Most people struggle to keep one conversation going at a time. Boris Cherny, the head of Claude Code at Anthropic, runs five Claude instances simultaneously in his terminal, with another five to ten sessions open on the claude.ai platform. His approach to AI-assisted coding looks less like a traditional developer workflow and more like an air traffic controller managing a dozen planes at once.
From prototype to productivity engine
Claude Code started life as a terminal-based prototype in late 2024. It was never designed to be a polished product with guardrails and dropdown menus. Instead, it was built to let developers interact with Claude directly from the command line, moving tasks fluidly between local instances and web-based sessions.
Cherny’s January 2026 thread detailing his personal workflow went massively viral, amassing millions of views across social media. The thread walked through how he orchestrates multiple Claude sessions, assigns different tasks to different instances, and shifts work between local and cloud contexts depending on what each job requires.
The results inside Anthropic have been striking. Productivity per engineer reportedly increased by nearly 70% following widespread adoption of Claude Code. That number becomes even more impressive when you consider that Anthropic’s workforce tripled in size over the same period.
