Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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?
00:27:59 · Dan Shipper
[00:27:59] S1: I would just prepare for that. So for example, every more classic piece of productivity software, whether it's Slack, or Word docs, or PowerPoints or whatever, it's really mostly meant for a human to use. And now people are doing CLI so it's meant for an agent to use independently of a human. And we're moving into this new paradigm, I think, where the human and the agent are on the same piece of work together, and they're both doing things, and I need to have visibility into what the agent is doing, the agent has to have visibility into what I'm doing. We have to go back and forth in this seamless way. And the kind of software that you make for that is going to be very different. So for example, there's a lot of stuff that Proof doesn't have. I don't have to have a lot of the Word document formatting, or page breaks, or making tables or whatever, because the agent just does it. I don't need to worry about that, it can do all the formatting for me. So, you can make the products a lot simpler and faster to start than the legacy products are. And then, there's all these other affordances that you need to start to have because the way agents interact with software is very different. So for example, agents can do a lot at once. They can just do a billion different things to your document, or your slide deck, or your code base or whatever, and how you display that to the user is going to be very different than the way you might display a human being concurrent in your document and doing stuff. You need approval, you need a inbox that summarizes, "Here's all the stuff that's going to happen," or has happened. You need logs and the ability to roll it back real quick. So, there's all those kinds of considerations that change the actual product, and then the underlying UX of it or the underlying infrastructure you need is different too, because agents can make a billion requests in three seconds. So, how are you going to deal with that? This is exactly why GitHub is having problems right now because the number of people using GitHub is skyrocketing exponentially and it's really just people's agencies in GitHub. So, I think it's this whole new world that is just starting, you're just starting to see a little peek of it, but there's so many cool things about it.
00:30:21 · Dan Shipper, Lenny Rachitsky
So for example, in Proof and some of our other products too, when someone has a problem they don't email support. Their agent sends a bug report, and an agent bug report is way better than a human bug report. It has like, "Here's exactly what I did, here's the exact repro steps, here's like ..." Proof is open source so, "Here's what I think is going on in the code base." And then we just get that, it becomes a GitHub issue, and then we can just send off an agent to fix it. And you can't do that with everything but it's so much better, and you can see the glimmers of this very fast closed loop between I ran into something, a paper cut, a little feature I want, a little bug, and my agent just goes off and talks to the company agent and then the company agent just goes and fixes it. That I think is incredibly cool. [00:31:13] S0: So, as a part of this that a lot of people are moving to CLI and trying to work from the terminal, is part of this prediction that people shift away from that and back to actual UX with agents- [00:31:23] S1: Oh, yeah. [00:31:24] S0: ... running alongside them?