"How do people learn to use Claude Code like Boris?"

Boris Cherny: "Maybe don’t listen to the LinkedIn influencers.

- Claude Code creator Boris Cherny (@bcherny ) was asked by Diana Hu ( @sdianahu ) at Startup School 2026.

"The thing about the model is that everyone is looking for one weird trick to make it work, but that simply doesn’t exist. There is nothing like that.

You have to approach the model empirically. Give it a task that is too hard. Give it the tools to verify its work, just as you would use those tools yourself if you were doing the task.
See where it struggles, and then fix the problem with better prompting, a skill, or if the model is missing context, an MCP connection that allows it to retrieve the context it needs.

That is basically it.

It sounds very simple. I think people tend to overthink and overengineer it because, in many ways, that is how we had to build systems in the past."

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From "Y Combinator" YouTube channel, (full video link in comment)