Boris Cherny

Ukrainian-born programmer, creator and head of Claude Code at Anthropic

Boris Cherny is a Ukrainian-born programmer in San Francisco who created Claude Code, the agentic coding tool from Anthropic, and leads it. He is also the author of the O'Reilly book Programming TypeScript (2019).

Career

Cherny was born in Ukraine and moved to the United States with his family in 1995. He studied economics at UC San Diego. From 2017 to 2024 he worked at Meta Platforms, on the Instagram team; by his last years there he was responsible for code quality across the whole company. He has written widely about TypeScript and front-end programming.

After a period living in rural Japan, he joined Anthropic in 2024. As a side project he connected Anthropic's Claude model to his own computer so that it could run commands, and the tool spread quickly inside the company. It was released publicly as Claude Code in February 2025 and became one of the most widely used AI coding agents. Cherny has said that all of his own code is now written by Claude, and has argued that companies should judge AI tools against the cost of the engineering work they replace, not against the price of other software.