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Boris Cherny (creator of Claude Code) on Lenny's Podcast. I hadn't come across the term "latent demand" before this podcast, and Boris Cherny calls it the single most important principle in product. The idea of latent demand is to watch how users misuse or hack your product to solve their own use cases, and then build specifically for that. Cherny also extends this to AI. With AI products, you should observe what the model/agent is trying to do (e.g., which data it wants to access, which tools are missing, or it has to chain together that could be implemented in a use-case specific tool call), and make that easier.

Cherny also had an interesting comment on innovation. You can't force it, but you have to give people space and psychological safety to fail, but cut ideas that aren't working. Claude Code itself wasn't explicitly on the roadmap, and it wasn't an obvious hit at launch.

He also shared an interesting observation on how roles in and around product are changing with AI. Everyone on the Claude Code team—engineers, PMs, designers, etc.—codes, but with a different angle. He thinks the term "software engineer" might disappear by the end of the year and be replaced by something broader, like "builder".