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

0:00 Ninety percent of people uh opening eye use codex. Not ninety percent of engineers, that's ninety percent of the entire company. Yeah, this tweet the other day where you said that you intend to make codecs the best. 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 time, 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 grade because the human aspect of taste is like part of the feedback mechanism you 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 of years ago? Everybody open AI is very autentic. 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

1:03 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 gonna s continue to be 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 Today my guest is Andrew Ambercino, product and engineering lead for the Codecs app at OpenAI. Codex is quickly becoming people's go to app. For building products.

1:31 And also For nonproduct work. like organizing files in your computer, drafting documents, doing data analysis, reading your emails, and a lot more. If you stick around for the end of this episode. 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.

1:49 Since this January, Codex usage has grown 6x. They currently have over five million weekly active users. I suspect this number is quickly going to be out of date. Internally at OpenAI, nearly 100% of their employees use Codex weekly. And that is not just the engineers.

2:06 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'sProductPass.com. For a year free. Of the hottest and most well crafted AI products in the world. Available exclusively to Lenny's newsletter subscribers. With that, I bring you Andrew Ambercino.

2:33 Andrew, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast. Thank you for having. This is a 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. When we were preparing for this chat, asked you what's the biggest thing you want people to get out of this conversation.

2:49 And you said that it was how AI is changing the shape of product work. You're working at Maybe the most bleeding edge AI pilled. Software team, there is. Do you have a really interesting lens into where things are heading.

3:01 Where other teams are gonna be in in a year or two or or m or more. What does the shape of product team look like now versus a couple of years ago? One of the The hardest things to do right now. As

3:13 A leader? Building these products. 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 Anybody can dold anything. Right.

3:25 Like I I generally believe now that Starting from scratch. If you Talk to these models, ours, anybody else's really. Um You can stand up.

3:36 Whatever feature you want. Right. And that's not necessarily the hard part of software, but that's Like That's really cool.

3:44 And I think that has created environments where People are making oh sorry, you give people unlimited tokens. Everybody at OpenI. Open AI is is very agentic. has great ideas and so everybody is building everything. Whereas I think, you know, you look

3:59 Back at product process that we've all run for a long time and it's been a little bit opposite, right? It's been kind of research ideation, maybe there was some prototyping, but it was You know, even when we got past waterfall it it was still kind of flavored of like

4:18 The implementation is expensive. And so you what you want to do is you want to de-risk all implementation up front. Through documents, through research, through prototypes, because prototypes and designs are cheaper. The assumption there.

4:31 Uh and that's changed. That's like totally changed and right now I'm sure there are ninety different explorations. For Th there's this feature. That we

4:42 desperately need to do that I'm sure there are ninety different uncoordinated teams. Like implementing and trying, right? Yeah. So I guess the short answer is like it's it's backwards. And it's not that people are doing fundamentally different roles or focusing on different things or that

4:57 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 Dare as a taste. Um, but it's the curation process. It's like of those ninety attempts, like

5:11 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? Um Yeah, all of those things.

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6:29 Go to workOS dot com to make your app Enterprise ready today. Taste such a such a buzzword. I want to come back to that. Uh this idea of ninety prototype, so interesting. So just to make sure I understand that.

6:41 So there's an idea out there floating around open AI. What People used to do is write docs. Yeah. Here's where we're gonna build, here's the feature, here's the strategy, PRID. Today, what you're describing, which makes all the sense is people just create a prototype. And

6:54 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 ninety different things people could look at and maybe pick here's a direction we want to go down. There's a lot of us. Yeah. Um And yeah, it's not just happening here. Like you've seen many product leaders say PRDs are dead, prototypes are in my I actually don't believe this at all.

7:17 I think that One of the interesting things that is happening right now. Is that Because Implementation.

7:25 Has gotten so cheap across Every medium. It's very tempting. To jump straight to a prototype. It especially if you're not an engine, right? Especially if you've never been able to

7:36 Right. code or never been interested or never had the time. It's really tempting to say like PRDs are dead. Let me just show you what I mean. Right.

7:45 What I've also noticed though is that for engineers, it's really tempting to write a lot of documents. A lot of documents that are not worth reading. Um this is no shade on people writing documents. It's that If implementation is abundant.

7:59 then it's really important to pick. Right. Or map. for the point you're trying to make. Yeah.

8:06 That points. Is product clarity around a vague area. Then it might actually be a document. If what you're trying to do

8:15 Is get something in people's hands to try out. into stress test and interaction pattern. It's a prototype. But I think like this is kind of The funny thing now, which is that like

8:26 It's really important to pick the medium. There's this uh term that uh a podcast guest shared that I think about when you say this. Uh, which is it's called the primal mark. when a designer or a painter or an artist just creates the first mark on on on a painting or piece of art.

8:42 That mark is what you start to respond to. And so everything kind of trickles down from that first mark you make. And what I'm hearing you saying is sometimes the prototype is the wrong first thing to do because then you're just responding. This prototype versus

8:55 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 P as you're saying. They're actually still useful. For specific use cases. Yeah. Part of the previous world. Was that the medium

9:10 implied. And baked in. A lot of A lot of signal around where in the process something was. Right.

9:18 So if you're seeing something that feels like the AB in production. That means. But it's late in the process. That assumptions have been de risked.

9:27 that you know design has looked at this, that this is a good business goal, right? 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 de rust and now that's like Just out the window, right? And so

9:42 I think It's really important to start saying, look We can have prototypes, we can have documents. Is it? Are we clear around what this is doing, right? Cause to your point, you do not want to over anchor on this thing that was meant to be an exploration.

9:56 But now it looks so production ready. That like Oh, visually it's ready for Praud. But it's not actually the right model of of where the research is going or what users are asking for, or what's right for the business, right?

10:08 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.

