OpenAI Codex lead on the new shape of product work | Andrew Ambrosino

[00:00] 90% of people at Opening Eye use Codex. Not 90% of engineers, that's 90% of the entire company. You had this tweet the other day where you said that you intend to make Codex the best [00:10] desktop app that has ever existed. Yeah, the quality bar for Codex had to be so high that there was never like a hesitation that you have opening this app to do the next thing. That this was your natural choice, just like people have kind of come to open a browser tab, right? That's true, I know. There's numbers constantly coming out about the records you guys are setting for usage. I don't know, like we'll see. A lot of people seem to like the app. Why do you think AI and the top frontier models are just not good at design? I think design's a little bit harder to [00:40] of the feedback mechanism we need, that is still feeling a little bit out of reach with the current technology. What does the shape of product team look like now versus a couple years ago? Everybody at OpenAI is very authentic, has great ideas, and so everybody's building everything. And it's not that people are doing fundamentally different roles or focusing on different things. It's that it's backwards. The implementation is actually not the expensive part anymore. It's... [01:03] dare I say taste. Do you feel like there's this collapse coming where everyone's everything and that's just the future or do you think we're going to continue to be... [01:10] mostly divided up. There are some things that I'm afraid of. I've heard a lot of companies be like, "We're getting rid of the product roll, and everybody's just gonna be a builder." And then what happens is...

[01:21] Today, my guest is Andrew Ambrosino, product and engineering lead for the Codex app at OpenAI. Codex is quickly becoming people's go-to app for building products, [01:31] and also for non-product work [01:33] like organizing files in your computer, drafting documents, doing data analysis, reading your emails, and a lot more. [01:39] If you stick around for the end of this episode, [01:41] We actually have a little clip from after we stopped recording, where the producer in the room started talking about how he uses Codex in his editing work. Since this January, Codex usage has grown 6x. [01:52] They currently have over 5 million weekly active users. I suspect this number is quickly going to be out of date. [01:58] Internally at OpenAI, nearly 100% of their employees use Codex weekly, and that is not just the engineers. Andrew is a designer turned engineer turned product manager who's building the app that more and more of the world is using to build their own products. Before we get into it, don't forget to check out Lenny's ProductPass.com for a year free of the hottest and most well-crafted AI products in the world available exclusively to Lenny's newsletter subscribers. [02:28] now. [02:30] Thank you. [02:32] you [02:33] Andrew, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast. [02:36] Thank you for having me. [02:37] This is a rare in-person podcast. I rarely do this kind of thing. We'll see how it goes. We'll see. We'll see people like these more. [02:43] When we were preparing for this chat, I asked you, what's the biggest thing you want people to get out of this conversation? [02:49] And you said that it was how AI is changing the shape of product work. You're working at

[02:53] maybe the most bleeding edge AI pilled software team there is. So you have a really interesting lens into where things are heading where [03:01] other teams are going to be in a year or two or more. What is the shape of product team look like now versus a couple of years ago? One of the, [03:10] the hardest things to do right now as... [03:13] A leader? [03:14] building these products. [03:16] is just sort of the inversion of the process in my mind, which I think a lot of people have talked about, which is that... [03:22] Anybody can build anything. [03:24] I generally believe now that [03:28] starting from scratch if you [03:30] talk to these models, ours, anybody else's really, um, [03:35] You can stand up. [03:36] whatever feature you want. [03:38] Right. And that's not necessarily a hard part of software, but that's like, [03:42] That's really cool. [03:44] And I think that has created an environment where... [03:48] People are making all of this, right? You give people unlimited tokens. [03:52] Everybody at OpenAI is very authentic, has great ideas. And so everybody's building everything. Whereas I think, you know, you look back at the product process that we've all run for a long time, and it's been a little bit. [04:05] opposite right it's been kind of research [04:09] Maybe there was some prototyping, but it was, you know, even when we got past Waterfall, it was still kind of flavored of like, [04:18] The implementation is expensive. [04:20] And so what you want to do is you want to de-risk all implementation up front.

[04:24] through documents, through research, through prototypes, because prototypes and designs are cheaper, was kind of the... [04:30] the assumption there. And that's changed. That's like totally changed. And right now I'm sure there are 90 different explorations for, there's this feature that we, uh, [04:42] desperately need to do that i'm sure there are 90 different uncoordinated teams like implementing and trying right um [04:50] So I guess the short answer is like, it's backwards. And it's not that people are doing fundamentally different roles or focusing on different things or that even skill sets have vanished or that roles have just disappeared. It's that it's backwards, right? The implementation is actually not the expensive part anymore. It's... [05:06] dare as a taste. [05:07] But it's the curation process. It's like of those 90 attempts, like what's good about these? What should we fold into other aspects of this? Right. How should we frame this? Should it be part of this other feature? Right. How many segments should be in the toggle? You know, all of those things. [05:23] This episode is brought to you by our season's presenting sponsor, WorkOS. What do OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, Vercel, Replit, Sierra, Clay, and hundreds of other winning companies all have in common? They are all powered by WorkOS. If you're building a product for the enterprise, you've felt the pain of integrating single sign-on, skim, RBAC, audit logs, and other features required by large companies. WorkOS turns those deal blockers [05:53] specifically for B2B SaaS. Literally every startup that I'm an investor in that starts to expand up market ends up working with WorkOS. And that's because they are the best. Whether you are a seed stage startup trying to land your first enterprise customer or a unicorn expanding globally, WorkOS is the fastest path to becoming enterprise ready and unblocking growth. It's essentially Stripe for enterprise features. Visit WorkOS.com to get started or just hit up their

[06:23] WorkOS allows you to build faster with delightful APIs, comprehensive docs, and a smooth developer experience. Go to workos.com to make your app enterprise-ready today. [06:33] Tastes such a buzzword. I want to come back to that. [06:36] This idea of 90 prototypes, so interesting. So just to make sure I understand that. So there's an idea out there floating around OpenAI. What people used to do is write docs. Here's what we're going to build. Here's the feature. Here's the strategies, PRD. Today, what you're describing, which makes all the sense, is people just create a prototype. [06:53] And, [06:54] What you're saying is people across the company have kind of similar ideas. And now instead of a doc, they create their little prototype. And that leads to kind of 90 different things people can look at and maybe pick here's a direction we want to go down. Is that the idea? There's a lot of this. [07:08] And, you know, it's not just happening here. Like you've seen many product leaders say PRDs are dead. And I actually don't believe this at all. [07:17] I think that one of the interesting things that is happening right now, [07:21] is that [07:22] Because implementation has gotten so cheap across the world, [07:27] Every medium. [07:28] It's very tempting. [07:29] to jump straight to a prototype. [07:32] especially if you're not an engineer, right? Especially if you've never been able to write code or never been interested or never had the time. [07:39] it's really tempting to say like, [07:42] PRDs are dead. Let me just show you what I mean, right? [07:45] What I've also noticed, though... [07:46] is that for engineers, it's really tempting to write a lot of documents. [07:51] a lot of documents that are not worth reading.

[07:53] there's no shade on people writing documents. It's that if implementation is abundant, [07:59] then it's really important to pick the right, [08:02] format for the point you're trying to make. [08:05] If. [08:06] That point is product clarity around a vague area. [08:11] then it might actually be a document. [08:14] If what you're trying to do is get something in people's hands to try out and to stress test an interaction pattern. [08:20] It's a prototype. [08:21] But I think like this is kind of. [08:24] The funny thing now, which is that like... [08:26] It's really important to pick the medium. There's this term that a podcast guest shared that I think about when you say this, which is it's called the primal mark. [08:35] when a designer or a painter or an artist just creates the first mark on a painting or piece of art. [08:42] That mark is what you start to respond to. [08:44] And so everything kind of trickles down from that first mark you make. [08:47] And what I'm hearing you saying is sometimes the prototype is the wrong first thing to do because then you're just responding differently. [08:53] to this prototype versus [08:55] a different idea versus a bigger idea. So I love hearing this. So like, everyone's just like, okay, forget it. No more writing, no more docs, no more periodies. You're saying, [09:01] they're actually still useful for specific use cases. Yeah, I think too, there's this part of the previous world. [09:08] was that the medium... [09:10] implied. [09:12] It had baked in [09:13] a lot of signal around where in the process something was, right? [09:18] So if you're seeing something that feels... [09:20] Like the Abin Production. [09:22] That means...

