Interview with Boris Cherny [video] • Hacker News Board

Re: Interview with Boris Cherny [video]

#11

Post by rvz » Tue, Jul 28, 2026, 9:53 PM UTC

ventana wrote: post #3

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.

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.

Re: Interview with Boris Cherny [video]

#12

Post by troupo » Tue, Jul 28, 2026, 9:54 PM UTC

ventana wrote: post #3

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.

> 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"

Re: Interview with Boris Cherny [video]

#13

Post by troupo » Tue, Jul 28, 2026, 9:59 PM UTC

georgemcbay wrote: post #5

ventana wrote: post #3

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.

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!"

> is more of an RNG-impacting (but not always for the better) lucky charm rather than it being universally helpful.

I wrote this last year, it's still true:

--- start quote ---

https://dmitriid.com/prompting-llms-is-not-engineering

In reality these are just shamanic rituals with outcomes based on faith, fear, or excitement. Engineering it is not.

--- end quote ---

There are some prompts useful for the user like brainstorming [1] but on the whole it's nothing but lucky charms

[1] brainstorming from superpowers: https://github.com/obra/superpowers

Re: Interview with Boris Cherny [video]

#14

Post by mfallon » Tue, Jul 28, 2026, 10:26 PM UTC

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.

Re: Interview with Boris Cherny [video]

#15

Post by chromakode » Tue, Jul 28, 2026, 10:27 PM UTC

iooi wrote: post #6

I don't get why Anthropic keeps saying how cool it is that they were able to rewrite bun in rust, I feel like if the model is really that good you wouldn't need a rewrite, you'd be able to create the runtime from scratch.

Code is a fantastic way to capture requirements, particularly iterative product discoveries over time. It's much easier to start with a manifestation of the requirements (and tests of invariants) than starting from base principles.

Re: Interview with Boris Cherny [video]

#16

Post by slopinthebag » Tue, Jul 28, 2026, 10:50 PM UTC

troupo wrote: post #12

ventana wrote: post #3

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.

> 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"

Yeah, I'm going over a bunch of components a frontier model generated and while they "work" the code is quite shocking and will create significant maintenance burden. Not to mention they don't use any of our shared utilities and duplicate so much code.

Re: Interview with Boris Cherny [video]

#17

Post by rescripting » Tue, Jul 28, 2026, 10:51 PM UTC

firasd wrote: post #10

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…

> 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.

Re: Interview with Boris Cherny [video]

#18

Post by firasd » Tue, Jul 28, 2026, 10:54 PM UTC

rescripting wrote: post #17

firasd wrote: post #10

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…

> 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.

LSPs don't really do this. They're like a better way to grep for something (so they do address the previous thing I said about listing all function names etc.) But they often don't say (depending on the particular LSP setup etc) this function ends at this char and they definitely don't then provide the text editing tool

Re: Interview with Boris Cherny [video]

#19

Post by EagleEdge » Tue, Jul 28, 2026, 11:09 PM UTC

mfallon wrote: post #14

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.

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.

Re: Interview with Boris Cherny [video]

#20

Post by throwaway219450 » Tue, Jul 28, 2026, 11:13 PM UTC

ventana wrote: post #3

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.

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".