10:17 Like how to achieve the goals. What medium to use? 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 Is it what you described?

10:31 deciding here's the thing we're gonna invest in. Is it also once you have a thing? Is this right? Is this the thing to ship talk about when he's Think about what is good taste, good judgment, what is Present.

10:41 Concretely,'cause people hear this word, they're like, Oh, I have good taste. I know it. What does it look like in practice? Yeah. Um It's funny. Yeah, I'm too online.

10:51 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 People overemphasize the aesthetic part of what taste means.

11:02 And they used Um Program's great, but they used him as an example. Palgram clearly has great taste. And wears cargo shorts.

11:09 Right. Like you know, we gotta we gotta like tease out what taste means a little bit. Um And and there's a lot of news here. I think it's all of the above. to to what you mentioned, it's it's the like

11:20 There is an aesthetic part to it. Um, but there's also a a systems thinking part of it, like how does this fit in the system? There is a where are we going and how like what What theme is this part of? There's How to present this.

11:35 A lot of it is wider context. And you know, obvious obviously there are parts of taste that are like Hey, this interaction animation doesn't fit. 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. Um

11:52 But there's there's like the like what should what should this be? Like if we can build anything, like what's what's the what's the goal here and how do we how do we get there? that I think is like s actually the real taste question here. When I when I hear things like this, I always wonder. Where will human brains continue to be valuable as AI becomes stronger?

12:12 And better and doing and doing doing more of of the work. And it feels like taste is is a part of it. Something I think about along these lines is just AI is still very bad at actual design. Like the output of AI is not great. Yeah. Rarely is it like this is it. They nailed it.

12:26 Yep. And it's always like, Oh, this is cloud design. This is codex design. Why do you think AI And the top Frontier models are just not good at design.

12:36 Today. Yeah. And do you think they'll get there? Do you think it will get to a place of like holy moly? We're done. Yeah, it tends to To think that

12:43 There are some practical reasons why it's lagged and also some Harder problems to crack. I'm not in our research or like I'm sure I'll get yelled at for saying this. I think design's a little bit harder to grade. Um than so than than software.

12:57 And that, you know, creating a loop where you can train the model on like what's good design and what's bad design is just a little bit more tedious and onerous than Yeah. Does the code compile? Does it Yeah. Two. Do what it's supposed to, right. Because the the human aspect of taste is is like part of the feedback mechanism you need.

13:14 I also think That Uh the labs historically invest in making their models good at things that accelerates AI research.

13:24 And that in the era the early era of coding models. Is very clear. the the model being able to write correct code. Would accelerate research.

13:34 Right. In a way that's 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. That flywheel.

13:44 Right. Um Those are practical reasons and I You know. those will go away. Like these models will get pretty good at design.

13:53 There are some kind of murkier things that is is gonna be really tough. Um Yeah, like I have kind of a short list of them. One is There is an aspect of of

14:03 Culture. to what is considered good design. 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. Right. Like Linear's website. 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.

14:24 that outputs Linear's website every time. That's not the challenge here, right? Um, there's an amount of like Novelty. that is more important in design than it is actually is in software engineering. Like software engineering

14:37 You almost you must want it to over index unknown patterns. Right. Whereas design, it's like, no, there's an element of randomness here and and novelty. Right. There's also the you know, to me, like I s I spent a lot of time writing

14:51 Coders. Yeah, supervising code on the early codecs out. And Even as the models get good at design, there's sort of a An abstraction layer.

15:01 That's Is an interplay between the software design. And the code that's being written. Like this thing over here in this corner. Should share X, Y, and Z. in the code base with this thing down here and right.

15:14 And that's a little bit different than saying 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 two hundred and sixty three components. One by one. The deep version is like the semantics between these two things that look different. Like they're both in list.

15:43 They have the like the style. to convey this interaction pattern to the user. And I think like that is still feeling a little bit out of reach with the current technology, right? That abstraction layer. So I think, you know, as as we've gone through this process, right.

15:58 Of Yeah, we started the codex app. Yeah. Uh November. And

16:04 We weren't using it full time. 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. So

16:15 What was the question? I know that was that was an amazing answer. Uh speaking of design and being creative. 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. And it feels like we're human brains continue to be valuable for now is like Creativity almost and coming up with a something new. versus like a patterns of

16:45 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 uh episode of Jenny, who is does the head of design for Clock Code and co working. Such and Share this whole

17:00 Kind of feeds us that the design process is dead. There's no time for design. Things are moving too fast. Uh. Just build now and design is kinda steering things as things move along. You're implying you have kind of a Different perspective.

17:12 On the design process. We probably agree on on a lot of this, Tony and I. I wasn't a fan. of the design like the design process proper. I agree with with her take that it is it is dead. I genuinely was not a fan of this process before AI.

17:28 Like I can describe the process real quick just from people think about the design. When I ran a setup a number of years ago we we would Yeah, do design hiring and There was this sort of snarky article that came out about like The case study factory.

17:43 And it was it was like mid SERP era stuff, right? You know what is that. Designers are being taught about this process. And valuing that above all else. Above All outcomes even, right?

17:56 And if something went through this process. That's Two three. One. It would be good.

18:02 And the process would Guarantee quality and guarantee impact. And also. If something's not a little bit more. The thing was good.

18:09 If it went through that process, even if you don't like it and nobody uses it. It's like The process w you know of of user research and the t 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 Some areas where it falls down. Especially because of the speed of implementation and like Once again, like that process is sort of predicated on the assumption that implementation is expensive. And that you

18:39 can really only afford to build once. And so you need to fully like exhaustively go through the problem space and the solution space before Implementing. Right.

