Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:20:45 · Dan Shipper
I think OpenAI was just like, "We see where this is going. Let's just skip to that." And so I think Codex right now, this is a horse race. They're going to have different positions, but I think Codex right now, it's my daily driver. I spend all my time in it, basically. I flip to Claude every once in a while, but I think they're getting the paradigm right. And it's clear to me that whoever is in the lead, because again, I think it'll change. Whoever's in the lead, it feels very obvious to me that all of the work that you do is going to be in one of those surfaces where, for example, when I'm writing a document, Codex has a browser in the app. It has an in-app browser. And when I'm writing a document, I just go into one of my Codex threads, which I have one thread for every project, and I just open the in-app browser, I go to the document, I usually do it in Proof, which is this online markdown editor I built. And then I just have Codex running and watching me in Proof and Codex can see what I'm doing. I can see what Codex is doing. It's all in one place, which is an extension of the same thing that made Claude Code work really well originally. And I basically feel like I have this parallel work buddy that not only can it respond and write in the document, but then it can go do research, it can use my computer to basically do anything that I can do on my computer and that's incredibly powerful. And I do this with everything. I've been at inbox zero for 10 days straight now, which if you know me, is crazy. I'm never like this, and that's because I literally just have Codex gather all my emails with Cora, which is our email agent. And then it renders a little page, and I think I showed you this at the Anthropic event. It renders a little page and I just monologue into it and just talk out each email. I'm like, "Okay, go research this. Oh, here's a question from our lawyers. Can you go collect all of the documents from the last four years and then put them into a report and send them?" And it just does it. And so all the stuff that I would procrastinate on, I don't really procrastinate on anymore. And so I feel like there's this, for a long time, I thought too that the optimal experience of AI was going to be take AI and put it in a browser.
00:23:11 · Dan Shipper, Lenny Rachitsky
And I think the reverse is actually starting to happen and be really, really valuable in a way that I did not expect, which is take the AI agent that you use all the time on your computer and put a browser in it so it can see everything you're doing. And that is just like a magical combination that I think is very uncommon now. You can't even do this in Claude Code because they don't let you browse external websites inside of Claude Code. So it's very uncommon now, but I think it will be super common in a year. [00:23:45] S0: This is more profound than it may even sound. What I'm hearing is instead of AI being baked into SaaS tools, what you're predicting here is the SaaS tools will run within Codex or Claude Code? [00:24:02] S1: That is one- [00:24:00] S0: ... code.
00:24:02 · Dan Shipper
[00:24:02] S1: That is one really important second order effect of this is ... Okay, so yeah, I'm using Proof or really any website, maybe PostHog or whatever, and I'm doing it inside of my agent and the agent has access to the website. So, it has access to everything that I have access to, and it has access to my whole computer. When I run the agent on that website, I'm using my tokens. I'm not using the vendor's tokens, I'm not using the app's tokens. And so, it puts SaaS back in this place where yeah, you want to make it friendly for an agent and everyone's got a CLI now, you want to make the HTML really usable. You want to make sure that anything that happens in the CLI shows up for the user immediately, all that kind of stuff. There are a lot of issues to deal with. But once you do that, you actually don't really need to think about having an AI surface that's primarily going to be the thing that users use in the sense that you don't need to build an agent necessarily into your product. I think you can, and there's another really interesting bifurcation of this that we should talk about, which is that having two agents is better than one. But I think for now there's this really cool thing where with Proof, for example, anyone who uses it, I don't pay for tokens because they bring their AI to Proof. And so, it changes what you build as a SaaS company and you build it now for both humans and agents to use at the same time, and it changes your margins back to, well, I don't really have to pay for tokens anymore because the user's going to bring AI.
00:25:39 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:25:39] S0: So, I think this is a huge deal. So, what you're describing here is more and more work that we do, more and more professional work, is it just going to happen within Codex or Claude Code? Where does Cursor fit into this? Is there potential there?
00:25:52 · Dan Shipper
[00:25:52] S1: That's a good question. I think that Cursor sees a lot of the same stuff, and in some ways they have some of the same stuff but it's better. I think that Cursor's cloud implementation is better than either OpenAIs or Anthropics and is more advanced, and I think that Cursor has at least so far more distinctly chosen a lane. They're more distinctly choosing to be for programmers, and that may limit how far they get in here. I think the definition programmer is expanding enough that they'll have a big market, but I don't know that they're going to jump into like, "Okay, use this to make a slide deck," or whatever. But it is really clear that every model company is starting to realize how important it is to have a harness to get the most out of the model. And so, where all the platforms are moving is to a world where you're not just doing prompt and response. When you call the model on the OpenAI platform, the Anthropic platform, they're literally running the model on a computer that is in the cloud that they run and then giving you the result out of it. And they know that in order to get the best results of the model they need to offer that. And so, you see Anthropic's got cloud managed agents. OpenAI does not have a response yet, but I assume that that's going to happen. And now Cursor was just essentially acquired by SpaceX. It's not like a full acquisition, but it's close. So, I think people are starting to realize I can't just do the model part of it, I have to have this harness above it. And I think the ultimate form of that harness is like I can do any kind of knowledge work. Cursor itself feels like one of the things that it's going to be a hard decision for them whether to stay just for coders or not.
00:27:42 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:27:42] S0: So, if people building products that aren't OpenAI or Anthropic, if this proves to be true, the prediction here is they're going to be using your product over time inside of one of these agents. Is there something you would do if you were one of those companies to prepare for that future?