototyping, recruiting a few engineers, and testing with cafeteria users.
- The small, scrappy team validated the idea and iterated through many janky early experiences to find product-market fit.
Find Latent Demand Before Building
- Latent demand is users doing things the product wasn't designed for; build features that surface that existing intent.
- You cannot get people to do things they never wanted; you can only make existing intent easier and more obvious.
Align Incentives Across Conflicting Orgs
- When working across orgs with different values, find a shared, testable hypothesis both sides care about.
- Align incentives or create a joint owner to avoid culture-driven failures like speed vs. reliability conflicts.