18:51 And then you m and then like c what kinda 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 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 you know work. But but this thing was real, right? That

19:17 This became part of the the design process proper, right? We pulled prototyping into that. The the problem now is that you can pull all of the implementation into that. And there's a mismatch between, I think, a lot of assumptions, again, like

19:32 You see this fully polished prototype that looks like it's ready to go out the door. And enough people at a company see that and they're like, Can we Can we release this now? But the appropriate

19:42 Like We're actually in the early design process stage and nobody's just saying that. Right. Like this is This is where we are with like a a bunch of like multiplayer exploration. Right.

19:51 You know. Ninety people will have this idea. It'll look really polished. But it's like No, this is actually

19:58 That that's the design process now, right? Tying the design process to mediums media. Uh w like that's the scary part. It's that Designers. Have more tools now.

20:10 to do this process with. Right. You can put stuff into the current product. And you can A B test it. Or just

20:16 You know, use that as a prototype. Um, many companies right now have This idea of like a baby version of the product, like baby cursor, you've seen this on Twitter, like we have baby codec, right? A

20:27 Dramatically simplified code base. That approximates All of the interactions of the production app. And therefore is a lot. Quicker to

20:36 Vib code over. Right,'cause you can be like, Well, what if the sidebar worked like this? Or what if a pain came in and had like a group chat here, or what if X Y Z, right? That's like a huge tool that's part of the design process. So to say the design process is dead, I feel like it it's both true and false, right? It's that.

20:51 If you are if you were tied. To the tools. in the ex like the sp the exact like day to day specifics of the process, then yeah, it's dead. Like You're not gonna have a good time.

21:02 But to throw the process out completely. Or through like the overlay of the process. The like Hey, we're at this point in the process. Like that. It's still more important than ever. It's it's really interesting because you have a background in every function. If people look at your LinkedIn, it's like

21:16 engineer, designer, product manager, founder. Uh now you oversee the desktop app and I think design is not under your purview, is that right? Is there like a separate design team or are they under your depends on the week. Okay. We worked very closely together. Like we believe in Wall sitting together, being embedded. Like.

21:33 I Reporting line, I don't know. They ship the shift weekly. What does the design process look like on on the codex app? 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 Um We've We have seen More roll collapse. In the codex org.

21:50 Um than I think other parts of the company and other parts of the economy. I think part of this is that This was a technical product for engineers. And so our designers.

22:01 Speak engineer. Right. Product managers. Speak. Technical language.

22:07 And write code, Alexander. Has a master's degree in computer science? Which is I do not have a master's degree in computer science, like So we see a lot of role collapse and and I think that Yeah, one of

22:19 One of the ways. That we describe how the groups work together. Is that there's significantly more overlap in the roles than there used to be. And everybody's sort of defined less by the fence and the boundaries of

22:33 where design stops and engineering starts. But more the average of where they're working. Right. So like, you know, if you average up all of the things. Yeah. Something our design team does.

22:43 There's plenty of code writing things. There's plenty of things that are product work. But on average, like Their dots over here. Right. You draw it.

22:50 You draw it out on a diagram. And it's Sort of speaks to the process too. Um, especially because The entirety of the Codex app has been informed.

23:00 by the dog fooding loop. There is a desire Among all us. 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. And so A lot of design we all work on. By using the uh. And say, Okay, what's broken about this? This is a whole thing we do, which is that we are

23:19 We often don't improve our process. So that we can make the product better to do it. Which is a deeply like uncomfortable place to be in. But Yeah.

23:29 Week to week it's changing. I love this point so much that Uh like what are you? It's Your role is the average of what you spend your time on. If most of your work is PME work, then okay, you're a PM for now. Yeah. If it's engineering, you're an engineer for now. I feel like was OpenAI the first company to uh call people member of technical staff? No. I I believe that this

23:49 This might have started with Xerox. First company I interned at was a company called Up There. Did the same thing. This has been around. But it's it's it's much more common now, but uh 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 are might be headed, this idea of Uh we're just gonna call every m member of technical staff. Your function isn't set. You're not like in this bucket of the PM org the And Jorg of 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 end skill set and the design skill set. Yeah. And people are I'm a designer. Where do you think this is like? Like people call it builder.

24:31 You feel like there's this collapse. coming, where everyone's everything and that's just the future, or do you think we're gonna s continue to be Mostly divided up in agents. There are there are some things that I'm afraid of. And I think that, you know, some some companies Like to be

24:47 Very extreme. About getting on to the bandwagon of whatever People say is going to happen. And I think

24:55 Part of the danger. And Eliminating the concept of roles. Is that It can dangerously eliminate

25:04 The idea. That things are specialties with knowables. Best practices. Right. I 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.

25:15 Um And everybody's just gonna be like A builder and then what happens is They don't Like

25:22 This whole discipline of product that's been built up and has Like real best practices, real things that have been tried and failed, and like real processes. Like That just gets abandoned because people are like, Oh, I wrote some code. Right.

25:35 Like that's not a great place to be in. I think that the boundary of like so and so Like this isn't your lane. I I welcome.

25:45 That part going away. But There's a balance here where it's like Not everyone can work on everything. For one, both in terms of breadth and depth, right.

25:55 Like this is why managers are not gonna go away. Um not everybody can work on it. Everything. And also Like

26:02 Every discipline. Has A skill component to it. Which I think a lot of engineers are guilty of. No.

26:10 recognizing that like, well, engineering is a skill to it. It's writing code and like other roles are just people vibing. And it's like, no, that's not how it works, right? Um like yes, you can use Excel. Yeah. But you cannot work on the finance team. Right.

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 is like It's easier. to switch roles. It's easier to learn the best practices.

26:34 It's easier to not tie your effectiveness in a role. with the ability to use the exact tool. Right. It's more of like Can you Get yourself into this mindset.

26:45 learn which things work and which don't. And then like Focus on it. Right. Like I I spent so long.

