Creator of Claude Code at Anthropic.
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6 of Boris Cherny's claims fit 5 mental models. Most often: Compounding, Make it real, Play long games.
Small gains that build on themselves beat big one-off wins; so do small losses.
Their wordsLike an investment, your knowledge will compound to improve all the choices you make and things you do throughout life.
Their wordsmost of your gains come from the long-term effects of compounding, not from the price you bought at
Making a cheap, real version settles questions a description cannot.
Their wordsThere’s just no way we could have shipped this if we started with static mocks and Figma or if we started with a PRD.
A longer horizon makes some problems solvable and some short-term wins look like what they are.
Their wordsAt Anthropic, we don't build for the model of today, we build for the model of six months from now. And that's still my advice to founders that are building on LLMs.
Where this was said
↗Y Combinator, quoting Boris Cherny on the Lightcone Podcastx.com
Think in odds, not certainties, and bet heavily only when the odds are clearly yours.
Their wordsWhen there’s new data, you have to update your priors.
When something becomes cheap and plentiful, the value moves to whatever is still rare next to it.
Their wordsIt’s not so much about deep work, it’s about how good I am at context switching and jumping across multiple different contexts very quickly.