Interview with Boris Cherny [video]

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• Hacker News
• 30:08 "This means engineers can talk to users... stuff that's actually fun". Wow, he totally gets us. /s

  31:09 He flubs the questioning. His first says "Raise your hand if 100% of your code uses agents." Then he says, "What about more than 50%". You can see the same audience members who raised the first time shrug and also raise the second time. He then says "Slightly less hands," which just means he sees what he wants to see. Don't believe this man.

  by jake_and_fatman
• still a long way to go!
  by linxy97
• 2 weeks rebuilding in Swift is absolutely crazy. Wonder if they're using production Opus 5 for this or their internal Mythos (if they even use it internally)
  by jke_kang
• If it's on the house (and they can probably turn up the token speed) why use anything other than the most powerful models?
  by kev009
• This gives you more raw behind-the-scenes. I think the video from Startup School is too polished. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQU9o_5rHC4
  by Taka108
• > From what I'm hearing, you for every model release, you basically delete all of the codebase, delete all of the prompt and start from scratch every time. That in the old world would have been not something Startup would have done for the product. It's like press delete every six months for everything.

  > That's right. So to be fair, we don't delete the entire codebase.

  by nojs
• I've spent the last year building an app with Claude Code without knowing how to code. I'm still surprised at how much it gets wrong, even on the newest models. What makes it work for me is describing exactly what I want and then actually checking everything it gives back.
  by mfallon
• For me, I just don't trust Claude Code to write first-class professional code. I have used all frontier claude models and it always does sloppy job that needs to be fixed by codex. I have claude/codex setup and any execution must go to codex and all reviews as well.
  by EagleEdge
• The TL;DR of the fragment at around 6:57 in the video, for those who don't want to watch, is that Boris recommends to delete all the customizations, CLAUDE.md, skills, and other stuff you had for older models, and try using the new models without all that, because the new models can surprise you.
  by ventana
• That is the interesting part to me. Also, was anyone else familiar with the LLM-app terms "ablation" and "product overhang," prior to this? I was not.

  If you were, please share the knowledge with us. Where can I learn more?

  by consumer451
• Salesman "recommends" you to continue wasting more tokens and on top of that, he "recommends" you to use only recursive loops with the latest and greatest models.

  Finally he also "recommends" that you do not look at the code, or even understand it.

  His "recommendations" are designed to get you to spend even more tokens and get you hooked on the Opus / Fable slot machine in order to extract as much money as possible from your wallets.

  News at 10.

  by rvz
• There’s really not much to specialize in and differentiate yourself. All this harness customization is fleeting. Remember prompt engineering?
  by sivanmz
• The ability to start a Claude Code session in a temporary "config free" mode, similar to how incognito works for chrome, would be a nice feature to make this easy to try out, especially since model releases are so frequent.
  by joebates
• > because the new models can surprise you.

  Yes, they keep surprising me that they still keep doing all of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48962703 with no improvement despite all the marketing assurances that "hey you don't need to read code anymore"

  by troupo
• Even for older models I was (and am) of the opinion that a lot of the context-overstuffing cruft people have been wrapping around their LLM usage is more of an RNG-impacting (but not always for the better) lucky charm rather than it being universally helpful.

  And a lot of people latched on to it as a form of self-soothing.

  "I may not write much code anymore, but I can still be an expert prompt engineer!"

  by georgemcbay
• Steering/corrective instructions are now supposed to go into memories - which are non-portable? How do we manage these documents for team members without everyone repeating themselves? And if you remove all these documents, how do you work with other models which might use them (nevermind that claude ignored AGENTS.md for the longest time).

  I am on board with not putting stuff like "write clean code" into an agent file, or using plugins for tools that are now built into the harness. I don't see enough evidence to support models being significantly better at figuring out intent, or getting the assumption correct. I've always gotten better results (as ever) with very constrained instructions, vs "fix the install".

  by throwaway219450
• All of these harnesses should support pinning config files and tools to specific models or families of models.

  It's really tiring to have to tweak everything with each model release and then watch those changes mess up cheaper models in the process.

  by m_ke
• So maybe SKILL.md and CLAUDE.md should have model version pinned?