[09:23] that it's late in the process, that assumptions have been de-risked, that, you know, design has looked at this, that this is a good business goal, right? [09:31] And now those things are sort of divorced, right? And the reason it was that way is because it was hard to get resources to build the thing until it was properly derisaged. And now that's like just out the window, right? And so I think it's really important to start saying, look, we can have prototypes. We have documents. Is it... [09:48] are we clear around what this is doing, right? Because to your point, you do not want to over anchor on this thing that was meant to be an exploration, but now it looks so production ready. [09:58] that like, oh, visually it's ready for prod. [10:01] But it's not actually the right model of where the research is going or what users are asking for, what's right for the business. Right. Not to overdo the taste thing, but it's like it's once again, it's like the taste to know like what to work on, how to present that information, like how to achieve the goals, what medium to use. [10:21] is emerging as like the most important thing to do. And that's it. That's, that's in every field. What is taste when you talk about good taste? Is it, [10:29] Is it what you described? [10:31] deciding here's the thing we're going to invest in. [10:34] Is it also once you have a thing? [10:36] Is this right? Is this the thing to shift? Talk about when you think about what is good taste, good judgment? What is that concretely? Because people hear this word. They're like, I have good taste. I know it. What does it look like in practice? Yeah. [10:47] Um. [10:47] It's funny, there was a tweet [10:49] I'm too online. There was a tweet, I think it was yesterday, from the head of product at Linear. I might be getting that wrong. Sorry to anybody who said...

[10:57] People... [10:58] overemphasize the aesthetic part of what taste means. [11:02] And they used Paul Graham's crate, but they used him as an example, saying Paul Graham clearly has great taste. [11:08] And wears cargo shorts. [11:09] Right. Like, you know, we got to we got to like tease out what taste means a little bit. And there's a lot of nuance here. I think it's all of the above to what you mentioned. It's it's the like there is an aesthetic part to it. [11:22] But there's also a systems thinking part of it. Like, how does this fit in the system? There's a where are we going and how, like, what. [11:31] What theme is this part of? There's how to present this. A lot of it is wider context. And, you know, obviously there are parts of taste that are like, hey, this interaction animation doesn't fit. [11:44] in the semantic meaning it's supposed to, right? Like it's too snappy for what it's actually trying to convey. And that's incredibly important. And I focus probably too much on that. [11:52] But there's like the... [11:55] What should this be? If we can build anything, what's the goal here and how do we get there? That I think is actually the real taste question here. [12:06] When I hear things like this, I always wonder where will human brains continue to be valuable as AI becomes stronger and better and doing more of the work. And it feels like taste is a part of it. Something I think about along these lines is just AI is still very bad at actual design. [12:22] like the output of AI is not great. Yeah. Rarely is it like, this is it, they nailed it. And it's always like, oh, this is cloud design. This is codex design.

[12:30] Why do you think AI and the top frontier models are just not good at design? [12:35] today yeah and do you think they'll get there do you think we'll get to a place of like holy moly [12:40] We're done. Yeah, I tend to think that there are some practical reasons why it's lagged and also some. [12:48] Harder problems to crack. [12:49] I'm not in our research org. Like, I'm sure I'll get yelled at for saying this. I think design's a little bit harder to grade. [12:55] than software. And that, you know, creating a loop where you can train the model and like what's good design and what's bad design is just a little bit more tedious and onerous than, you know, does the code compile? Does it, you know, do... [13:07] do what it's supposed to, right? [13:09] Because the human aspect of taste is like part of the feedback mechanism you need. [13:14] I also think that [13:16] The labs historically invest in making their models good at things that accelerates the [13:22] AI research. [13:24] and [13:25] that in the early era of coding models, it was very clear that the model being able to write correct code [13:32] would accelerate research. [13:34] right in a way that's [13:36] You can't really make the same case for design. Not that getting good at design isn't important. It's that it's not directly in that. [13:43] that flywheel, right? [13:46] Those are practical reasons, and I, you know, [13:49] Those will go away. Like these models will get pretty good at design. There are some kind of murkier things that is going to be really tough. [13:58] Like I have kind of a short list of them. One is there is an aspect of, of,

[14:03] Culture. [14:04] to what is considered good design. [14:06] in that you remember it was probably what last year where like every new website that came out was just a [14:13] Copy of Linear's website. [14:14] Right. [14:15] like linear's website, [14:16] Great design, great taste. Like if a model did that, I'd be like, wow, this is an incredible leaps here, right? If I have a model that outputs linear's website every time, [14:27] That's not the challenge here, right? [14:29] there's an amount of like, [14:30] novelty that is more important in design than it actually is in software engineering like software engineering [14:37] you almost want it to over-index unknown patterns, right? [14:41] Whereas design, it's like, no, there's an element of randomness here and novelty, right? [14:46] There's also the, you know, to me, like I spent a lot of time writing code or supervising code on the early codex out. And even as the models get good at design, there's sort of a. [14:59] an abstraction layer that's [15:02] is an interplay between the software design. [15:05] and the code that's being written. Like this thing over here in this corner should share X, Y, and Z information. [15:10] in the code base with this thing down here and write [15:14] And that's a little bit different than saying, [15:16] the model needs to be a better designer, especially on the, like, you know, that's not visual, that is visual design, but it is significantly deeper. It's about the abstractions in that, like, oh, if tomorrow our company did a rebrand, the shallow version of this is that we have to, you know, [15:32] update 263 components one by one. The deep version is like the semantics between these two things that look different.

[15:41] They're both in lists that have this style that convey this interaction pattern to the user. And I think that is still feeling a little out of reach with the current technology, that abstraction layer. So I think as we've gone through this process of... [15:59] We started the Codex app in... [16:01] November. [16:03] And... [16:04] We weren't using it full time. [16:06] Now we use it for everything. That's been a journey. But now it's like the things that we actually do while using it are different things. [16:14] so. [16:15] What was the question? I know that was that was an amazing answer. Speaking of design and being creative. [16:20] The Codex app when it came out, it's like such a new thing. Yeah. That nobody has had seen before. It's like not a terminal thing. It's not an ID thing. It's like this chat thing that codes and you could see code. Yeah. [16:32] To your point, it feels like it'd be hard for AI to be like, here's a whole new paradigm for how to code. [16:37] And that feels like we're, [16:38] human brains continue to be valuable for now is like creativity almost and coming up with something new. [16:43] versus like patterns of things that have been done before. Yeah, I mean, I totally agree. Let's give it up for the human brain. For now. As we were getting ready for this, you said that you were listening to the episode of Jenny, who is the head of design for clock code and co-work and such. And, [16:59] share this whole kind of thesis that the design process is dead. [17:02] There's no time for design. Things are moving too fast. [17:05] just build now and design is kind of steering things as things move along. You're implying you have kind of a [17:10] Different perspective.

[17:12] on the design process. [17:13] We probably agree on a lot of this, Jenny and I. I wasn't a fan of the design, like the design process proper. I agree with her take that it is dead. [17:24] I genuinely was not a fan of this process before AI. Can you describe the process real quick, just from people thinking about the design process? Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, I... [17:33] When I ran a startup a number of years ago, we would do design hiring. And there was this sort of snarky article that came out about the case study factory. [17:43] And it was like mid-SERP era stuff, right? And it was that... [17:48] Designers are being taught about this process. [17:51] and valuing that above all else above [17:54] all outcomes even, right? And if something went through this process, that two things were true. One, it would be good. [18:02] and the process would guarantee quality and guarantee impact. And also that if something happens, [18:07] The thing was good. [18:09] if it went through that process, even if you don't like it and nobody uses it. And it's like, [18:14] The process was, you know... [18:16] of user research and the divergence and the convergence. It's the right framework. It was always a little academic, but I think, [18:25] I think this is really exposing... [18:27] some areas where it falls down especially because of the speed of implementation and like [18:33] Once again, like that process is sort of predicated on the assumption that implementation is expensive. [18:38] and that you can really only afford to build once.

