Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
01:26:58 · Lenny Rachitsky
[01:26:58] S0: The other interesting piece of that is just a lot. We just had this guest post by Molly Graham about the waterline model, and it was this pitch that most of the problems in your team, people jump to it's the person's fault, but most of it is like, "Okay, they don't actually understand their job. They don't understand what success looks like. They don't understand the goal." Or there's team overlap with who's responsible. So it's not like the person it's structural issues generally, and that feels like the same situation here. If your bot is doing the wrong thing, it's not that it's dumb, it just doesn't have the context, doesn't know what you want it to do.
01:27:32 · Claire Vo, Lenny Rachitsky
[01:27:32] S1: Yeah. And it's so funny because in an agentic system, that line is so clear. You can actually go into its file system and say, "Does it have this information? Should it be able to do this job?" And what you realize is no matter how you have communicated to it or explained to it that API, the Yapper API, while effective, is lossy. It's lossy. You tell somebody to do something, they forget it. You tell them to do it two weeks ago, they definitely forget it. And so making that effective communication onboarding so clear, so literal in the file system is very interesting because it is a reflection of how good am I at tasking my team? How good are my systems? How robust is my documentation? Because if this magical AI system with endless resources and infinite coding abilities can't figure out which projects are doing well and aren't, how am I supposed to figure that out? How is somebody I hire supposed to figure that out? So it is like almost maybe we need to do an RPG where you just go through the paces as a manager. And if you can make your agents effective, then you get promoted into human management. [01:28:50] S0: You mentioned Hilary Gridley, and she's big on this, just how much of the manager skillset translates to AI and agents.
01:28:50 · Lenny Rachitsky, Claire Vo
[01:28:50] S0: You mentioned Hilary Gridley, and she's big on this, just how much of the manager skillset translates to AI and agents. [01:28:57] S1: Yeah. And I mean, the other thing, which is I think really interesting, say you're not a manager. Let's say you're an IC. This is a really interesting way to think about your personal operating system. How do I remember what we did? Should I remember what we did every day? Do I have a list of who I'm working with and what their preferences are and how they like to communicate? Do I know what tools I have access to? If you just think about your own personal onboarding into an organization, maybe you just need to scaffold out some of the same things that you see here to give yourself a framework. Not that you couldn't do that organically, but the structure often helps. [01:29:34] S0: Maybe just as a final motivation to people that are like, "Okay, this all sounds wonderful, I got to go eat some dinner," Just to give people a sense of why this is important and worth their time in spite of all these other products launching, Jensen, the founder of Nvidia, just like the other day, he's just like, "Every company in the world needs to have a Claw strategy." OpenClaw is the new computer. It's the fastest growing open source project in history. If you look at the chart, it's just absurd more than Linux. So there's something going on here, even if there are going to be simpler products, easier things that are easy to use. Maybe is there anything there you want to add too?
01:30:13 · Claire Vo
[01:30:13] S1: I'll say what my personal experience was as somebody who has been thinking about AI for quite some time, so compelled by this moment in technology that I quit my fancy pants executive job to sit and marinate in this future of AI. And why I have these three Mac minis on my desk is because one Saturday I woke up and I turned to my husband, I said, "I'm having a ChatGPT moment." I'm having this, which I have not had since ChatGPT came out, which is this is going to change everything. Maybe not this specific instance of it, maybe not this specific repo, although the stars just keep going up and up and up, but I'm having this moment where my imagination has unlocked another level because of what I could predict and presume this sort of harness, this sort of product, this sort of experience can unlock if you take it as a given that things are going to improve. I'm truly having a moment with this, and I'm having that moment because it's so useful, personally useful. I'm having that moment because it's really inspiring me as an AI builder of what the next wave of products is going to look like. And I'm having a moment because this thing is not perfect, and it's open source, and it's a lot to maintain. And imagine in a year when it's not that. Whoever figures that out, I think is going to have something really special or maybe we'll all have something that we all run and lovingly craft at home, and that will be special too. So I will just say for folks, this has been one of those really intense moments where my eyes open and I think, "Wow, this is going to change my personal life and my professional life in a way I could not have predicted three years ago." And while I spend a lot of time in AI, I don't have those moments often.
01:32:10 · Lenny Rachitsky, Claire Vo
[01:32:10] S0: That's a big deal for someone being so close to all of the things to say that about this one product. [01:32:14] S1: Yeah, and I'm anti-hype guy. I was not like this when it first came out. So you can trust me, there are the receipts. I did it live. I'm not just saying this because I think it is the fashionable thing. I am saying this because I spend my entire day with an OpenClaw. [01:32:31] S0: Yeah, eight open, nine now. We just created the new one. [01:32:35] S1: Nine. [01:32:38] S0: Incredible. Okay, Claire, before we get to a very exciting lightning round, is there anything else, anything else you want to share? [01:32:42] S1: No, it's super fun. Again, if you're not ready for this, totally fine. If you're just, I'm not going to be in the terminal, totally fine. Play with Claude Code if that feels a little bit more accessible to you. Play with ChatGPT. Play with Claude. Play with any of these tools that feel accessible to you, but start to think of, "If I could employ someone in my life that I can't actually afford, if I could employ an assistant that just would make my life better, what are the things that they would do and can AI in whatever format get you there?" So a lot of the inspiration and what we do at the podcast is we just try to help you open your eyes to this can help solve a problem for you. Whether that problem is highly technical or not at all technical, I just want people to continue exploring because it's pretty incredible what these tools can do.
01:32:42 · Claire Vo, Lenny Rachitsky
[01:32:42] S1: No, it's super fun. Again, if you're not ready for this, totally fine. If you're just, I'm not going to be in the terminal, totally fine. Play with Claude Code if that feels a little bit more accessible to you. Play with ChatGPT. Play with Claude. Play with any of these tools that feel accessible to you, but start to think of, "If I could employ someone in my life that I can't actually afford, if I could employ an assistant that just would make my life better, what are the things that they would do and can AI in whatever format get you there?" So a lot of the inspiration and what we do at the podcast is we just try to help you open your eyes to this can help solve a problem for you. Whether that problem is highly technical or not at all technical, I just want people to continue exploring because it's pretty incredible what these tools can do. [01:33:40] S0: With that, Claire, we have reached our very exciting lightning round. I've got five questions for you. Are you ready? [01:33:46] S1: I'm ready. [01:33:47] S0: What are two or three books that you find yourself recommending most to other people?