Inside the Development Workflow of Claude Code's Creator

"Claude Code's creator Boris Cherny described how he uses it at Anthropic, highlighting practices such as running parallel instances, sharing learnings, automating prompting, and rigorously verifying results to compound productivity over time. Cherny does not customize Claude Code, as he finds it works great out of the box, and runs many sessions in parallel, including five locally in his MacBook's terminal and 5-10 on Anthropic's website. To avoid conflicts, each local session uses its own git checkout, rathen than branches or worktrees."

"He starts remote sessions with & from the CLI and often uses --teleport to move them back an forth. However, 10-20% of those sessions are abandoned due to unexpected scenarios. Cherny prefers using Opus 4.5 with thinking for all coding, valuing its higher quality and reliability over Sonnet despite its slower speed. He also finds Opus better at tool use and notes that it is ultimately faster overall than the smaller model."

"Each team at Anthropic maintains a CLAUDE.md in git to document mistakes, so Claude can improve over time, and best practices, such as style conventions, design guidelines, PR template, and so on. Cherny often uses the @.claude tag on coworkers's PRs to add learnings to CLAUDE.md, ensuring knowledge from each PR is preserved. Currently, Cherny says, their CLAUDE.md is 2.5k tokens. One key aspect of his workflow is starting with a plan and refine it iteratively before switching to auto-editing:"

Many Claude Code sessions run in parallel, including five locally and 5–10 remotely. Each local session uses its own git checkout instead of branches or worktrees to avoid conflicts. Remote sessions are started from the CLI and often moved with --teleport. About 10–20% of sessions are abandoned due to unexpected scenarios. Opus 4.5 with "thinking" is preferred for coding because of higher quality, reliability, and better tool use, making it faster overall despite slower response. Teams maintain a CLAUDE.md in git to record mistakes and best practices, and use @.claude on PRs to add learnings. Workflows begin with iterative planning in Plan mode, then switch to auto-accept edits; commands live in .claude/commands.

Read at InfoQ