Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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?
00:31:24 · Lenny Rachitsky, Dan Shipper
[00:31:24] S0: ... running alongside them? [00:31:25] S1: CLIs are over. We speed ran the CLI era. It was nice while it lasted, but I think it's pretty clear ... Sorry. It's not that CLIs are going to completely go away. Obviously they've been around for the last like 30 years, or 40 years or 50 years or whatever. They will continue to be around. And I think there is this moment when Claude Code was so popular, or when Claude Code was really starting to gain in popularity that people were like, "The thing that's working is the fact that it's the CLI," and I don't think that's what it is. And when you move into an actual UI for this, you start to realize we made GUIs for a reason, and it's just nicer to be in a GUI, and you can get all the same benefits inside of a GUI, especially for non-programmer work. But I would estimate that definitely the majority of the technical people inside of Every are not using CLIs anymore as their main work surface. I think a lot of programmers are still flipping into it every once in a while, but it's more or less they're using Codex, Claude Code, Cursor, that kind of thing.
00:32:35 · Lenny Rachitsky, Dan Shipper
[00:32:35] S0: Awesome, okay. I definitely wanted to make that part clear. So, coming back to the big picture of the prediction here, there's these two modes of work that you're anticipating. One is this super agent within a company that you chat with through Slack most likely that can go off and do work and answer questions, and then there's on your computer running Codex or Claude Code. And within that, all the work that you normally do on your computers now are going to be living within Codex or Claude Code, or maybe some third party that emerges that we're not even aware of yet. [00:33:06] S1: Yes. And you're going to use apps inside of the internal browser of those tools. [00:33:14] S0: Wow, okay. Listening to you talk about it, it may not feel as profound as it is, because this is a big change to how we work. We don't currently have an AI that we talk to regularly in Slack, and we also don't work currently mostly in Codex or Claude Code. So, this is actually a pretty massive shift. [00:33:32] S1: I think so. [00:33:35] S0: Is there anything else along these lines before we get into our next prediction?
00:33:38 · Dan Shipper
[00:33:38] S1: Well, a few things. I'm definitely not an agent maximalist, I really think we're going to have a lot of different agents that we use. It seems pretty clear to me. And I really do think that two agents are better than one, so what's a good example? When I have Codex interact with another agent, it can give so much more context about me and what I want than I would be able to type, and it can go back and forth talking about things that would take a long time for me to express directly to an agent that you get this speed up effect when you assume that your users are using Codex, or Claude Code, or Cowork as their basic way they access your app. And a really simple example, we have this hosted OpenClaw product, which we had on waitlist. We actually had to pause it because we started taking people off the waitlist, and OpenClaw is just a very a very hard agent harness to make work. It's moving so incredibly fast, and if you're like a platform for it, it's like when things break you can't fix it. It's very hard. But one of the things that we learned in that process is let's say you're building an agent product or any new software experience, what you would assume, let's say to set up an agent, is you need to build a little web interface or a little Slack workflow that asks people about, "Okay, who are you and what are you going to use this for? And what's your ideal dream outcome?" Or whatever the things you are that you would put on an onboarding checklist. If instead you just make a hard line of we are only going to service users who use Codex or Cowork, what happens is you just paste a prompt into Codex or Cowork, it goes and talks to the app, and the app can be either just a regular server or it can be its own agent, and Codex has so much information about you that it can just give it. "Here's all the stuff I've been working on with Dan, here's all the ways that he might want to use this app," and then bring it back to me, and it's this very custom experience. And also for a technical product like an agent, when something goes wrong I can just tell Codex, "Go fix it." And Codex will go talk to the app and figure out what's going on for me. And so, I think the whole paradigm starts to change when you assume that everyone's got an agent and those agents are talking to other agents in this really magical and important way.
00:36:22 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:36:22] S0: There's a couple more things I want to touch on before we get started, because there's so much to talk about. One is you made this point about SaaS tools not using ... You can use tokens from the model companies basically when using a SaaS tool. Talk a bit more about that, because that may change the business model for SaaS companies in the future. That feels like a big deal.