26:54 feeling like I should not be a software engineer because I didn't care about like Assembly language or Memorizing type script syntax. You know, and it's like 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. And I think that's what's kind of starting to erode. I just don't I I think people take this they hyperbolize all of this. What does your team look like on on Uh on the Codex team. Yeah. How many engineers, designers, PMs? What's kinda like the makeup of the team right now? Every time people ask me like how many people are on the Codex team.

27:32 Do you remember my answer to this? Uh. I I'm like it's somewhere between ten and a few thousand. I mean. Like a fake answer, but it's It's real in that

27:40 We do see this as the culmination of Mm what everybody works on here. Like everything that goes into model research. Everything that goes into how Yeah. models are good at CUA and browser use.

27:52 Everything about how you know monopersonality. all of the product work around, you know, front end infrastructure, all of the user, like all of it. Is this product. At the same time, we are not accepting PRs daily from thousands and thousands of people on whatever they want. Um So we got a team, uh double digits of engineers.

28:10 probably half that on the design side. Um Yeah, a few product people, although you know, product here is kind of more of a zone defense play. And I think one thing that is very common around um among everybody on the codex. side or or on the desktop side.

28:26 Is Agency and taste. Right. Lot of former founders. or people who were at larger companies doing founder shaped things.

28:34 Um A lot of people with With immense taste. At OpenAI we let teams get Very large.

28:41 So we haven't said hey, there's no management, but like The teams are quite large, right? It's mostly ICs. Um, and I think that's good. You use this term zone defense for product work. I think 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 I have had a lot of conversations with with Alexander about this this analogy. Which is that like

29:06 If two product people are working too closely. That's often not. A good signal. And that like you kind of want Like as a product org.

29:16 You sort of want to do this like force directed activity. 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 Yeah.

29:34 gear long planning thing not gonna work. And so now it's like We need the taste makers to guide things from Inception. to what the product should be.

29:43 And that means You basically want company coverage. 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?

29:54 And that's kinda how it goes. And then you fill in the gaps and you're like, look. Like we want to hire engineers to be product minded. Like we don't we don't want it to be that, you know, we've got a bunch of people writing a bunch of code. That needs like full team reviewing it for like product coherence, right? Like we want everyone to have these skills.

30:10 But I think like what people go deep on has to change. Right. This is definitely a thread I've been noticing. Over and over with Talking to folks like you is the

30:19 The most valuable person right now. one of the most valuable someone that could take an idea from idea to Done. with the taste to know this is great. Yeah. Just like shepherding throughout this obsession, making it awesome.

30:32 Like this kind of high agency. High taste person exactly, as you described. Is that Is that kinda the way you think about here's who we're hiring, here's who's gonna do really well in this new world. Yeah. I think that that's that's the core piece right now. And it

30:44 It also speaks to how I sort of see I see versus management, which is that It's not that management is going away. It's not that Everyone's an I C, but like everyone's kind of both now.

30:57 Right. If you're an I C You're not typing code out character by character. Right. Like you are managing something. You're managing Agents you're managing. Yeah, like

31:08 You're managing Work that is happening. Right. That comes together to do a certain thing. If you're a manager of teams. You're doing the same thing.

31:17 Just at a different Like different granularity, right. I generally look for Like Obviously command over.

31:25 The discipline, but then the taste to say like Hey, you're gonna have unlimited tokens and I don't Like we can't just be doing slop. Like you need to be able to determine what signal, what noise. Like

31:36 In a world of just infinite content. Mentioned planning. Uh At the pace things are moving. Become very hard to plan road maps. Yeah. I imagine, especially in your world.

31:46 Uh people are very frustrated with me all the time on this. Yes. 'Cause things are just constantly shipping, things are changing, right? How do you plan on on on your team? What's kinda like how far ahead? Are you thinking? And what does a plan look like? Is it like a spreadsheet? Is it an MD file? What what's kind of the output of a plan? Yeah, I'm I don't think we do anything revolutionary on that. We're not clever about planning.

32:05 I think like The basic just is The shorter term something is. The more detail it needs. And 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. Because any amount of precision that you add to a nine month plan right now is false precision. And like You're just gonna waste time.

32:24 But you can say stuff. Right. 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 product, like Anything that you could have planned in November.

32:37 May have been true for December. But like isn't What happened, right? So It's hard.

32:42 Like it is really hard to do planning. We generally need to know. Like What do we think models are able to do on what timeline?

32:49 And My last company. I kinda saw this shift. Where we were Starting.

32:56 to use the models to drive features. And The product. Process fell down. It basically had to be like

33:03 Let's list out all of the things. That we think we are interested in doing for the next year or two. Let's prototype all of them. decide which things are ready now.

33:15 And then just Let the others Sit and bake. And then every time there's like a new Leap in models, let's try that thing again with it swapped out.

33:23 'Cause like the whole premise of whether features were good or not. were based on whether they were Smart enough. Not The shape of them.

33:30 Mm. So there's a great story about the coexap. I Like I'm very confident that the codex app that we released In February.

33:38 If that had been ready. In November. It would have Absolutely failed in the market. And the the the only difference was

33:46 The models between November. In February. Right. And I I think like

33:51 There's a lot to that. That This product with the exact same shape. I think would have Like

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35:20 Build things that are not yet working, then. Will work when the model gets Better. And there's this kind of o other thread of ambition. Be more ambitious. With the things you take on.

35:31 So is this just like a way you approach things is just like let's just build a bunch of things that May not work yet. We'll just have'em around. And wait for a model to catch up. Is that kind of the approach? Yeah, I think we have a lot of that. I think sometimes the challenge is like you have to be very clear again about what stage of the design process that's in. 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. That means you have an artifact now that we can test against for into future models, right? Um This happens with the in a browser. In the app that we have, right? Like

36:01 We had a Kind of a Working version of it. I mean go back to Atlas, we had Agent working inside of Atlas and You know.