[18:42] And so you need to. [18:44] to fully like exhaustively go through the problem space and the solution space before, before, [18:49] implementing. [18:50] Right. And then like what kind of we saw with like, you know, Figma and Origami and all of these tools that you can fast forward some of the insights by pulling interactive prototypes earlier into the process. Right. [19:04] that you can [19:05] you know, simulate production. And like, you know, there ended up being sort of a meme about executives just being like, well, can we just do a prototype and then like expect it to work? But but this thing was real, right? That [19:17] this became part of the, [19:20] the design process proper, right? We pulled prototyping into that. The problem now is that you can pull all of the implementation into that, [19:28] And there's a mismatch between, I think, a lot of assumptions. Again, like you see this fully polished prototype that looks like it's ready to go out the door. [19:36] And enough people at a company see that and they're like, can we, [19:39] Can we release this now? [19:40] But the appropriate, like, we're actually in the early design process stage and nobody's just saying that. [19:46] right like this is this is where we are with like a bunch of like multiplayer exploration right [19:51] you know, [19:52] 90 people have this idea it'll look really polished [19:55] But it's like, [19:56] no, this is actually, that's the design process now, right? Tying the design process to mediums, media, like that's the scary part. It's that designers... [20:08] Have more tools now. [20:10] to do this process with. [20:11] right you can put stuff into the current product

[20:14] and you can A-B test it. Or just, you know, use that as a prototype. Many companies right now have... [20:20] this idea of like a baby version of the product, like baby cursor. You've seen this on Twitter. Like we have baby codecs, right? A dramatically simplified code base that approximates the, [20:31] all of the interactions of the production app and therefore is a lot quicker to vibe code over, right? Because you can be like, well, what if the sidebar worked like this? Or what if a pane came in and had like a group chat here? What if X, Y, Z, right? [20:43] That's like a huge tool that's part of the design process. [20:46] So to say the design process is dead, I feel like it's both true and false, right? It's that, [20:51] If you are tied... [20:53] to the tools. [20:54] in the exact day-to-day specifics of the process, then yeah, it's dead. You're not going to have a good time. [21:01] But to throw the process out completely, [21:04] her throat like the overlay of the process the like hey we're at this point in the process like that [21:10] is still more important than ever. It's really interesting because you have a background in every function. If people look at your LinkedIn, it's like engineer, designer, product manager, founder, [21:19] Now you oversee the desktop app. And I think design is not under your perfumes there. Is there like a separate design team or are they under your? Depends on the week. [21:26] We work very closely together. We believe in... [21:30] while sitting together being embedded. [21:33] I... [21:33] reporting line. I don't know. They shipped weekly. What does the design process look like on the codex? Yeah, there's been a lot written about role collapse, existential role collapse. There are no roles anymore. We haven't seen that.

[21:45] And we've... [21:46] We have seen more role collapse in the Codex org. [21:50] than I think other parts of the company and other parts of the economy. I think part of this is that... [21:56] This was a technical product for engineers. [22:00] And so our designers... [22:01] Speak Engineer. [22:03] Right? Our product managers speak. [22:06] technical language and write code. Alexander, [22:09] has a master's degree in computer science, which is I do not have a master's degree in computer science. So we've seen a lot of role collapse. And I think that one of... [22:19] One of the ways that we describe how the groups work together is, [22:23] is that there's significantly more overlap in the roles than there used to be. [22:28] And everybody's sort of defined less by the fence and the boundaries of [22:32] where design stops and engineering starts, but more the average of where they're working. [22:37] right so like you know if you average up all of the things that [22:41] somebody on our design team does. [22:43] There's plenty of [22:44] code writing things there's plenty of things that are product work but on average like [22:48] there are dots over here, right? If you draw it. [22:50] You draw it out on a diagram. And this sort of speaks to the process too. [22:54] especially because... [22:57] The entirety of the Critics app has been informed by the dogfooding loop. [23:01] There is a desire to, [23:03] Among all of us. [23:05] to try to do as much as possible in the app, even when it's not the best tool. [23:09] so that it can become the best tool. [23:11] And so a lot of design we all work on by using the app and say, OK, what's broken about this? This is a whole thing we do, which is that we we often don't improve our process.

[23:22] so that we can make the product better to do it. [23:25] which is a deeply uncomfortable place to be in. [23:27] But, you know, [23:28] Week to week, it's changing. I love this point so much that, [23:32] Like, what are you? It's your role is the average of what you spend your time on. If most of your work is PM work, then OK, you're a PM for now. Yeah. If it's engineering, you're an engineer for now. [23:42] I feel like, was OpenAI the first company to call people a member of technical staff? No. I believe that this... [23:48] This might have started with Xerox. First company I interned at, it was a company called Up There, did the same thing. [23:54] This has been around. But it's much more common now, but, you know, it is kind of a tradition in research-focused companies, right? Okay, got it. So it emerged from research. But I feel like it's such a, I don't know. [24:05] sign of where things might be headed. This idea of, we're just going to call everyone a member of technical staff, [24:11] your function isn't set. You're not like in this bucket of the PM org of the, [24:15] and Jorga, the design org. Do you feel like that's where... [24:18] we all had long-term? Do you feel like functions will continue to exist? Like, there's still the PM skill set and the ENGE skill set and the design skill set? Yeah. And people are, I'm a designer. What do you think this is like? Like, people call it builder. Do you feel like there's this collapse that's going to be [24:33] coming where everyone's everything and that's just the future? Or do you think we're going to continue to be [24:37] mostly divided up in versions. [24:39] There are some things that I'm afraid of. And I think that, you know, some companies... [24:46] Like to be very extreme. [24:48] about getting onto the bandwagon of whatever...

[24:52] people say is going to happen. [24:54] And I think part of the danger... [24:57] in eliminating the concept of roles. [25:00] is that. [25:01] It can dangerously eliminate... [25:04] The idea that things are specialties with knowable things. [25:08] Best Practices. [25:09] right i've heard a lot of companies be like we're getting rid of the product role which i think is by the way a terrible idea um [25:15] And everybody's just going to be like a builder. And then what happens is... [25:20] They don't. [25:21] like this whole discipline of product that's been built up and has, uh, [25:26] like real best practices, real things that have been tried and failed and like real processes, like, [25:31] That just gets abandoned because people are like, oh, I wrote some code. [25:35] Right. [25:35] Like that's not a great place to be in. I think that the boundary of like so-and-so... [25:41] Like this isn't your lane. [25:43] I welcome that part going away. [25:46] But. [25:47] there's a balance here where it's like, [25:49] Not everyone can work on everything. [25:52] for one, both in terms of breadth and depth, right? Like this is why managers are not going to go away. Um, not everybody can work on everything. And also, um, [26:01] Like every discipline has... [26:05] a skill component to it. [26:07] which I think a lot of engineers are guilty of not recognizing that like, well, engineering has a skill to it. It's great in code and like other roles are just people vibing. It's like, no, that's not how it works. Right. Right. [26:17] um like yes you can use excel you can [26:20] but you cannot work on the finance team. [26:22] Right. That is like,

[26:23] That kind of stuff, right? Yeah. I think there's also just like, do you want to be doing this work? Yeah. Do I want to be? I think more of it's that actually now. It's easier to switch roles. It's easier to learn the best practices. It's easier to not tie your effectiveness in a role with the ability to use the exact tool. [26:40] right it's more of like can you get yourself into this mindset learn which things work and which don't and then like [26:48] Focus on it. [26:49] Right. [26:50] Like... [26:52] I spent so long. [26:54] feeling like I should not be a software engineer because I didn't care about like [26:59] assembly language or [27:02] memorizing TypeScript syntax. [27:04] You know, and it's like, [27:06] There have always been parts to these roles. [27:09] that are that sort of gatekeeping that are like, well, no, this like being good at this role is being good at this tool. [27:15] And I think that's what's kind of starting to erode. [27:18] I just don't I think people take this. They hyperbolize all of this. What does your team look like on the Codex team? [27:25] How many engineers, designers, PMs? What's kind of like the makeup of the team right now? Every time people ask me, like, how many people are on the Codex team, do you remember my answer to this? [27:34] I'm like, it's somewhere between 10 and a few thousand. I mean, like a fake answer, but it's real in that we do see this as the culmination of... [27:43] what everybody works on here. [27:45] like everything that goes into model research, everything that goes into how, you know, [27:49] models are good at Kua and browser use, everything about how, you know, model personality, all of the product work around, you know, front-end infrastructure, all of the user, like all of it,

