← All IntelClip / EntertainmentMeasurable internal productivity jump from Claude Code
From Boris Cherny: Claude Code & the Future of Engineering | Acquired Unplugged · ≈8:43
“the amount of code per engineer that everyone at the propic is writing”
“when new people join the ramp up time is like two days because you know like this used to be weeks but now it's two days because you just like ask quad”
What’s in it
- How Claude Code tripled+ code output per engineer at Anthropic
- Why new-hire ramp-up dropped from weeks to two days
- Using Claude 'skills' to query the database instead of asking engineers
Clip transcript
and uh essentially like everything is going up including the like the code. Um and so when we look at the lines of code written the number of pull requests written by people at Anthropic since we released quad code this has grown many hundreds of percentage points. Um I think the latest stat we shared was like something like 3x. Um but this is actually very very outdated. So it's it's a lot higher now. What what was 3x? Uh the amount of code per engineer that everyone at the propic is writing. I see. So the size of the engineering team went up, you know, like many multiples. And usually what happens as the size of the engineering team grows is productivity goes down. And when I was at Meta, one of my responsibilities was code quality for all the code bases. And the reason we cared about that was it's useful for productivity. If the code is high quality, it makes engineers more productive. And we kind of showed this empirically. Um, and typically what happens is the code quality gets worse, productivity goes down. Another thing that happens is as the number of engineers grows the productivity goes down because the new people who are kind of asking engineers like how do I do this how do I do this so the engineers they're asking don't get to write code and it takes just you know like it takes ramp up time and the the first thing that we saw at anthropic is when new people join the ramp up time is like two days because you know like this used to be weeks but now it's two days because you just like ask quad and we still have to explain to new people that join the team like people ask like how do I query the database and And the answer is open quad, run it in the Claude codebase and have quad query the database because there's like a skill for quering the database and it just knows. So of of the new engineers that you've hired in 2026, how many of them have written any code?
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