36:08 That was Pretty cool. We had an operator before that in ChatGPT, right? That didn't work out. Very cool idea. Like There's some thread that you can draw between operator

36:18 Alice. Codex Chat. That's like fundamentally the same feature. But the re releasing of it with different intelligence. Totally changes the outcome here.

36:28 And so I push people not to be stubborn about like No. This isn't working, so it's a bad feature. It's like, no, it might not be ready yet. Um There's also this aspect of

36:39 Especially in research. There's always a desire to be the most Ambitious. And to say okay, but at the limit. The model can just do this.

36:49 And it just doesn't work on the product side. Like if you if you go back to the original codex release. Basically what it was. Is it said. It was Codex Web. And it wasn't good for interacting with. It was like

37:01 You give the mile a task. And it's gonna go off. Do the task, come back to you with it finished. 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 hooked up to the cloud.

37:20 Um doesn't pretend to be as it's not as AGI paled, right? It's like gonna ask you questions, it's gonna sit there. You can't just delegate your life to it. That worked way better, right? Cause that's the point that the models were out there. Right. So we were like We were too AGI pilled for the moment.

37:35 And I think like I I think about that lesson a lot on this stuff. It used to be that You know. Bali 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.

37:51 Before it works. 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. Like getting people prepared for this new feature. And then just uh what you can build as a team. And I I love that codex example because Comes back to this idea of ambition and I wanna hear if there's anything there for you of just the thread of just be more ambitious because these models can do so much more than 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 a fast. Yeah, this is a core challenge. Once 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 micro optimized. 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 futures 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 And the same way the codex app came and disrupted ChatGPT in some way, right? This thing will get disrupted by a future effort. And that's that's part of The design.

39:07 Is that like You can't always as one team be good at both the disruptive piece. Instead of like maintaining a product and its quality piece. Some point. Go to design a process that allows for both.

39:18 Kind of zooming out a little bit. If you think about the progression that we've been on of uh AI impacting how we build product. It's like 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 a hundred percent of our code.

39:35 Two You actually put it this way that now like Coding is steering the AI. 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 is the AU version of coding. And now that there's like agents and loops and

39:51 All these things. What's kinda the Latest frontier. From what you've seen. of how people are building.

39:59 Is it is the loops? Is there something else of just like the most AI piled AI Forward teams. Here's how they operate now that people may not be aware of. Yeah. I mean loops so last week, man. I mean we t we talked about this, um

40:12 You know, one of the big questions is always, well, how much of the product is AI Britain. And It's always hard to answer that question'cause If you're using the goalposts.

40:22 From last year, it's like well, a hundred percent of our product right now is AI written code. So the question is more like Well Okay, fine. Is 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 Autonomously developed software.

40:45 Um lot of like harness engineering stuff, a lot of different explorations on like, okay, well what if you came in overnight and did garbage collection of the code base to clean it up, right? One thing that I think all models suffer with right now. Is just

40:58 They they usually increase complexity. If research is listening at any company, please Make the models better at deleting code. Um But

41:08 You know, th that becomes a problem right now when you try to put Development completely on autopilot. Um and it's both on the 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 Two Build Which ones to ignore, which ones to kind of like group together and reframe a little bit. How do you model how to build the right abstractions? Right. Like all of this is getting better.

41:33 Um, I don't think we're at place yet where we're like We're just gonna set up a loop that's like Improve the app. You know, and listens to Twitter and listens to Slack and listens to email. I was like

41:45 We're not there yet. But We are we are We're trying to make it happen. Do you think we'll get there?

41:50 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. Win win the market. I don't know, man. Like I

42:00 I am not in the business of saying Yeah. Never or always or whatever. Yeah. How are you using? AI in your work as

42:09 Product leader, engine leader. Yeah. That maybe people may not be aware they can use. Yeah, poor. Yeah. I I think I have the best job. In in the world right now.

42:19 Um, but one of the things that makes it very fun. is that when we were developing the original code example. The goal for me personally was to make it The thing. Yeah.

42:29 wrote the code with. Right. I was like, I need to make this. so good at development that I can build the code step with this. And the codex app at that time was a development tool. Right.

42:39 And we did that like Super quick dog fooding loop. 'Cause you've got your personal dog food fooding web 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? Um

42:53 You know, we released that and then the next challenge was Hey, people are starting to do some different Shaped things with us, right? And now I 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.

43:06 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.

43:21 Like I've I've tried to align my own usage of it with the problem that we're trying to solve. 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. you know, 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 May ish that introduced

43:46 D in that browser. Computer use. And artifact creation. to the codex app. That was I think our Codexes.

43:54 For almost everyone release. And 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. with everything that needed to happen. And I was like automating 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. Um, but at the time I felt like I was at the bleeding edge of like How to manage

44:21 A product release? In short, like the way that I use The codex app is Basically like what What has my job grown into and how do I make this thing?

44:32 able to do everything I need to do. Um, I will get up in the morning, I will see the daily brief that I have from like Everything from the three thousand Slack channels that I'm in, like which things need my attention. I can kind of message back and be like, All right, give me five questions and I'll answer them and I can yeah, do that. How do you set that up? What's like the workflow to for somebody to set that up? Yeah, that sounds amazing. Again, I I think we're still in the like discovery phase on on a lot of this. And so right now it's like I'm making an automation.

45:00 That says Or schedule task that says like Go through my Slog Channels. These are the things that I care about and think are most important, you know, so I'm still kind of defining that. Like

45:12 These are things to watch out for different categories. Like here's some context and Yeah, I'll I'll You know, that'll get set up as a uh automated task. And then First two 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

45:28 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. So I can kind of coach it along the way. It'll update the way that it's

45:41 Yeah. Notifies me. Stuff like that. Amazing. I think in the future though, like this is this has been a core problem with the the chat bot. Shape.