[28:00] is this product at the same time we are not accepting prs daily from thousands and thousands of people on whatever they want um [28:07] So we've got a team, double digits of engineers, probably half that on the design side, um, [28:13] few product people, although product here is kind of more of his own defense play. And I think one thing that [28:20] is very common around among everybody on the codex side or on the desktop side is the, [28:27] agency and taste right. [28:29] A lot of former founders or people who were at larger companies doing founder shaped things. [28:35] a lot of people with. [28:36] with immense taste. At OpenAI, we let teens get [28:40] very large. So we haven't said, hey, there's no management, but like, the teams are quite large, right? It's mostly ICs. And I think that's good. You use this term zone defense for... [28:49] product work. And that's really interesting. It kind of maps to the design kind of shift also, just like you're there to kind of manage and coordinate. Talk a little bit more about what that looks like. What does zone defense look like for a product person? Yeah, and I have had a lot of conversations with Alexander about this analogy, which is that like [29:06] If two product people are working too closely, that's often not [29:10] A good signal. [29:11] And that, like, you kind of want... [29:14] Like as a product org, [29:16] You sort of want. [29:18] to do this like force directed activity. [29:20] Where you're like, where are the gaps, especially in this new world where curation and like, you know, steering and alignment is a lot of things where you're like, there's a ton of chaos happening on people throwing ideas all over the place. Right. The whole like top down, you know, year long planning thing not going to work. And so now it's like we need the tastemakers to guide things from inception to what the product should be.

[29:42] And that means you basically want company coverage. [29:46] And so you spread out and you say, all right, who's like, who's best at what? Let's create some space between us so that we got full coverage, right? And that's kind of goes. And then you fill in the gaps and you're like, look, like we want to hire engineers to a product minded. [30:00] Like we don't, we don't want it to be like, you know, we've got a bunch of people writing a bunch of code. [30:04] that needs like full team reviewing it for like product coherence, right? Like we want everyone to have these skills, but I think like what people go deep on has to change, right? [30:14] This is definitely a thread I've been noticing [30:16] over and over with [30:18] Talking to folks like you is the most valuable person right now. One of the most valuable is someone that could take an idea from idea to idea. [30:25] done with the taste to know this is great yeah just like shepherding throughout this obsession with making it awesome [30:31] like this kind of high agency, high taste person exactly, as you described. [30:36] Is that... [30:36] Is that kind of the way you think about here's who we're hiring? Here's who's going to do really well in this new world? Yeah. [30:41] I think that that's the core piece right now. And it also speaks to how I sort of see IC versus management, which is that, [30:49] It's not that management is going away. [30:52] It's not that [30:53] Everyone's an IC, but like everyone's kind of both now. [30:57] Right. If you're an IC, [30:59] You're not typing code out character by character. [31:02] Right. [31:03] like you are managing something you're managing agents you're managing you know like [31:08] You're managing... [31:09] Work that is happening. [31:11] right, that comes together to do a certain thing.

[31:13] If you're a manager of teams, [31:15] You're doing the same thing just at a different level. [31:18] like different granularity, right? I generally look for [31:22] like, [31:23] obviously command over the discipline but then the taste to say like [31:28] hey, you're going to have unlimited tokens and I don't, like, we can't just be doing slot. Like, you need to be able to determine what signal, what's noise, like, in a world of just infinite content. You mentioned planning. Uh... [31:40] At the pace things are moving, it's become very hard to plan roadmaps. Yeah. I imagine, especially in your world. People are very frustrated with me all the time on this. Yes. Because things are just constantly shipping. Things are changing, right? How do you plan on your team? What's kind of like, how far ahead are you thinking? And what does a plan look like? Is it like a spreadsheet? Is it MD file? What's kind of the output of a plan? Yeah, I don't think we do anything revolutionary on that. [32:03] We're not clever about planning. [32:05] I think like, [32:06] The basic jest is: [32:08] the shorter turn something is. [32:10] the more detail it needs. [32:11] Then. [32:12] It's not that we don't plan for nine months out. It's that that just has to stay very hazy. [32:17] Because any amount of precision that you add to a nine-month plan right now is false precision. And, like, you're just going to waste time. [32:24] But you can say stuff. [32:26] Right. But like, [32:27] nothing that we planned i think research is different so i'm not speaking for research here but like on the applied side when we do products like [32:34] Anything that you could have planned in November... [32:37] May have been true for December. [32:39] but like, isn't what happened. Right. [32:41] So it's hard. Like it is really hard to do planning. We generally need to know like,

[32:46] What do we think models are able to do on what timeline? [32:49] and [32:50] My last company, I kind of saw this shift. [32:53] where we were [32:55] starting to, [32:56] to use the models to drive features. [32:58] and the product process fell down, it basically had to be like, let's list out all of the things that we think we are interested in doing for the next year or two. [33:11] Let's prototype all of them, decide which things are ready now, [33:14] And then just, [33:16] Let the others sit and bake. [33:18] And that every time there's like a new... [33:20] Leapin models, let's try that thing again with it swapped out. [33:23] Because like the whole premise of whether features were good or not were based on whether they were [33:27] Smart enough. [33:29] not the shape of them. So this is a great story about the Codex app. [33:33] I like I'm very confident that the Codex app that we released. [33:37] in february if that had been ready [33:40] in November. [33:41] it would have absolutely failed in the market. [33:44] And the only difference was the models between November and February, right? [33:49] And I think like, [33:51] There's a lot to that. [33:53] that [33:54] This product with the exact same shape. [33:57] I think would have like, it's, it's, [33:59] Outcomes were totally different depending on just a few months of timing. [34:04] This episode is brought to you by Mercury. Radically different banking loved by over 300,000 entrepreneurs and now with command. I've been a customer of Mercury's for over six years. I have never once thought about leaving. Mercury is basically what happens when banking is built by product people, not by bankers. They make it so easy, dare I say fun, to send invoices, move money around, set up virtual cards for folks on my team. Does your bank have an API,

[34:34] or an AI-ready MCP server? I don't think so. And just recently, they launched Command, a conversational interface built directly into Mercury, which acts as your financial operator. I've been using Command to transfer money around to figure out what categories I've been spending the most money in, analyze my cash flows. And just today, I used it to find out how much I've made from a specific sponsor over the past year. I just asked, how much have I made from X over [35:04] cool. Visit mercury.com to learn more and apply online in minutes. Mercury is a fintech company, not an FDIC insured bank. Banking services provided through Choice Financial Group and Column N.A. members FDIC. [35:17] This is definitely a threat on this podcast is... [35:20] Build things that are not yet working, then, will work when the model gets started. [35:25] better. And there's this kind of other thread of ambition. Be more ambitious with the things you take on. So is this just like a way you approach things? It's just like, let's just build a bunch of things that [35:35] May not work yet. We'll just have them around and wait for a model to catch up. Is that kind of the approach? Yeah, I think we have a lot of that. [35:41] I think sometimes the challenge is like you have to be very clear again about what stage of the design process that's in. [35:46] People still have this muscle memory of like, oh, I wrote the code for this thing. Therefore, we should put it out there. [35:51] It's like, no, no, no. [35:52] That means you have an artifact now that we can test against for future models, right? [35:56] um this happens with the in a browser in the app that we have ray like [36:01] we had a kind of a working version i mean go back to atlas we had