  Somewhat like AWS CloudFormation templates start with something like TemplateVersion: 2017-10-01

  But maybe that's old school thinking still.

  by albert_e
• this assumes everyone uses the same model, but where I'm at, we use a wide variety of models

  we keep the AGENTS.md simple and monorepo quirk focussed, no instructions for specific agents or models

  by verdverm
• I'm thinking a lot about this recently as I'm building AQ.dev (Multiplayer coding harness). My instinct is to keep it simple and not trying to do too many shenanigans with these files and let engineers maintain control.
  by knighthacker
• They should just be symlinks to CONTRIBUTING.md and other docs humans are meant to read.

  The whole idea behind LLM is they use the same language and tools as us, so we literally don't design anything specifically for them.

  by crazylogger
• The most interesting part is Boris' recommendation to delete your Claude.md every 6 months to see what the model is capable of. The link in the post sends you directly to that moment.
  by knighthacker
• It would have been nice to hear about how to be more efficient, task/token wise, especially with Opus 5.

  Most users are on a subscription, and aren’t able to run dynamic workflows, spinning up 1000 agents or leaving a bun rewrite going for weeks. Don’t get me wrong… I like cake.

  by discordance
• Seems like something they should work on, not customers. Reinventing my workflow every six months because a company/product is lazy is not high on my list.
  by bmitc
• I feel like the Big Insight with Claude Code was 'give the AI access to tools, in fact to your actual laptop'. And of course 1.5 years later 'a harness to enable an agent to use my computer' has turned into the flagship product we expect from frontier labs

  However. I don't think all the other 'Ideas' these harness-building guys have are all that universally applicable. Heck they are naysaying their own gearhead stack of skills.md and claude.md lately including in this video. But also I'm suspicious of this whole thing of spawning agents. For example "find every function in this codebase" is probably better done deterministically using a script that extracts function names rather than by spawning 20 agents to 'read' chunks of the code in token space. But it certainly racks up the token usage which is good for the person selling you inference...

  And there is a lot missing in the actual harnesses frankly that isn't about more parallel agent ninjutsu. Like why isn't there a 'move this function from this file to this file' tool (copy/paste char range) and we have to see Claude/Codex/etc flail around rewriting huge chunks of code in token space

  by firasd
• > And there is a lot missing in the actual harnesses frankly that isn't about more parallel agent ninjutsu. Like why isn't there a 'move this function from this file to this file' tool (copy/paste char range) and we have to see Claude/Codex/etc flail around rewriting huge chunks of code in token space

  This is a very important point. There's so much missing in software development that we've gone from zero to one hundred without considering the in between. Same thing happened with electric cars and automated driving. Everyone decided that we should go from no driver assistance to full-self driving instead of incrementally building up driver assistance features. This is similar. We and these AI tools need better semantic tooling for dealing with software development. Otherwise, like you say, these AI tools are just going to flail about as much as we do. It's pretty ridiculous our version control systems still operate on objects that are just lines of text.

  by bmitc
• "find every function in this codebase" is rarely a thing imo. Why would you want to do that, for some statistics? In many cases, what you want to do is find "all classes that implement some interface" - of course depending on the language. And reasonable languages allow agents to find that reasonably efficiently ("implements Foo") - a bit slower than specialized interfaces, but in a way that don't require you to maintain a giant index.

  And yes, agents writing chunks of code or scripts to accomplish tasks is already what they do, when they determine it's efficient.

  >And there is a lot missing in the actual harnesses frankly that isn't about more parallel agent ninjutsu. Like why isn't there a 'move this function from this file to this file' tool (copy/paste char range) and we have to see Claude/Codex/etc flail around rewriting huge chunks of code in token space

  I think if we had agent-specialized languages that you would modify by directly changing AST or some other structure it would be more efficient. But, otherwise, it's way more efficient to train on existing corpus - like PRs - which is the same reason that internal LLM thinking is not binharic, but regular English (or Chinese).

  by KptMarchewa
• Yes exactly, his job is first and foremost to be a token salesman.

  He’d be telling you to use workflows that spin up loads of agents all the time whether or not he actually thought they were the best way to be productive

  by ifwinterco
• > Like why isn't there a 'move this function from this file to this file' tool (copy/paste char range)

  There Is: https://github.com/oraios/serena

  by senand
• > Like why isn't there a 'move this function from this file to this file' tool (copy/paste char range)

  There is, you can install LSPs for a given language which act as just another tool the model can use to more efficiently manipulate code.

  by rescripting