Build for the model six months from now, not the model of today.

Public figures on record

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1. 25 Feb 2026

   Boris Cherny quoted

   Their wordsAt Anthropic, we don't build for the model of today, we build for the model of six months from now. And that's still my advice to founders that are building on LLMs.

   spoken · official transcript

   ↗Y Combinator, quoting Boris Cherny on the Lightcone Podcastx.com

Where this collides

• In tension with

  Trying to anticipate what AI will look like two model releases from now is a waste of time and a route to AI psychosis.

  Cherny builds deliberately for a model that does not exist yet and tells founders to do the same; Hansson says guessing two model releases ahead is a waste of time and sends you mad. Not a contradiction, and the gap between them is the interesting part: Cherny is betting that the next model will be BETTER without claiming to know how, while Hansson is attacking the attempt to predict WHAT it will be able to do. One can act on the first without doing the second — but the bet only pays if the guess about capability is roughly right, which is the thing Hansson says nobody can do.

Related korents

• Because an LLM can argue almost any direction competently, the right way to use one for forming an opinion is to make it argue every side. LLMs
• Even if all progress on LLMs stopped today, LLMs would remain the second most important development in a software career spanning the mid-1990s to now. LLMs
• Large language models could still plateau, and that possibility should be held open even though no evidence of it has appeared. LLMs
• LLM memory as currently built is a distraction to the model: one old question keeps resurfacing as if it were a lasting interest. LLMs
• LLMs can write a large fraction of the tedious code a developer will ever need to write, and most code on most projects is tedious. LLMs
• LLMs reverse the usual pattern of technology diffusion: they benefit ordinary individuals far more than they benefit corporations and governments. LLMs

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