[36:06] agent working inside of atlas and you know that was pretty cool we had an operator before that in chat tpt right that didn't work out very cool idea like [36:15] There's some... [36:16] thread that you can draw between operator [36:18] Alice, Codex, ChattyBetty. [36:21] that's like fundamentally the same feature. [36:24] But the re-releasing of it with different intelligence totally changes the outcome here. And so I push people not to be stubborn about like notes. [36:32] this isn't working so it's a bad feature it's like no it might not be ready yet um [36:37] There's also this aspect of, especially in research, [36:41] there's always a desire to be the most... [36:44] ambitious and to say, okay, but at the limit, [36:47] The model can just do this. [36:49] And that just doesn't work on the product side. [36:51] Like if you go back to the original Codex release, basically what it was. [36:56] Is it sad? It was Codex Web. [36:58] And it wasn't good for interacting with. It was like... [37:01] You give them all a task. [37:03] And it's going to go off, do the task, come back to you with it finished. [37:06] like doesn't sound that radical the problem is like it didn't do the task that well like it wrote code it was it was [37:11] It was good, but it was like that form factor was too early. And then the cloud code comes out totally local, like not have depth of the cloud, doesn't pretend to be as it's not as AGI pelt. Right. It's like going to ask you questions, going to sit there. You can't just delegate your life to it. [37:28] that worked way better, right? Because that's the point that the models were out there, right? So we were like, we were too AGI-pilled for the moment, right? [37:35] And I think like I think about that lesson a lot on this stuff.

[37:39] It used to be that, you know, [37:41] Failing in market told you all these things about the shape of the product, about the communication of the product. And now it's like, no, you might need to release this thing six different times before it works. [37:52] And that might like the shape might not change at all. There's like, it's so interesting to hear about all the variables you have to think about building product now. There's the timeline for the models and the research and how smart it gets. There's like people's ability to even understand this is how. [38:06] You could build software in the cloud, and this is the future. [38:08] like get people prepared for this new feature and then just what you can build as a team. And I love that Codex example because... [38:15] It comes back to this idea of ambition, and I want to hear if there's anything there for you of just this threat of just be more ambitious because these models can do so much more than you even imagine. [38:23] And sometimes it's too ambitious for the market and they're not ready for it. But you think about that at all, just like pushing your team to be more ambitious because it's so much easier to just do things that maybe felt crazy hard in the past. Yeah, this is a core challenge. [38:35] Once there's a product... [38:38] that exists or a feature that exists. It's really easy for people to find paper cuts and maximize. [38:44] And they should. And people on Twitter like to remind us of this. And I thank them for that. Like people should be focused on the features that exist and making them more reliable and better. But this, you know, this is why we also have a culture of bottoms up exploration here. [38:56] Because sometimes... [38:58] And the same way the Codex app came and disrupted ChatGipT in some way, right? [39:02] this thing will get disrupted by a future effort. And that's part of the design. [39:07] Is that like... [39:08] You can't always as one team be good at both the disruptive piece and

[39:12] and maintaining a product and its quality piece. [39:15] Some point in. [39:16] I'm going to design a process that allows for both. Kind of zooming out a little bit, [39:20] If you think about the progression that we've been on of AI impacting how we build product, [39:26] It's like, [39:27] Insane how far we've come from, as you said, we used to write all our code by hand, like artisanally created human code to AI writing 100% of our code to you actually put it this way that now like coding is steering the AI. [39:40] And like when you think about what percentage of my code is written by AI, it's almost like how many times did I have to steer it in the right direction as the version of coding? [39:48] And now that there's agents and loops and all these things, [39:53] What's kind of the... [39:54] latest frontier from what you've seen of how people are building. [39:59] is it loops is there something else of just like the most ai built ai forward teams here's how they operate now that people may not be aware of yeah i mean loops are so last week man i mean we talked about this um [40:12] you know, one of the big questions is always, well, how much of the product is AI written? And, and, [40:17] It's always hard to answer that question because... [40:20] If you're using the goalposts, [40:22] from last year it's like well 100 of our product right now is ai written code [40:26] So the question is more like, [40:28] Well, okay, fine. Is the code... [40:31] written supervised versus unsupervised right and that's like a totally different thing i welcome the moving of goalposts because that means we're making product progress there have been a lot of explorations here around like autonomous

[40:43] autonomously developed software. [40:45] Um. [40:46] A lot of like harness engineering stuff, a lot of different explorations. I'm like, okay, well, what if you came in overnight and did garbage collection of the code base to clean it up, right? [40:54] One thing that I think all models suffer with right now is just... [40:58] They usually increase complexity. [41:01] if research is listening at any company, please make the models better at deleting code. [41:07] But, you know, that becomes a problem right now when you try to put... [41:12] development completely on autopilot. And it's both on the [41:16] the human side and the code base side so like feature requests right you know how do you teach a model which features [41:22] to, [41:23] Build. [41:23] which ones to ignore, which ones to kind of like group together and reframe a little bit, how to model, how to build the right abstractions, right? Like all of this is getting better. [41:33] I don't think we're at a place yet where we're like, [41:36] we're just going to set up a loop that's like, [41:39] Improve the art. [41:40] you know, and listens to Twitter and listens to Slack and listens to email. I was like, we're not there yet. [41:46] But we are we are we're trying to make it happen. [41:49] Do you think we'll get there? Do you think we'll get to a place where it's just like grow, like win slash goal, make money, like make me a billion dollars, win, win the market? I don't know, man. Like, I, yeah. [42:00] I am not in the business of saying never or always or whatever. Yeah. [42:05] How are you using... [42:07] AI in your work as... [42:09] product leader, engine leader. There are some ways that you use it that maybe people may not be aware they can use.

[42:14] Yeah, four. Yeah, I think I have the best job. [42:17] in the world right now. But one of the things that makes it very fun... [42:22] is that when we were developing the original Codex app, the goal for me personally was to make it... [42:28] the thing that i wrote the code with [42:30] I was like, I need to make this so good at development that I can build the code up with this. [42:36] And the Codex app at that time was a development tool, right? [42:39] And we did that like super quick dog fooding loop because you've got your personal dog fooding loop where you're like, oh, like I can't do this thing. I should fix that so that I can do the thing. Now I can do the thing. Now I can do more things. Right. [42:52] you know, we released that. And then the next challenge was, [42:55] Hey, people are starting to do some different shaped things with us, right? [42:59] And now I... [43:00] you know, need to grow this. And so I need to hire a few people and help. So then like my role changed at the same time that the role of the app needed to change. So I'm like, okay, I need to do more product discovery here. I need to figure out the right loops for seeing what everybody's working on and steering things that are off track. And so all of a sudden, that's what I started using the Codex app for, right? I did still write code. It's like, I've, I've tried to align my own usage of it with [43:25] the problem that we're trying to solve. [43:26] Right. And now I'm like, I need to build a spreadsheet that models this out. I need to kind of. [43:33] do it, [43:34] internal deep research on all of the efforts that have gone into this area of research for the next version of this. There's a release or a series of releases in... [43:44] May-ish that introduced the In-App Browser.

