Boris Cherny shared an internal demo of Claude Code with Anthropic. It received two likes.
Two.
No one really believed a terminal-based coding tool was the way to go. They were all expecting an IDE plugin. Something sleek and with a GUI. Not a command line.
Nevertheless, Boris persisted. He didn't have a roadmap or a mandate; he simply felt it was the right choice. So, he kept tinkering with it during nights and weekends.
Why the terminal?
He chose to build it on the terminal for a few simple reasons: first, he was one person, and the terminal was the quickest way to prototype it.
But then, he realized something. Every other interface would need constant redesign as the model got better. The terminal? Same interface for decades. No redesign needed. Just pipe in better models.
So, Anthropic folks began using it internally. Daily active users took off. By February 2025, they released it externally.
It still didn't catch on right away. Too different. Too weird. A CLI coding tool in 2025? No one understood it.
But gradually, as models got better, the reality of the tool was fully realized. It spread like wildfire.
The numbers now are insane
→ 4% of all public GitHub commits
→ 135,000 commits per day
→ $2.5 billion annualized run-rate
→ Anthropic adding 1 million new users daily as of March 2026
From two likes on an internal demo to 4% of global code output.
Hindsight is 20/20
What's killing about this story, but is predictable looking back, is that of course the terminal is what you want. Of course a prototype from one man can put someone's engineering department's plugin to shame.
Of course models are going to continue to become the bottleneck, making a stream-oriented interface like the terminal an invaluable tool.
…but two likes.
Every dev has had this moment. You build something. You show it to your team. Crickets. The instinct is to kill it and move on.
Boris didn't. And now Claude Code is writing more code per day than most companies ship in a year. 🚀
What's your "two likes" moment? Ever built something everyone ignored that turned out to be right?
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