45:50 Right, is that I know how to set this up. I have time to set this up because for me it's product discovery to set it up. But if you were Not working at Open AI, not to build on this, like.

46:00 You don't want to have to figure out all the stuff. We we we need to like figure out that that shape of things. Yeah, what I'm hearing here is I don't think people realize that Uh Your app can act a lot like Open Claw.

46:12 Yeah, you was it was people were so excited about like you just talked to it, set up this thing. check on this thing for me every day and then tell me what's going on. Like it's starting to become a part of all these all the products. Uh, which is amazing. So the way somebody would set this up is they just talk within the app and say, I wanna set up an automation to do this, look at my Slack and these are the things I might I wanna do. Yeah.

46:32 Great, yeah. And the apple say, you know. Yeah. It'll set it up for you. If it doesn't have a Slack connector, it'll say Can I add the slide connector, yes or no? You can hit yes to that. Yeah, like

46:43 The least that we can do. is make it so that if you don't know how to do something in the app. They can just ask it. Yeah, right. Yeah. I don't think that's enough, but I think that's the least we can do. Yeah. A good example of this I build this little app that built her spammy email for Bandbox. So every em email that comes in and I built this in Codex. Uh every email that comes in it looks at it and decides is this

47:03 Uns unsicited 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 Pup sub hubbub API things and triggers.

47:17 I don't know if you ever use that interface. It's like so Annoying and slow. So I was like, Wait, what if I ask you to do it? And I was like, Okay, cool. Do this for me.

47:25 And it just Uh 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 like watch it doing its thing. Designing the decision boundary between Connectors. When to use the in app browser versus your Chrome extension.

47:46 That's connected versus computer use. Yeah. It's 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. Are really interesting.

48:01 Because Some of them. really click. Like some of the 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. And then like certain themes arise.

48:15 And we're like, you know what, that should be a first a first class experience on the app. Like we should take this thing that everybody seems to be setting up and just make that work. And I think Memory is sort of in the shape. We're

48:27 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 uh 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. 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?

49:02 What should become a primitive What shouldn't Um Yeah. Yeah.

49:06 This is the the taste and judgment you spoke of earlier, you know, citing these things. Wanna talk about this browser use piece a little bit because I think people don't realize how Powerful this is. And what it could be is for. Reminds me, I don't know if you watched uh when Dan Shipper was on the podcast. He had the

49:21 Uh from every Yeah, this prediction that we're gonna start using codex to run our SaaS apps inside of Yeah. So instead of going to Chrome. I know he slacks me about this every day ask asking for stuff. Do you feel like this is where things go, where we're just working within

49:36 The codex app using Notion and linear and Salesforce. inside with your agent kind of helping you along? Or do you think that's a kind of a different direction? It's been yeah, it's been really interesting because obviously we've had a few attempts at

49:50 Browser shaped activity, right? And An operator and Chachu K T agent mode and Atlas and Now we have the in app browser inside of the desktop app. We also have the ab

50:02 The ability to install. A Chrome extension where the app connects to Chrome. Like We've had a lot of shapes at this, and I think we've we've learned a lot of different things. There's there's a lot at 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 it's like kinda janky. So we Uh the the the in app browser was for development. It was for testing your front end. on development and we were like, it's not really for anything else, guys. Like

50:31 It's it's a developer tool, right? And then we we switched. over to our owl owl stack, which had powered the Atlas browser. And so now, you know, we have 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 Uh 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 is only for the agents, right? But like you've got Chrome, you open Chrome, you

50:56 Yeah, do your thing in Chrome. If you ask the desktop uh It opens up this browser that it can control really quickly. Doesn't have the latency of playwright, whatever. But that you know, or are we trying to say

51:07 This happens for everything. And like We want you to use this as a browser. And those have a lot of trayoffs. It's not Super

51:14 Yeah, well travelled. Path, right? Like most browsers. Our browsers at the top level. They've got browser tabs. Um

51:22 This creates a lot of really boring but tedious problems like keyboard shortcuts, right? Are we trying to do key mapping to VS Code or to Chrome or to our own thing or to linear or like You know, we wanna have some sort of muscle memory that carries over, but Got all these things that have shape like

51:39 sub shapes of different products out on the market. What do we do? And this just highlights how extra challenging this app is. where you have to allow it to work for somebody that's never built anything.

51:52 basic user to like power like Peter. Yeah. Yeah. Open claw trying to code with it. I I'm not convinced I'm gonna get Peter to use the app. I think he might be the last Is it real hold out. Okay.

52:04 But I'm gonna I'm gonna keep trying. Okay, let me uh let me zoom out for a moment and talk about kinda the big picture. If we're You're taking all this? What's the what's kinda the vision for for Codex? Where does this go? What's it gonna look like? Yeah, I don't know, a year or two, ten years. We

52:18 Hand Coex is a CLI, right? And then we decided to build this out and You know, we were we were a little uncertain about the app and um But had a lot of conviction and and What it

52:31 Could be. As To start. A developer tool, right? That yeah. And it wasn't gonna be an ITE, it was gonna be this right sized surface where

52:40 It was like sort of a chapa, but it was more than that. And You could see the code, but we weren't gonna let you edit the code. There's a really interesting thing that happened at OpenAI in January. In February. It was before we actually released the code example, which is that We'd started to dog food the codics out.

52:58 And what we were finding, like we were converging on some pretty clear internal PMF. On Engineering. Right. And research workflows.

53:08 They were thrilled. They were loving it. We were like, all right, we just gotta 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.

53:19 Like this codex. effort is onto something with these coding agents. And We have people from marketing, from comms, from finance, from legal, from basically every discipline Who are using this Codex app.