[43:47] computer use and artifact creation to the codex that that was i think our [43:53] Kodices. [43:53] for almost everyone release. And... [43:57] Everybody knows the term vibe coding. I think that was like our first vibe coordinated release. We're like, I had a, you know, Notion doc somewhere. [44:04] with everything that needed to happen and i was like automating [44:07] like going out to gather updates. [44:10] from pull requests from Slack channels and like updating the status tracker. And like now this is pretty commonplace. [44:17] But at the time, I felt like I was at the bleeding edge of like, [44:20] how to manage a product release. In short, like the way that I use [44:25] the Codex app is... [44:27] Basically, like, what... [44:28] What has my job grown into and how do I make this thing [44:32] able to do everything I need to do. [44:34] I will get up in the morning. I will see the daily brief that I have from like, [44:38] everything [44:39] from the 3,000 Slack channels that I'm in, like which things need my attention, I can kind of message back and be like, [44:46] All right, give me five questions and I'll answer them and I can do that. How do you set that up? What's like the workflow for somebody to set that up? Yeah, that sounds amazing. Again, I think we're still in the like discovery phase on a lot of this. And so right now it's like I'm making an automation that says or scheduled task that says like go through my Slack channels. [45:05] These are the things that I care about and think are most important. You know, so I'm still kind of defining that. Like, [45:11] these are things to watch out for different categories. Like here's some context and, you know, I'll, you know, that'll get set up as a automated task. And then,

[45:20] First few times it runs, it might need some steering. And luckily with this app, you know, I don't have to find out how to edit the instructions. I can just be like, hey, next time this runs, like, can you please worry about this instead? Or can you de-emphasize this work stream? Or, hey, this thing happened and it didn't come up in a brief. Like, can you make sure that stuff in the shape [45:38] So I can kind of coach it along the way. [45:40] The lob take the wave of it. [45:41] it. [45:42] notifies me. [45:43] Stuff like that. Amazing. I think in the future, though, like this is this has been a core problem with the chat bot. [45:49] Shape. [45:50] right, is that [45:51] I know how to set this up. [45:52] I have time to set this up because for me, it's product discovery to set it up. [45:56] But if you were... [45:58] not working at OpenAI, not developing this, like, [46:00] You don't want to have to figure out all the stuff like, [46:02] We need to figure out that shape of things. Yeah, what I'm hearing is I don't think people realize that [46:09] uh, [46:09] your app can act a lot like OpenClaw. [46:12] people were so excited about. You just talked to it, set up this thing, [46:17] check on this thing for me every day and then tell me what's going on. Like, yeah, like it's starting to become a part of all these all the products. [46:22] which is amazing. So the way somebody would set this up is they just talk within the app and say, I want to set up an automation to do this. Look at my Slack. And these are the things I want to do. Yeah, great. Yeah. And the app will say, you know, [46:34] Yeah. It'll set it up for you. [46:36] If it doesn't have a Slack connector, it'll say, [46:39] Can I add the Slack connector? Yes or no? You can hit yes to that. The least that we can do,

[46:46] is make it so that if you don't know how to do something in the app, they could just ask it. Yeah. Right. I don't think that's enough, but I think that's the least we can do. Yeah. A good example is I built this little app that filters spammy email from Anbox. So every email that comes in, and I built this in Codex, every email that comes in, it looks at it and decides, is this unsolicited kind of cold email-y stuff that I don't want to look at? And labels it and puts it somewhere else. And to set that up, one of the steps was you have to go into, like, the Google Cloud Console and set up all these... [47:14] pubsub hubbub api things and triggers i don't know if you've ever used that interface it's like so annoying and so i was like wait what if i ask you to do it and i was like okay cool [47:24] Do this for me. And it just... [47:25] You describe computer use. I've never actually seen this happen on my computer before. It just takes over my computer and starts going there. It's like, I don't care if you don't have a connector, man. I'll just start clicking. Yeah, and it figures it out. It's crazy just to watch it doing this thing. [47:39] Designing the decision boundary between [47:41] connectors, when to use the in-app browser versus your Chrome extension, [47:46] that's connected versus computer use. Yeah. It was interesting. And all done through just like feeling it out. I saw a great Twitter thread the other day where they describe all these three and what you use it for. Yeah. So this person described it really well. These personal workflows... [48:00] are really interesting. [48:01] because... [48:03] Some of them. [48:04] really click like some you know people are trying all sorts of stuff everybody's making these personal systems you ask everybody here what they do and everything's gonna be different [48:13] And then like certain themes arise and we're like, you know, that should be a first thing.

[48:17] a first class experience on the app. Like we should take this, [48:20] thing that everybody seems to be setting up and just make that work. And I think memory is sort of in the shape of, [48:25] where [48:26] We've had a lot of people and a lot of people at other companies, too, are like, well, I set up an obsidian base or a notion area and I tell it how to basically build my mind palace and how to put it's like, I don't know if everyone like you shouldn't have to do that. Like there should be a memory feature that does that for you. Right. That's pretty generic. So that's, you know, that's one. But then there are other things like. [48:47] They're your process of your job. [48:49] And there's something that like, yeah, you should set that up. But I think this is we're constantly waiting through like what's working for individual people. Like what should what should enter the product versus stay like, no, that's just how you do your job. Right. What should become a primitive? What shouldn't? [49:05] Yeah. This is the taste and judgment you spoke of earlier, citing these things. I want to talk about this browser use piece a little bit because I think people don't realize how [49:14] Powerful this is. [49:15] and what it could be used for reminds me i don't know if you watched uh when dan shipper was on the podcast he had this [49:21] From every... [49:22] This prediction that we're going to start using [49:25] codecs to run our SaaS apps inside of. [49:28] Yeah. Instead of going in Chrome. I know. He slacks me about this every day. I ask him for stuff. [49:33] Do you feel like this is where things go, where we're just working within the Codex app using... [49:38] notion and linear and salesforce inside with your agent kind of helping you along [49:44] Or do you think that's kind of a different direction? [49:46] Yeah, it's been really interesting because obviously we've had a few tons of browser-shaped activity, right?

[49:52] an operator and [49:54] Chachukty Agent Mode and Atlas and... [49:57] Now we have the in-app browser inside a desktop app. [50:01] We also have the ability to install a Chrome extension where the app connects to Chrome. [50:06] we've had a lot of shapes of this and I think we've, we've learned a lot of different things. There's, there's a lot of play. There's a lot of really boring things at play. Like, you know, [50:15] We originally launched the app. It's an Electron app. The things that you can do with in-app browsers in there, it's like kind of janky. So the in-app browser was for development. It was for testing your front end. [50:27] one development and we were like it's not really for anything else guys like [50:30] It's a developer tool, right? And then we switched... [50:34] over to our OWL stack, which had powered the Atlas browser. [50:37] And so now, you know, multi-tab and we've got enterprise security so that you can actually log into all your websites if you're, you know, so... [50:44] we've been iterating on this. I think the tough thing has always been, what should the shape of this browser be? Like, is this something that... [50:51] is only for the agents, right? [50:54] that like you've got Chrome, you open Chrome, you do your thing in Chrome. If you ask the desktop app, it opens up this browser that it can control really quickly. It doesn't have the latency of Playwright, whatever. [51:04] Or are we trying to say, [51:07] this app is for everything. And like, [51:09] we want you to use this as a browser. And those have a lot of tree offs. It's not, [51:13] super well-traveled [51:16] path, right? Like most browsers... [51:18] are browsers at the top level. [51:20] they've got browser tabs. Um,

[51:22] This creates a lot of really boring but tedious problems like keyboard shortcuts, right? [51:27] Are we trying to do key mapping to VS Code or to Chrome or to our own thing or to linear or like... [51:33] We want to have some sort of muscle memory that carries over, but... [51:36] got all these things that have shaped like, [51:39] Sub shapes of different products out on the market. What do we do? [51:42] And this just highlights... [51:44] how extra challenging this app is. [51:47] where you have to allow it to work for somebody that's never built anything. [51:51] From like the more... [51:52] Basic user to like power like Peter. Yeah. Hope and claw trying to code with it. [51:57] I'm not convinced I'm going to get Peter to use the op. [52:00] I think he might be the last... [52:02] Is it termos aren't real holdout? Okay. [52:04] But I'm going to keep trying. [52:06] Okay, let me zoom out for a moment and talk about kind of the big picture, if we're... [52:10] You're taking all this? [52:12] What's the, what's kind of the vision for Codex? Where does this go? What's it going to look like? I don't know, a year or two, 10 years. We had Codex as a CLI, right? And then we decided to build this app. And... [52:24] You know, we were a little uncertain about the app, and... [52:28] but had a lot of conviction in what it could be as to start a developer tool, right? That, you know. [52:35] And it wasn't going to be an IDE, it was going to be this right-sized surface where [52:39] It was like sort of a chatbot, but it was more than that. And you could see the code, but we weren't going to let you edit the code. There's a really interesting thing that happened at OpenAI in January 1st. [52:50] In February. [52:51] It was before we actually released the Codex app, which is that we'd started to dog food the Codex app.

