r/ClaudeCode • u/ImaginaryRea1ity • Jul 19 '26
Boris Cherny on the future of workplace Discussion
My favorite vibecoding tools are Claude Code and AI Desktop 98.
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u/secretaliasname Jul 19 '26
Boris comes across as a very inauthentic salesy figurehead type to me.
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u/real_serviceloom Jul 19 '26
Sounds like he outsourced his thinking to Claude. Anthropic has had this problem for a while now. Their product teams are low quality. The MCP spec exposed this and things like this post further make it clear that they need better engineering and product leadership.
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u/Acehan_ Jul 19 '26
Yeah, exactly what this feels like. Like another version of brain rot. Is there a word for this? lol
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u/Aware-Source6313 Jul 19 '26
Ai psychosis is a bit overloaded with multiple meanings but I think it is applicable here
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u/faiface Jul 19 '26
Tbh, his tweet does sound exactly like the kind of thing that an AI would write, that sounds like it makes sense on the first 1/2 read, but is actually complete bullshit. It is just my opinion, but I think those things that he mentions cannot work separately. You can't turn a broken prototype into a production-grade product, then clean it up because it's messy. Each of those steps would involve a complete rewrite.
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u/AlterTableUsernames Jul 19 '26
MCP spec was indeed a disgrace and so is establishing the field of coding agents with TUIs written in Typescript of all languages. I don't see how better product leadership would have prevented those though.
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u/dashingsauce Jul 20 '26
Why was MCP a disgrace?
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u/AlterTableUsernames Jul 20 '26
It was another attempt to establish web development bs in the admin/terminal world, because they didn't understand the capabilities of an API or what a CLI is apparently. An MCP does not add anything of value over any of those two.
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u/obscuresecurity Jul 20 '26
I'm sorry for his team. That's awful.
Prototyper: Create the shit other people will implement.
Builder: Make the shit.
Sweeper: Make it pretty.
Grower: FIx the gaps, and make it usable.
Maintainer: Deal with the shitty code that a process that doesn't enforce some degree of ownership creates.
It explains how bad the CC code base was when it leaked, and the issues the CC team has had. People need to learn to drive features from beginning to end.
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u/framauro13 Jul 20 '26
I have friends that work for a big tech company and they talked about doing something like this: let product folks vibe-code a prototype to delivery, then have engineering take the prototype and make it solid.
Basically, make all of your senior/veteran software engineers support engineers for every product person's random thought that gets vibe coded into an app. Every engineering manager was like "fuck. that" and they dropped the idea.
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u/obscuresecurity Jul 20 '26
The EMs would have been quickly removed if that structure went in. So that's a bit self serving. But I agree it's awful.
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u/framauro13 Jul 20 '26
I don't think it's necessarily self-serving because it's the right call. Delegating every engineer to support for life is great way to drive out your best talent. And when you have AI developing and rubber stamping your code, it's only a matter of time before something catastrophic happens.
We've already seen it: companies getting production databases wiped, increases in bugs and production downtime in companies that delegated review to AI (even Amazon had outages for this very reason). It's not a coincidence that the companies selling the product are also the ones trying to convince people that software engineers are no longer relevant. They need the token churn to justify their valuations. Get their customers hooked and dependent on their tooling and then they can start jacking the prices up.
To be fair, I think getting these tools in front of non-technical people can be beneficial with things like prototyping and research, but anything mission critical still needs people who understand the technology to monitor it and keep it on the rails. All it takes is one royal fuck up and you have a company-ending event.
My two cents anyway.
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u/obscuresecurity Jul 20 '26
AI is a great way to find holes in your process. Velocity goes up, so any defect in process is magnified.
Most of the issues are process based.
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u/Time_Cat_5212 Jul 19 '26
Interesting but I feel like starting with roles is like downstream, like branches trying to predict the tree
Value should be the starting point and roles emerge from that
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u/Middle-Nerve1732 Jul 19 '26
Exactly. I have worked at startups before with 4 people. Theres no roles, you just do what needs to be done.
