Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:31:58 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:31:58] S1: Okay, that's really helpful. So there's these three modes currently. There's the engineering mode, the chat mode, and then the do knowledge Work mode. And the knowledge Work mode, it's actually Codex doing all that work, but people may not know what Codex is, may be afraid of it. Is there anything in that Work mode that's not just Codex? Because that's actually really interesting. Is there additional harness tweaks to make it feel a little different or is it just the same thing with a little different UI?
00:32:23 · Tara Seshan
[00:32:23] S0: It's really at the UI level. So Work mode and Codex mode, if you go to Codex and ask it to generate an amazing financial model to price your product or something like that or predict my revenue for the next six months or something like that, Codex will do as good a job as Work mode. It's really about whilst it's doing so, what kind of UI do you want to see in the chain of thought? What kind of technical detail do you want exposed to you? It's incredible. It's similarly powerful. And so Codex users aren't missing out on anything by not switching modes. In fact, we do not want them to. Stay in Codex and do all the stuff you want to do in Codex, and we will show you the appropriate UI based on the things you asked for. Truly our north star is to merge all these things so that users don't have to make any of these decisions. The separation is really more about how can we meet people where they are as much as possible in terms of the products that they use, in terms of their familiarity with concepts and make sure that we are enabling everyone to take advantage of working with agents, which has transformed entirely the way every single developer works. We should do the same thing with knowledge work.
00:33:29 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:33:29] S1: It makes sense. Because things move so fast, I imagine somebody's like, "Let's try Codex. This is going to be awesome." And then it takes off and there's 10 million monthly active users, and then they're like, "Wait, what are we doing here? We got ChatGPT, we got Codex. How do we..." So it makes sense why these things. It's not going to feel obvious and perfect for a while because you have to adjust as things work and things don't work. And there's these transition periods of like, okay, cool. Now let's get people moving towards this vision of the super app, let's say. Okay. I imagine one of the hardest parts of your job is balancing this hundred billion MAU product, ChatGPT, maybe the most successful consumer product in history, with Codex, which is this new thing and other new things that you guys want to try. How do you think about that, I don't know, just balancing these very innovative, fast-moving teams and products with this like, okay, there's a billion people using this, we can't change this dramatically?
00:34:30 · Tara Seshan
[00:34:30] S0: Yeah, I think one of the most interesting things here is that one of the goals of launching Work in ChatGPT web and launching it in the desktop app and bringing these things together was to look at those billion people who are using ChatGPT and bring them more and more of the agent's power. If you think about the first era of AI products as chat, the second era of these products is clearly working with agents and primarily has been coding agents. We'd like to bring it to more domains certainly, like knowledge work. And that is part of the goal of giving all these billion chat users the power of Work. Certainly the product challenge that's on us is, how do we not only bring it to them, but make it natural and easy to adopt, make it not a decision they have to explicitly make? We can just help them do the right thing. How do we decomplexify it so they don't need to think about things like harnesses, which feel like crazy concepts for a billion consumers to understand? So that is primarily the challenge. And then of course, that third era that might come soon is how do you work with a persistent coworker who is able to get things done with you, maybe collaboratively with other people? And so part of this challenge in the near term is we are introducing agents to a billion people who may not have experienced them yet. How do we do so in the easiest, most natural, and most usable way possible? Certainly there's a lot more for us to do to make that happen. But part of this is also a lesson I've had maybe contrasting pre-AI era or past product experience with this one, which is at previous companies, like polish was king, getting every UI interaction or getting every little thing completely right was way more important than shipping something early because time didn't make as much of a difference in terms of the outcome. And so as such, if every corner wasn't perfectly polished and everything wasn't exactly correct, you might as well not ship it. But I think what's been really compelling and interesting about this era and this product experience has been getting the product in the hands of users when you have so much conviction that, hey, it's transformative, is way better than perfect. And that urgency and that introduction of that product is so important.
00:37:02 · Tara Seshan, Lenny Rachitsky
So we have a lot to do to make it more usable and easier for chat users, certainly especially for folks who are not maybe even using it for productivity, but using it for consumer tasks. But yeah, done is better than perfect, and we have so much more to do. [00:37:20] S1: Yeah, I remember when this app first launched, there was a lot of comments about the confusion and seeing how quickly the team iterated and respond to the feedback is exactly what I'm hearing here is get it out, figure out what's not working, how people are using it, iterate quickly. Feels like that's the model now.
00:37:36 · Tara Seshan
[00:37:36] S0: And of course there are things that you can continue to iterate and get that feedback prior to launching. And there's a lot that we can and should always do better. But iterating as quickly as possible and listening to the right signals is regardless of whether that's pre-launch, post-launch, ideally pre-launch, is the key thing. I think there's this phrase which is, "Before enlightenment carry water, chop wood. Post enlightenment, carry water, chop wood," sort of thing. And actually with the Codex app, the team who initially got it up and running and were working on it were super, again, user-focused, tight iteration loop, really dogfooded the thing, mainlined the app as much as possible to get everything right. Folks started to realize that was happening externally and on Twitter and users started to really notice. But the team was always really focused on users, really focused on that iteration. And it was merely, to some extent, the market catching up, that was the change. And that process has not changed internally. Everyone still constantly uses the app. Everyone who's building it obviously is a developer using it for development and is constantly fixing not only their own problems, but trying to listen to other people in the company's problems and user problems. Actually, what's sort of remarkable is that the mode of operating hasn't changed. It's always been the same thing I had mentioned earlier. Are we elevating our mission sufficiently? Are we maximally accelerating progress and are we mainlining it as much as possible? And I think it's great that users and folks on Twitter have noticed, but that operation, that full credit to the team, that hasn't changed.