53:32 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 R G on the you know, it's like It's doing all of these things.

53:43 that are actively not the right product surface for them. So why don't we take our other surfaces. And add codecs to them. Like let's add it to the Chai Chi PD desktop app. Let's add it to the Atlas browser, right? And let's

53:56 Essentially take the lessons of codex and make it more general. for a general knowledge work tool, right? And those efforts went for a little bit. And Oh.

54:06 The most annoying problem happened which is Nobody would leave the codex out. For the apps that were allegedly. For these other personas. And I think the lesson in all of this was just that, like

54:17 The whole Developer tool versus general knowledge work tool. Like there's a lot of nuance here that isn't just one or the other. And I think we really we believe really strongly in this. And uh there are certainly 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. People who are doing Excel work. Don't want to see Git repository information. We know that. But we also know that we can tell a lot from what they're doing. about what kind of work they do.

54:47 And we can Start simple. grow the product complex as we feel. It's needed, right? Doesn't mean we don't have modes, right? You might want some modes for organizing your stuff.

54:57 and to sort of be like legible about the the ways that you enter the experience, right? But we really believe strongly that what we've built here is the right shape to take take on like Really deep. Vertically.

55:11 Focused. Things. Right. We work deeply with our finance team with our Team working on science. team working on legal, right? And and we say

55:20 Like If we can build The right extensibility primitives. In the right. general model.

55:28 Then you can do anything with us, right? 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 The best desktop app. That we can build. Like what does that look like? Um

55:40 And so you know it was Codex the developer tool. Chat GPT, like Where's this gone? This is how we think about it.

55:48 It is so interesting the point you made that the Codex app was so 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 out. So clearly the direction is combine them so that you're not creating this confusion. Which I know is You know, things people have been talking about, this idea of come bringing'em together. Somebody called it a super app and

56:09 Wish they hadn't said that,'cause now I have to hear about the super outb all day, every day. 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 Or TBD. Yeah. I think What we see here is that it's a great home base. It's a great place to keep track of all of the things that you have to do across different surfaces.

56:32 And some of those things. You do all of it in the U. Some of those things. The uh opens other apps to to do, right?

56:40 The app can connect to Excel. So that you know. Yes, it has a spreadsheet editor. Inside the app. Is that

56:48 Good enough. for people doing financial modeling at OpenAI for raising billions of dollars. Like Probably not. Um and so the

56:57 Talks directly to The add in. And Microsoft Excel on your desktop. 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.

57:09 It's This thing should be a a home for you. Where you start work. You end work, you automate work, and it uses Whatever you need to do.

57:20 Right. There's a there's a great story about We had some videos. That we shot in this room. for the original launch of the code example. And

57:29 our in house DX videographer Brent. Then was test. with editing all these videos, right? And he edited all the videos with codex. 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 Just because he was curious if Codex could edit videos. And so

57:52 Codex is not a video editor per se. It doesn't have any of that UI in it. But Um it was able to understands that he used Premiere Pro.

58:01 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. So naturally what Codex then did. Was built itself. An extension.

58:13 That could be installed into Premiere Pro. That it could then talk to and say, hey, Premiere Pro extension, can you please change this marker? Inside of the Premiere Pro app. That was pretty nuts when we saw that happening.

58:26 Um It's a great model, right? There are these like specialty tools. That specialize in things. And so we're trying to do two things at once with Cec and with Now with ChatGPT. One is

58:39 How can we seamlessly 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 GPT can use that video editor, right? It can interact again, it can hand stuff off to it, right?

58:52 So how can we do that? And that's often through um connectors or computer use or even extensions in this case, right? And then there is, you know. Dan Shepherd's thing which is Hey, I have these web apps.

59:04 That you can click around And use it. But I wanna be able to open these in codex and have Codecs 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 Mm. Story is interesting. To me, because it's another example of Just be more ambitious with these AI jobs. Like you mean um May not know. Maybe they could do this thing.

59:28 It's almost just like go try, go try it, see if it figures it out. I'm gonna Take us to recurring corner on the podcast. That I call fail corner. And so the question for you is

59:38 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. People may not. 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. 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 This is Perhaps the first time I've I've Not felt like I was feeling. I mean, I was a startup founder for a long time. I

1:00:14 Ended up. selling the company for Parts essentially. Right. And it was just it was years. It was a slog. It was Heavily regulated spaces.

1:00:24 The whole thing fell. Like a constant failure. Um I went to this other startup and we were trying to Do some AI tools and and

1:00:33 Also like pretty locked down regulated industry. And that felt like just time after time of trying things in 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. Point in the market. Why not?

1:00:51 We With this, you know. With this project to bring what we've learned with the Codex app. And Marriott.

1:00:59 With Chat GPT. There have been 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 two thousand message thread about how stupid we are. And it's like th this is the thing I love about opening eyes, people will just tell us that. Right. There's There's no uh

1:01:18 There's no holding back on like when we fail with product things internally. It's why the external product has been pretty great. Is because it goes through these cycles of two thousand the sucks. I failed for Like.

1:01:30 I don't know, somewhere between ten and fifteen years. We're getting to this point. So I'm still surprised every day that things are going well. And I know it. I I like but I think this is really important for people to hear. That

1:01:41 You can have a lot of things not work out and then things start to work out super well. And it's just keep going and keep learning. I imagine is is a lesson. Well, with that we're uh we reached our very exciting line round. I've got five questions for you, are you? Here we go. Uh, what are two or three books that you find yourself recommending most to other people? See man, I'm I'm a parent now. I'm a a parent of young kids, so I

1:02:03 I'm like I don't know, there's one called the Gruffalo. I use my kids. I oh my God, our kid just got obsessed with the Gruffalo. Yes. Uh we have like a a bedtime chart. Yeah. And now it's like pajamas, brushed teeth. Books, Gruffalo. Uh. on blanky.