[52:58] And... [53:00] what we were finding, like we were converging on some pretty clear internal PMF on, on, [53:05] Engineering. [53:06] Right. And research workflows. They were thrilled. They were loving it. We were like, all right, we just got to get the quality bar up before we release it to the world. We're convinced that this will be a thing. But then at the company, we spun up a few other workflows to say, hey, like this codex effort is on to something with these coding agents. And we're going to be able to do that. [53:24] We have people from marketing, from comms, from finance, from legal, from basically every discipline that's. [53:30] who are using this codex app, even though it is actively hostile to these people, right? It is like trying to show them code. It's trying to ask for approval to run RG on the, you know, it's like, it's doing all of these things that are actively not the right product service for them. [53:46] So why don't we take our other surfaces, [53:50] and add codecs to them. Like, let's add it to the Chai2PD desktop app. Let's add it to the Atlas browser, right? [53:55] And let's essentially take the lessons of codecs and make it more general. [53:59] for general knowledge work tool, right? [54:02] And those efforts went for a little bit. And the, [54:06] the most annoying problem happened, which is [54:09] Nobody would leave the Codex app for the apps that were allegedly for these other personas. [54:14] And I think the lesson in all of this was just that, like, [54:17] The whole... [54:18] developer tool versus general knowledge work tool like there's a lot of nuance here that isn't just one or the other [54:25] And I think we believe really strongly in this.

[54:28] And there are certainly... [54:30] In the same way that we talk about the average of your role is like what your role is now, [54:34] This is true on the product side too. [54:36] People who are doing... [54:38] Excel work don't want to see get repository information. We know that [54:42] But we also know that we can tell a lot from what they're doing. [54:45] about what kind of work they do. [54:47] And we can start simple. [54:49] grow the product complex as we feel is needed right doesn't mean we don't have modes right you might want some modes for organizing your stuff and to sort of be like legible about the the ways that you enter the experience right but we really believe strongly that [55:04] what we've built here is the right shape to take, take on like really deep, [55:10] vertically focused. [55:12] things right we work deeply with our finance team with our team working on science team working on legal right and and we say like [55:22] If we condolts. [55:24] The right extensibility primitives. [55:26] in the right general model. [55:28] then you can do anything with us, right? [55:30] And then our challenge is, well, how do you, you know, how do you generalize it? But this is kind of going back to like, [55:35] the best desktop app. [55:37] that we can build. Like, what does that look like? [55:39] um, [55:40] And so it was Codex the developer tool. [55:43] chat GPT like we're just going [55:46] This is how we think about it. [55:47] It is so interesting, the point you made, that the Codex app was so... [55:51] Like you did such a good job getting people to be aware it existed and so good to use and fun to use that everyone's starting to use that versus the chat GPT app. So clearly the direction is combine them so that you're not creating this confusion.

[56:02] which I know is, you know, things people have been talking about, this idea of bringing them together. Somebody called it a super app, and... [56:09] Wish they hadn't said that, because now I have to hear about the Super. I bet all day, every day. [56:12] We'll get past it. Great. Okay. But is that, is that kind of the not, let's not call it a super app, but the idea is like one place people go to do all the things. Is that the general idea? [56:22] RTPD. [56:23] Yeah, I think... [56:24] What we see here is that it's a great home base. [56:27] It's a great place to keep track of all of the things that you have to do across different surfaces and some of those things. [56:34] You do all of it in the app. [56:36] Some of those things the app opens other apps to do, right? The app can connect to Excel so that, you know, yes, it has a spreadsheet editor. [56:46] inside the app. [56:47] is that, [56:48] good enough for people doing financial modeling at OpenAI for [56:52] raising billions of dollars? Like, probably not. And so the app talks directly to [56:58] The add-in. [56:59] and Microsoft Excel on your desktop. [57:01] When it's done, you can close Excel, right? And so it's not just about, hey, we're drawing a rectangle on the screen and everything needs to happen in that rectangle. It's, [57:10] This thing should be a home for you. [57:13] where you start work. [57:15] You end work, you automate work, and it uses whatever you need to do, right? There's a great story about... [57:22] We had some videos that we shot in this room for the original launch of the Codex app. [57:28] and our in-house DX videographer Brent,

[57:32] Dan was tasked with editing all these videos, right? [57:35] And he edited all the videos with Codex. [57:37] which was one of the early, like... [57:40] whoa, what are people doing with this thing, right? And the process for why he decided to start using Codex was really interesting. He started... [57:48] Just because he was curious if Codex could edit videos. And so Codex is not a video editor per se, right? It doesn't have any of that UI in it. [57:56] But... [57:57] It was able to [57:59] understands that he used Premiere Pro. It could do some edits by editing the files that were backing what was on screen in Premiere Pro, but it couldn't do everything. [58:08] So naturally what Codex then did was built itself an extension of the [58:13] that could be installed into Premiere Pro, [58:16] that it could then talk to, [58:18] and say, "Hey, Premiere Pro extension, can you please change this marker?" [58:22] inside of the Premiere Pro app. [58:24] That was pretty nuts when we saw that happening. [58:26] Um, [58:28] it's a great model, right? There are these like specialty tools that, [58:32] specialize in things and so we're trying to do two things at once with cadix and with now with chat gpt [58:38] One is... [58:39] How can we seamlessly? [58:41] interact with these tools that you're already using and say like we don't we don't need to build a better video editor for you right but like codex and chat if you can use that video editor right it can interact again and hand stuff off to it right so how can we do that and that's often through um connectors or computer use or even extensions in this case right [58:58] And then there is, you know, Dan Shepard's thing, which is, hey, I have these web apps.

[59:04] that you can click around. [59:06] and use. [59:07] But I want to be able to open these in Codex and have Codex do extra stuff with it. Right. And so those are kind of like two models that are almost inverse of each other that we're doing a lot with both at the same time. [59:18] Let's premiere... [59:19] Story is interesting. [59:21] To me, because it's another example of [59:23] Just be more ambitious with these AI jobs. You may not know. Maybe they could do this thing. It's almost just like, go try. Go try. See if it figures it out. [59:31] I'm going to, [59:32] Take us to a recurring corner on the podcast that I call Fail Corner. [59:36] And so the question for you is people see people like you just like killing it, just growing. Everything's winning. Codex is doing so great. This crazy career. Everything's up and to the right. [59:48] People may not. [59:49] see the times that things didn't work out. [59:52] and things that you launched that were failures. And so these stories are really important for people to hear that it's not all just win all the time. [59:59] What's a story of a time you failed in your career that taught you something really important? It's funny to hear that description played back at me. [1:00:06] And like, [1:00:07] This is perhaps the first time I've, I've, [1:00:10] not felt like I was failing. I mean, I was a startup founder for a long time. [1:00:13] I... [1:00:14] Ended up. [1:00:15] selling the company for [1:00:17] parts essentially right and it was just it was years as a slog it was heavily regulated spaces the whole thing felt like a constant failure [1:00:27] Um, [1:00:28] I went to this other startup and we were trying to [1:00:31] do some AI tools and, and this, [1:00:33] also like pretty locked down regulated industry.

[1:00:36] And that felt like just time after time of trying things and it not working. So to me, it's been like, oh, I've failed actually quite a lot. And, you know, sometimes it's just a point in time where things line up like skill set, passion. [1:00:49] point in the market lineup. We, with this, you know, [1:00:54] with this project to bring what we've learned with the Codex app. [1:00:58] and Maria with Chachapiti. [1:01:01] there have been. [1:01:02] I don't know how many micro failures on this where we're like, this is the shape it should look like. [1:01:07] And then throw that in Slack. And there's like a 2000 message thread about how stupid we are. And it's like, this is the thing I love about opening eyes. People will just tell us that, right? There's no holding back on like when we fail with product things internally. It's why the external product has been pretty great. [1:01:24] is because it goes through these cycles of like 2000 the sucks i failed for like [1:01:30] I don't know, somewhere between 10 and 15 years before getting to this point. So I'm still surprised every day that things are going well. And I know it. I think this is really important for people to hear. [1:01:40] that, [1:01:41] you can have a lot of things not work out and then things start to work out super well. And let's just keep going and keep learning. [1:01:47] I imagine is a lesson. Well, with that, we reached our very exciting lightning round. I've got five questions for you. Great. What are two or three books that you find yourself recommending most to other people? See, man, I'm a parent now. I'm a parent of young kids, so I'm like... [1:02:04] I don't know. There's one called The Gruffalo. I read my kids. Oh, my God. Our kid just got obsessed with The Gruffalo. Yes. We have like a bedtime chart. Yeah. And now it's like pajamas, brushed teeth, books, Gruffalo on Blinky. Yeah. Yeah. It's so good. So other books I'm reading right now are like that style. I'm like, actually, The Gruffalo is not a terrible one. I feel like there's some less. So sweet. Yeah. Although every kid's book is about death.

