Anthropic Creator: 100% AI-Generated Code Becomes 'Problematic' for Companies Due to Rising Costs

Boris Cherny, the creator of Anthropic’s generative coding tool Claude Code, has admitted that letting AI write 100% of code is becoming ‘problematic’ for companies, even as he continues to champion AI’s transformative role in software development. According to a report by Business Insider, speaking at a fireside chat hosted by Scale AI, Cherny said companies are right to focus on return on investment (ROI) as AI token costs rise. He responded directly to concerns raised by Uber COO Andrew Macdonald, who recently questioned whether AI spending was delivering enough consumer-facing value. “ROI is absolutely the right framing because you don’t want to just think about cost… you spend something on it and you get something back,” Cherny said. He cautioned against restricting token usage too early, arguing that experimentation often leads to breakthrough ideas. Cherny further acknowledged that measuring the impact of AI by the percentage of code written is no longer useful, since many engineers now allow AI to generate their code. “Once you get it to this point where engineers are just writing a lot of code, the bottleneck is going to be good ideas,” he said. He also warned that companies must focus on idea generation and innovation pipelines, rather than simply accelerating code output. Cherny also stressed that Anthropic offers enterprise customers ways to manage token budgets, including per-seat cost controls and backend usage monitoring. He noted that tokens are not free for Anthropic either, “Every token we use is a token we do not give to a customer, so there’s an opportunity cost.” Boris Cherny feels days of AI prompts are over. After previously declaring that “software engineering is dead,” Cherny now says the era of manually writing AI prompts is ending, with the future in loop engineering, where AI agents generate and refine prompts themselves. While loops reduce human effort, they raise concerns about token budgets. Running multiple agents and sub-agents can quickly become expensive.

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