1:02:18 Yeah. Yeah. It's so good. So other books I'm reading right now are like That style. Okay. I feel like there's some less sweet. Yeah. Although every kid's book is about death. Like someone's eating someone, someone's killing there's always like

1:02:32 Bad, like murder. Yeah, and and destruction like violence. No one doesn't feel like violence to them. Like the words that they're just like Creates like an arc in excitement. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Great choice. Graffalo. I currently have a book backlog. I I need like

1:02:47 I need to read. All of them. Any other children's books that that your kid likes? Okay. So Yes, actually.

1:02:53 Um I am well versed on children's space. My favorite children's book ever is a very old one and it's called The big orange spots or some Something along those lines. Look it up. It's great.

1:03:06 Go get it. And if you hate HOAs, go get it. It's about um This guy, Mr. Plumbing. Who lives on a street?

1:03:13 Where all the houses are the same. It's very neat street. 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 paints.

1:03:25 hammocks, alligators, and he like totally redoes his house. And the neighbors, like they're up in arms, right? Like you know, HOA, property value, whatever, whatever. Um it's not about HOAs, but I Very anti HOA person. It's just really cool. And then like one by one the neighbors go talk to'em and 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? I think I think that's a good book. I think people need to read this when they're uh especially Yeah. Nabi is

1:03:54 When I hear from this is agency. Agents, exactly. You can just do things. Just do things. Amazing. Okay, we'll keep going. Uh favorite recent movie or TV show you really enjoyed if you've had any time. So the magic school bus is back. Um on Netflix. It's it's a new animated. It's got Kate McKinnon.

1:04:11 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 the main Miss Frizzle. It's yeah. I always liked the magic school bus. Exactly. I've never seen it. P personally, like I don't have time for movies. So what I do.

1:04:28 His watch. Hour long Netflix things. Back to back, you know the thing that people do? Like Vinge. Well, I couldn't sit I couldn't sit down and watch a whole movie and then like Watch hour long episodes and keep yeah. I do.

1:04:39 Some there's something addicting about that week. Favorite product you've recently discovered that you really love? What was the terrible answer? I feel like I'm Discovering

1:04:48 our product every day. That's all. That's so I think Linda does a great job. Like linear until c until

1:04:55 This Linear was like My favorite. At least software product. Is that what you guys use to to plan in court? Well. In theory.

1:05:03 Do you have a favorite life motto that you find yourself coming back to in work or life? I wanna ask everyone who works with me this because I I I feel like I'm not a motto person and then People tell me stuff I say all the time.

1:05:16 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. You've been a PM You've been a designer, you've been an engineer.

1:05:28 Which is the Tougest role. Of the three. Which is like the hard. Start a war?

1:05:34 Yes. I don't know. I I think they're all very different. And the things that make it tough for one person. Make it.

1:05:43 Easy for others. There's a lot. There's so much So many ticks. Oh this. And like this triad, what's gonna happen with this triad? Like

1:05:51 Designers are done. Or like should designers code? R PMs cooked. Like Are engineer uh do we not need engineers anymore because PMs are gonna write all the code? Or designers gonna PM now and like

1:06:04 Everybody's cooked and everybody's so back. And I don't know. Like There's some convergence, there's some fluidity that is being introduced that I think is refreshing and great.

1:06:16 Especially for people with agency that want to be able to just like do the thing that needs to get done. Um, and at the same time, like we talked about. There are some things that shouldn't go away. But

1:06:26 I think People should find it. the stuff that's worth working on and go figure out what to do on those things. That is a beautiful way to end it. Andrew, thank you so much for being here. Thank you. Everyone.

1:06:38 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. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lennyspodcast.com. See you in the next episode. I love that thing about Brent and the premiere. Yeah.

1:07:04 That's cool. I've actually used code and as well. Simple stuff. Like Oh, could you just cut this into the three breaks, you know, like if there's uh pause and conversation, like the second I and codex understands it. Basically like every Job we feel like starts with a story like this, which is

1:07:24 The product's not designed for it, but It's sort of a Blank chat bot that can write code. So it can do everything, but like what What are the useful things for it to do? I mean people just have to have curiosity about the project. They they have to

1:07:39 You know, have an in An intentional outcome. And Use codex as the platform for that. Just to see what happens. You know, there's no risk.

1:07:47 Oh. Just a few tokens. But of course, if you're working for OpenAI, there's less risk on that regard. Yeah. You asked um One of them like what? Or a lot of them actually. Like what skills are important. Yeah. And like then then you've also had conversations about like the cracked new grad versus the like I don't know if you're married.

1:08:10 To the exact process you have. Right now. Like that. 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.

1:08:20 Get married to like The outcomes that you were uniquely able to deliver and then do things like change your process. To try things. Like you just keep I'm the best at understanding Figma auto layout. Like What are you doing? Right, because AI's gonna be better at that. Yeah, so.

1:08:36 You just keep spouting interesting things. Keep it in. It's crazy the level of self awareness. Fire. Like

1:08:43 Okay. It is. Yeah. It's also why I'm nervous to ever say like this is how something's gonna be'cause I think about like my parents

1:08:51 are open minded people, they are into their careers, but just like The stuff that works here is just not gonna it's not gonna work with everybody. There's no nice way of saying that. 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. And there's also just like it's kind of like a s a bummer to have to relearn things all the time. Yeah, you know, it's like God damn it.

1:09:20 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 because you you like have to. Repeater in chief. Um and so like to me, I'm like if I can come in and do my job in a different way every day. Love it.

1:09:42 But like That's not. You found product market fit for your job. Yes. Yeah, no, that's how it that's And I can't negotiate because I'm like, Well I don't want other jobs.

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

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