[1:02:29] like someone's eating someone, someone's killing. There's always like... [1:02:32] bad like murder yeah and and destruction it's like violence i don't want it to feel like violence to them that like the words that they're just like [1:02:40] It creates like an arc and excitement. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Great choice, Gruffalo. I currently have a book backlog. [1:02:46] I need like, [1:02:47] I need to read. [1:02:48] All of them. Any other children's books that your kid likes? Okay, so yes, actually. I am well-versed on children's-based. [1:02:56] My favorite children's book ever is a very old one, and it's called... [1:03:01] the big orange spots or something. [1:03:03] Something along those lines. Look it up. It's great. Go get it. [1:03:06] If you hate HOAs, go get it. It's about this guy, Mr. Plumbein. [1:03:12] who lives on a street where all the houses are the same. [1:03:15] It's very neat street. [1:03:16] And then one day a bird drops a large can of orange, orange paint on his house. And he says, F, F it. Like I'm going all in. So he goes to the store, he gets paint, hammocks, alligators, and he's like, totally redoes his house. [1:03:28] And the neighbors, like, they're up in arms, right? Like, you know, HOA, property value, whatever, whatever. It's not about HOAs, but I'm a very anti-HOA person. It's just really cool. And then, like, one by one, the neighbors go talk to them, have... [1:03:41] uh what they refer to as lemonade but like it's a very convincing lemonade because one by one they all start redoing their house like one guy does like a boat right [1:03:49] I think that's a good book. I think people need to read this when they're, especially, you know, Nibby's. [1:03:54] What I hear from this is agency. Agents, exactly. You can just do things. Just do things.

[1:04:00] Amazing. Okay, we'll keep going. Favorite recent movie or TV show you've really enjoyed if you've had any time? So The Magic School Bus is back on Netflix. It's a new animated, it's got Kate McKinnon, because Miss Frizzle is now Professor Frizzle, and she's, you know, around, but she's not the main Frizzle now. Kate McKinnon plays the main Miss Frizzle. I always liked The Magic School Bus. [1:04:21] He's back. I've never used it. [1:04:23] Personally, I don't have time for movies. So what I do... [1:04:28] is watch. [1:04:29] hour-long Netflix things. [1:04:30] back to back. You know, I think that people do like, Oh, I couldn't sit. I couldn't sit down and watch a whole movie and then like watch our long episodes and keep, yeah, I did. [1:04:39] There's something addicting about that. Favorite product you've recently discovered that you really love? What was the terrible answer? [1:04:45] I feel like I'm discovering... [1:04:48] our product every day. Beautiful. That's so... I think Linear does a great job. Like, Linear, until this, Linear was, like, my favorite. [1:04:58] At least software product. Is that what you guys use to plan? Well, in theory. Do you have a favorite life motto that you find yourself coming back to in work or in life? I want to ask everyone who works with me this because I... [1:05:11] I feel like I'm not a motto person. And then, [1:05:14] people tell me stuff I say all the time. Yeah. Like when we were chatting ahead of this, there's so many little nuggets that stood out to me that I've integrated into this chat. So I, I totally hear that. Okay. Last question. [1:05:24] You've been a PM, you've been a designer, you've been an engineer. [1:05:28] Which is the toughest role?

[1:05:31] of the three. [1:05:32] which is like the hardest start of war. Yes. [1:05:35] I went, oh. [1:05:37] I think they're all very different. [1:05:39] And the things that make it tough for one person. [1:05:41] Nick it. [1:05:43] easy for others. [1:05:44] There's a lot. There's so much... [1:05:46] so many takes on this and like this triad, what's going to happen with this triad? Like designers are done or like, should designers code? [1:05:55] our PMs cooked like our engine, do we not need engineers anymore because PMs are going to write all the code or designers going to PM now. And like, like, [1:06:04] everybody's cooked and everybody's so back and I don't know, like, [1:06:09] There's some convergence, there's some fluidity that [1:06:12] is being introduced that I think is refreshing and great, especially for people with agency that want to be able to just like do the thing that needs to get done. And at the same time, like we talked about, [1:06:24] There are some things that shouldn't go away. [1:06:26] But, [1:06:26] I think people should find the stuff that's worth working on and go figure out what to do on those things. [1:06:32] That is a beautiful way to end it. Andrew, thank you so much for being here. Thank you. [1:06:36] Bye, everyone. [1:06:37] Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. [1:06:46] Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. [1:06:52] You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny's podcast dot com. [1:06:58] See you in the next episode.

[1:07:01] I love that thing about Brent in the Premiere. Yeah. That's cool. I've actually used current edit edits as well. There we go. It's basically simple stuff, like... [1:07:10] Oh, could you just cut this into the three breaks? You know, like if there's a pause of conversation, like the second, and Kodix understands it. Basically, every... [1:07:21] job we feel like starts with a story like this, which is the product's not designed for it, but it's sort of a blank chatbot that can write code. So it can do everything, but like what, what are the useful things for it to do? [1:07:34] Right. [1:07:34] I mean, people just have to have curiosity about the project. They have to... [1:07:38] You know, have an intentional outcome and use Codex as the platform for that just to see what happens. [1:07:46] You know, there's no risk at all. Right. Just a few tokens. A few tokens. But, of course, if you're working for OMI, there's less risks. [1:07:54] on that regard. Yeah. You asked, um, [1:07:57] One of them, like, what, or a lot of them, actually, like, what skills are important? Yeah. And, like, then you've also had conversations about, like, the cracked new grad versus the, like... [1:08:07] I don't know if you're married to the exact process you have right now. [1:08:13] I don't know what advice to ever give, but if there's one piece, it's like, do not get married to your exact process. Get married to, like... [1:08:21] the outcomes that you were uniquely able to deliver, and then do things like change your process to try things. You just keep having the best. You're like, I'm the best at understanding Figma auto layout.

[1:08:32] What are you doing? Right, because AI is going to be better at that. Yeah. So you just keep spouting interesting things. Keep it in. It's crazy the level of self-awareness that's required to be successful with AI. [1:08:45] It is. Yeah. It's also why I'm nervous to ever say like, this is how something's going to be, because I think about like my parents are open minded people. They are into their careers, but just like. [1:08:55] The stuff that works here is just not going to work with everybody. There's no nice way of saying that. [1:09:00] You know, like the people who are here are self-selecting for. [1:09:05] Like, oh, I'm somebody who just figures out the next thing to do. And that's just not like most of the population will not be an early adopter of things. [1:09:13] And there's also just like, it's kind of like a bummer to have to relearn things all the time. Yeah. You know, it's like, God damn it. [1:09:19] Just to learn a new thing again. Yeah. Like I, I hate repetition. This is like a me thing. Like I don't, this is why I'm like not ever the best media person either. Cause I just like, I hate repeating myself. Perfect. Um, sucks to be a founder when you hate repeating yourself. Cause you like have to repeat her in chief. Um, and so like, to me, I'm like, if I can come in and do my job at a different way every day, [1:09:41] Love it. But like, that's not. [1:09:44] You found product market fit for your job. Yes. Yeah, no, that's how it is. [1:09:48] I can't negotiate because I'm like, well, I don't want other jobs.

[1:09:54] Amazing, man. Well, thank you.