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How It Started: A Translated Post on X
A post I came across on X caught my eye recently: a user named Xiaohu had translated a Chinese post into Japanese (posted August 3, 2026, https://x.com/xiaohu/status/2084089717814129048). In short, it claimed that on average 90% of the code inside Anthropic is now written by Claude Code, and that the person behind the quote, referred to as “Boris,” has personally been at nearly 100% since last November. Even more interesting was the second half of the post, which argued that the old split between frontend, backend, and product design is outdated. The post also included a clip from a Bloomberg podcast.
Who Is “Boris”? Tracing the Source
It turns out “Boris” is Boris Cherny, known as the creator of Claude Code at Anthropic. The original source appears to be an episode of Bloomberg’s podcast Odd Lots, published on July 20, 2026, in which Cherny was interviewed by Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal. The episode was titled “The Creator of Claude Code on the Hottest Piece of Software…” and covered the rise of so-called vibe coding driven by AI coding tools.
For context, a Fortune report from January 29, 2026 noted that Cherny said AI now writes 100% of his own code, while an Anthropic spokesperson said the company-wide figure sits between 70% and 90%, which roughly lines up with the numbers in the original post.
The Five Archetypes Trace Back to Cherny’s Own Post
Another interesting find: the “five roles” idea itself was first laid out by Cherny in his own post on X (@bcherny, June 29, 2026, https://x.com/bcherny/status/2071379474277613732). As engineering, product, and design blur together, he described five archetypes he sees on the Claude Code team (the naming differs slightly from the Japanese translation quoted above): someone who rapidly generates and tests new ideas, someone who turns a surviving prototype into a production-grade product, someone who cleans up and polishes the UI and code, someone who grows a product that has already found market fit, and someone who keeps a mature system secure, reliable, and efficient at scale. He noted that many people span two or even three of these roles, and that the roles don’t map neatly onto traditional job functions such as engineer, PM, or designer.
So Where Do “Manager” and “Engineer” Fit In?
One thing that stands out about this list is that traditional roles like “manager” and “engineer” don’t appear in their usual form. This came up directly in the replies to Cherny’s post.
One reply argued that a sixth archetype was missing: the “Orchestrator,” the person who decides which of the five roles to deploy, when, and how to transition between them, calling it rarer than all five combined despite having no job title of its own. Cherny replied that, ideally, you hire the right kinds of people and design team incentives so that people self-organize, adding that as projects and ideas change faster and faster, having a central coordinator works less well, and that Claude itself can take on part of that coordinating role. In other words, it’s less that he deliberately excluded a manager role and more that he believes self-organizing teams and AI-assisted coordination work better in fast-changing environments than centralized management.
As for “engineer,” the point isn’t that the job disappears. As Cherny wrote in the original post, these roles aren’t tied to job function: engineers, PMs, and designers can each fall into any of the five categories, sometimes more than one. It’s less about the traditional, siloed job title and more about which phase of work a person is doing right now.
A Mixed Reception
After it was posted, this framework was picked up by outlets like Business Insider, LinkedIn, and Medium and generated a fair amount of discussion. But the replies also included skepticism, including questions like why you’d need separate builder and sweeper roles if coding is largely solved, and, in the replies to the Japanese translation covered here, comments mapping the five roles back onto familiar titles like product manager or R&D engineer and joking that it was really just old wine in a new bottle.
Wrapping Up
Boris Cherny’s five role archetypes are getting attention as a possible model for how work might be divided up in an era when AI writes so much of the code. He has clearly thought through the question of coordination and management too, which suggests this is more than an offhand idea, even if the terminology and boundaries between roles are still a bit fluid, and some practitioners remain skeptical. If you want to hear the tone and nuance for yourself, the Odd Lots episode and Cherny’s original X post are both worth a look.