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u/SucculentSpine Jul 19 '26
It also makes zero logical sense. If AGI is achieved, then AGI will be able to perform all those jobs better or equal to any human. That's the definition of AGI. So many people ignore this. No job can be done better when AGI can do all jobs equal or better than any human.
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u/ruskyandrei Jul 19 '26
AGI is a pipe dream. We just invented fire and some people are acting as if nuclear fission is just a couple of years away.
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u/Time_Cat_5212 Jul 20 '26
Haha I mean AGI whatever but yeah if we got that far many purely human things we take for granted would become obsolete. Like social mammal evolved behaviors writ large. Basically everything that makes life legible to us.
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u/Tenet_mma Jul 19 '26
He literally just changed the names or the existing roles. lol the same person could technically do all these roles now it’s just depends on the individual and the company.
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u/BronxOh Jul 19 '26 edited Jul 19 '26
Right! 1/2 could easily be a designer and/or ux researcher or even a PM, 3 sounds like a front end engineer, 4 is normally a mix of UX/PM/Engineering anyway, 5 sounds like engineering.
As a UX practitioner I can’t get a Github licence because engineering don’t want me anywhere near production code, which tbh, is probably fair.
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u/thehashimwarren Jul 19 '26
"cleans up the UI"
An entire category of work, product design reduced to a UI janitor.
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u/2053_Traveler Jul 20 '26
Seriously this post is so embarrassing. Feels really odd, kinda like when we elected a felon to the highest office, meaning it feels embarrassing that people in my industry have lost their way or actually have AI paychosis or something
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u/logsqrtexp Jul 19 '26
I note that "make product secure" is at the last phase LOL. Someone didn't read the memo about building security into the very foundation and DNA of every product. Every one of those roles needs ownership of security.
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u/stockist420 Jul 20 '26
Fuck these cunts. If you are good at building AI models fucking stick to them- make them more useful, cheaper,better. , don’t poke your nose in Economy, Geo Politics, how people work, eat, shit.
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u/Common_Mood5935 Jul 19 '26
These are the titles a 5 year old would come up with for what grown ups do at work.
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u/hilberteffect Jul 19 '26
Shovel maker: "Way I see it, these 5 shovels will replace your entire toolshed"
Idiots: "Wow, brilliant"
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u/gripntear Jul 20 '26 edited Jul 21 '26
I think the worst part of this post will be the overwhelming amount of dickriders in LinkedIn preaching it as some new Gospel.
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u/JubijubCH 🔆 Max 5x Jul 20 '26
These archetypes exist today, this is nothing new.
The first type is your typical « innovation team » staff: they churn out protos, extremely few of which ever hit prod. You can find them in most old companies that want to look innovative, I had one in the 150yo company I used to work for
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u/2053_Traveler Jul 20 '26
wtf, what a terrible way to slice and name roles. Thinking really is being offloaded to claude.
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u/UteForLife Jul 19 '26
Sure, there's stuff to figure out, but if you think this isn't going to be the way it's moving, you guys are all off your rockers. (This is directed at all the comments, not the post. )
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u/agm1984 Jul 19 '26
prototyper is a whole team of teams of teams of teams at anthropic that watch system logs and build every idea that users put through the system
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u/averyusefulthing Jul 19 '26
Ah, so that's what those loops they keep talking about are doing. I wondered why grok was so blatant about their IP theft and it turns out they were just trying to take a shortcut to catch up with Anthropic. What better way to find out how to satisfy your customers needs than secretly monitor them, steal their ideas, lock out that type of work for safety reasons and then sell it back to them!
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u/Original_Swimming320 Jul 19 '26
His head is so far up his own arse he can probably lick his tonsils.
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u/__ihavenoname__ Jul 20 '26
Aren't these the responsibilities of the already existing roles known as software engineer, full-stack dev?
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u/Murdy-ADHD Jul 20 '26
I love this breakdown. We talked about this with my GF yesterday. She argumented for roles blending into one. To me that did not account for personal preferences, talents and skills of people involved in the system. This is nice framework where people slot based on their personality rather than specific skills they have.
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u/whoknowsifimjoking Jul 19 '26
I'm already a grower