Head of Claude Code: What happens after coding is solved | Boris Cherny
Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
32:3934:33
I was thinking about what is the right, like, historical analog for this? Because, somehow we have to situate this thing in history and figure out when have we gone through some more transitions, what's the right mental model for this. I think the thing that's come closest for me is the printing press. And so if you look at Europe in the mid 1400s, literacy was actually very low. There was sub 1% of the population, it was scribes, that they were the ones that did all the writing. Were the ones that did all the reading. They were employed by lords and kings that often were not literate themselves. So it was their job of this very tiny percent of the population to do this. And at some point, Gutenberg and the printing press came along. And there was this crazy stat that in the fifty years after the printing press was built, there was more printed material created than in the thousand years before. And so the volume of printed material just went way up. The cost went way down. It went down something like 100x over the next fifty years. And if you look at literacy, it actually took a while because learning to read and write is quite hard. It takes an education system. It takes free time. It takes not having to work on a farm all day so that you actually have time for education and things like this. But over the next two hundred years, it went up to like 70% globally. So I think this is the kind of thing that we might see is a similar kind of transition. And there was actually this interesting historical document where there was an interview with some scribe in the 1400s about how do you feel about the printing press? And they were actually very excited because they were like, actually, the thing that I don't like doing is copying between books. The thing that I do like doing is drawing the art in books and then doing the bookbinding. And I'm really glad that now my time is freed up.