Anthropic’s Boris Cherny has a simple message for the 22-year-old computer science graduates looking to figure out what’s next.
“If you want to work at a company, you can totally still do that — there are entry-level jobs, there’s a lot you can do,” Cherny told tech journalist Casey Newton during a recent episode of Newton’s “Platformer” podcast. “But if you’re at all entrepreneurial, go start a startup.”
Thanks to AI tools like Claude Code, which Cherny created, entrepreneurs can build and scale their companies like never before.
“There has never been a better time in history to do it; it’s the golden age,” he said. “You and your agents can build a giant company.”
Cherny told Newton that he had recently spoken with the latest batch of founders at Y Combinator, the famed Silicon Valley incubator once led by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Instead of asking founders whether they used Claude Code, Cherny said he asked for a show of hands of how many founders let Claude Code write “100% of their code.”
“These are the most cutting-edge startups — usually a few people each — and half the hands went up,” he said.
In contrast, Cherny said, when he asked the same group how many of them don’t have the model write any of their code, “out of a couple hundred people, one hand went up.”
“Everyone else was somewhere between 50% and 100%,” he said. “So coding is getting solved for a bigger and bigger percentage of the code we write.”
Cherny’s broad advice aligns with the growing chorus in tech, which sees the rise of AI, especially coding agents, as offering unprecedented opportunities for the next generation of startups.
“For a long time, I think the most important ingredient that I looked for — YC looked for, that kind of this part of our industry looked for on a founding team — was technical talent,” Altman said recently. “And that’s still very important, but now people who just really deeply understand their users and can’t code at all. I want to fund those people.”
As for the future of software engineering, Cherny said, while the title of engineer may change, the broad work of people writing code or using agents to write code will not.
“I don’t think we’re going to call them engineers,” he said. “But if we talk about people writing code or using agents to write code, I think there will be 100 times more of them than there are today. That’s my prediction.”
