Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:46:19 · Tara Seshan
[00:46:19] S0: I think humans will continue to be the most valuable certainly as an entity of accountability, so who ultimately owns the outcome here. In some ways you can think of your agent that you're working with as your report. Ultimately who owns, what was the end product? Was it high quality? Was it a thing that you wanted it to do and say? That will certainly remain a person, at least for now, and especially in industries and places that are highly regulated or require a direct human interface. That makes a ton of sense to me. I think the human brain is also really valuable for expression. I had mentioned earlier that analogy of software is not like real estate, it is more like a film where you could put money and a great film does not come out. The greatest films are not the ones with the biggest budgets. And given that there's a certain artistry and opinionation and expression in building software where you feel like there's some authorship by a person or a group of people, and that part remains, to me, so human. What you choose to build and how it feels, feels like such a human question. I also think the human brain continues to be valuable in how we care for each other and relate to one another. That piece of my work has remained so human and has actually become more important than ever. The part where you talk to other people on your team and collectively figure out how you can be enthusiastic about a area, how you learn and work together, how you elevate each other's ambitions, all of that feels and remains such a human thing to do. Yeah, I think the human brain will continue to be so valuable in that regard. That said, I can't predict what'll happen with the models. But those pieces feel to me to be incredibly, incredibly human.
00:48:18 · Lenny Rachitsky, Tara Seshan
[00:48:18] S1: I love that answer. There's this idea that you talked about, this idea of this overhang of what AI is capable of and what we're actually doing with it. It feels like one of the biggest gaps is like, okay, what should I do with it? I'm curious, what are some ways that you use AI in your work that may inspire people like, "Oh wow, I didn't think about using it that..." There's two buckets here. One is just how your PM job has changed most, thanks to AI, that you're just like, "Okay, now I use AI for this stuff." And then is there any super interesting creative uses of AI recently that you're like, "Oh yeah, I should try this?" [00:48:55] S0: One of the most exciting ways that I use AI in work is I actually build sites all the time now. I don't know if you've tried building sites in Codex. [00:49:05] S1: I haven't talk about Sites.
00:49:05 · Lenny Rachitsky, Tara Seshan
[00:49:05] S1: I haven't talk about Sites. [00:49:06] S0: Sites is a really fun, amazing product. You can basically build a site, certainly in Work as a presentational artifact, but I also build sites for literally anything. I built a site for the team as a game where we all played a game together using a site because Sites have a database. I actually built a site because I went on a backpacking trip recently. I built a site of the route that tracked the elevation of everywhere we were going. Everyone on our trip inputted all their food. It was superfast and effective. Sites realized the dream of malleable personal software that Alan Kay flagged in the '60s of the true personal computer is one that has personal software. In some ways, Sites are the tangible way to make that possible. We had all once dreamed of making personal software, and certainly people with tools like Notion, et cetera, try with all these blocks to configure what that could be. But with the Site, it is literally a prompt. I literally with a prompt say, "Build me this exact tool that I need to get this thing done," and it just does it. They're shareable. They can auto update. You can use internal data to build a dashboard, for example, with lots of metrics. And rather than painstakingly laboring over some sort of slide deck, a site is just a way more dynamic surface for presentation. [00:50:33] S1: How do you use a site? Do you have to do anything special or you tell it, create a site? [00:50:33] S0: In Codex be like, "Create a site that- [00:50:35] S1: Create a site.
00:50:35 · Lenny Rachitsky, Tara Seshan
[00:50:35] S1: Create a site. [00:50:36] S0: ... is a, I don't know, is a mafia game for my team," and it will just do it. [00:50:40] S1: And I'm thinking capital S site, but it doesn't matter, I imagine. [00:50:44] S0: Yeah. [00:50:44] S1: It just knows what sites are? [00:50:45] S0: Mm-hmm. [00:50:46] S1: Yeah, because it used to be, "Here's some source code, go figure out where to deploy it." [00:50:50] S0: Yeah. [00:50:51] S1: And you're saying here is it just hosted for you and immediately you can use it. [00:50:53] S0: Host it for you. You choose whether it's public. You can choose whether it's with your team- [00:50:57] S1: Awesome. [00:50:57] S0: ... or choose whether it's private to you. They're great. The easy reach of building a site all the time has changed what my day-to-day looks like, which often in previous worlds used to look like creating lots of artifacts like docs and sheets and whatever it might be. Now I just make sites all the time. [00:51:16] S1: And you could do that through, I imagine, Work or... Can you do it through all the surfaces, Codex, Work, ChatGPT Chat? [00:51:23] S0: You can do it through Work. You can do it- [00:51:23] S1: Okay, cool. [00:51:25] S0: ... through Codex. You can do it in the web. You can do it on mobile. You can do it anywhere. [00:51:27] S1: Okay. I just kicked off create a site about Tara Seshan. [00:51:30] S0: Great. [00:51:31] S1: Is that how you pronounce your last name, by the way? I haven't asked you. [00:51:35] S0: Tara Seshan, like station.
00:51:35 · Tara Seshan, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:51:35] S0: Tara Seshan, like station. [00:51:37] S1: Seshan. Okay, cool. Okay, cool. Sites. Okay. Any other quick tips, while we're on this- [00:51:37] S0: I think that- [00:51:44] S1: ... topic, for people? Because that was a great tip, because I don't think a lot of people know about Sites, so it's very useful. [00:51:47] S0: Yeah, Sites are awesome. The other thing I really love is using Visualize in Codex. Have you used /visualize? [00:51:53] S1: No. [00:51:54] S0: Oh, /visualize is incredibly exciting. You can just do /visualize, visualize my ChatGPT usage until now, or something like that, and it will pull in all the things that you've done and create an amazing visualization for it. The number of times that I've been thinking about, how do I not only pull in a bunch of charts and data, but present them in a way that is understandable and useful for the story I'm trying to tell has been infinite. And Visualize makes that incredibly simple. It is surprisingly delightful to use Visualize. [00:52:26] S1: These are such good examples of there's so much power here we don't even know about or understand, and that's the challenge you have here. Help us- [00:52:26] S0: For sure, for sure.
00:52:26 · Tara Seshan, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:52:26] S0: For sure, for sure. [00:52:34] S1: Help us know all these things. That's why podcasts like this are also useful. Can't put it all in the product. I'm going to go in a totally different direction. I'm going to talk about writing. I asked Brie Wolfson, who knows you well, what to ask you. Funny enough, she suggested questions for the previous podcast conversation I did with Adam Ward from Cursor. So she said, "Okay, you should ask her about writing/thinking. A Tara brief is iconic." Help us understand just what makes your writing your briefs iconic and any tips that might be helpful for people that are maybe trying to get better at writing and writing documents.