How the creator of Claude Code sees the future of AI

Claude Code is a developer tool for developers. And yet, over the last year and especially the last few months, the team at Anthropic has seen a huge number of people, across industries and disciplines, figure out how to access their terminal so that they could build new stuff too. Few AI products have found true product-market fit the way Claude Code has. But how did that happen? And are we ever going to get out of the terminal?

On this episode of The Vergecast, Anthropic’s Boris Cherny, the head of Claude Code, explains how the project has taken off over the last year. Cherny has made a lot of headlines recently by saying that Claude Code now writes 100 percent of his code, and he explains how his relationship to that code has changed. We also talk about Cowork, and Anthropic’s ongoing attempt to make Claude Code (and everything) a little more accessible to everyday users. It won’t just be chat windows, but nobody’s exactly sure what it will be yet.

After that, The Verge’s Hayden Field joins the show to continue our conversation from a few weeks ago about AI and privacy. These new agentic systems all ask for vast access to our data, our apps, even our devices themselves, in exchange for doing lots of useful things on our behalf. Hayden walks through the tradeoffs inherent in that access and how you should think about guarding your data going forward.

Finally, The Verge’s Allison Johnson helps David answer a question from the Vergecast Hotline (call 866-VERGE11 or email vergecast@theverge.com!) about how the RAM shortage will affect your gadget purchases this year. Depending on who you are, and how old your gadgets are, it’s either time to do some maintenance or do some upgrading.

If you want to know more about everything we discuss in this episode, here are some links to get you started: