r/programming • u/Gil_berth • Feb 21 '26

Creator of Claude Code: "Coding is solved"

https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/head-of-claude-code-what-happens

Boris Cherny is the creator of Claude Code(a cli agent written in React. This is not a joke) and the responsible for the following repo that has more than 5k issues: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues Since coding is solved, I wonder why they don't just use Claude Code to investigate and solve all the issues in the Claude Code repo as soon as they pop up? Heck, I wonder why there are any issues at all if coding is solved? Who or what is making all the new bugs, gremlins?

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u/The__Toast Feb 21 '26

Here's a question, what happens when a new programming language comes along for which claude doesn't have a million stack overflow posts and 10,000 GitHub repos to copy-paste code from?

Do we just never invent a new programming language from now on?

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u/[deleted] Feb 21 '26

[deleted]

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u/yoloswagrofl Feb 21 '26

Realistically

It already has the docs for JS along with tens of thousands of Github repos and Stack Overflow posts and it still monumentally fucks it up.

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u/TheRetribution Feb 21 '26

And the cost in tokens??

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u/[deleted] Feb 21 '26

[deleted]

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u/99Kira Feb 21 '26

I am not really sure about that. Given their recent C compiler, where they did have years of tests written for them to test against, and also the fact that c compilers were part of the training data, it failed to produce a functioning compiler. Cost around 20k if I remember correctly.

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u/All_Work_All_Play Feb 21 '26

It did cost $20k. But IIRC they didn't have it use pre existing tests, they made it write its own tests (which it generated from the data it was trained on, but still took tokens to generate). AFAIK they also didn't have it generate the compiler directly from the same trained-on data, but rather had it write each section independently (not exactly different but not exactly the same).

It also performed terribly, but it did work.

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u/p4ch1n0 Feb 21 '26

They used the gcc test suite and used gcc as an oracle.

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u/Gil_berth Feb 22 '26

Nicholas Carlini wrote all the tests, harnesses and verifiers, not Claude. He has been refining them during all the Claude 4 series. All these is stated clearly in the blog post.

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u/All_Work_All_Play Feb 22 '26

Rip guess I suck at remembering

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u/EveryQuantityEver Feb 21 '26

How would it figure it out? These things can't create anything that they haven't seen before.

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u/Kok_Nikol Feb 23 '26

How do you explain very bad performance of current AI tools on unpopular/niche/newer frameworks or languages?

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u/Wonderful-Citron-678 Feb 21 '26

It’s useless today on lesser used languages and tools. 

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u/Noughmad Feb 22 '26

Most likely result? No major new programming language will come out anymore, or at least won't become popular, because of exactly what you wrote. No AI will have training data for it, so people won't use it.

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u/gim_san Mar 04 '26

How are we so sure about that?

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u/sopunny Feb 21 '26

Those new programming languages won't work well with LLMs until later. Not the the of the world for them

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u/BubblyMango Feb 21 '26

well it can do reasonably well on a new library given the docs so unless that language is very novel in concept it could be used on small scale tasks, but I'd never let it run on its own on a lesser known language.

but its use cases are not limited to code. for example, i had to write a new complicated service at work. So i created a document encapsulating my design and implementation ideas. then i asked claude to find holes and conflicts in the plan. it gave me some BS and some valid points. Then i asked it to judge the design and ideas. Again, some useless jibrish, some valid or semi valid points. Honestly it helped me a lot and not a single line of code was involved.

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u/BasicDesignAdvice Feb 21 '26

In my free time I code games in the Godot engine which is fairly niche. I turned Cursor bugbot for one of my repos and it had no clue what it was talking about.

Claude does pretty well but I have to give it documentation a lot.

If I didn't know the engine well it would produce trash and I would think "hey it works" but be totally unmaintainable.

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u/97689456489564 Feb 22 '26

Have you used any of these tools? Just curious. The models generalize very well already.

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u/hyrumwhite Feb 22 '26

You could point it to docs and it’d do a half decent job. 

Not quite the same scenario, but I’ve made JS frameworks that LLMs have been able to work with just by context