00:03:14 · Khe Hy
[00:03:14] S1: I looked, and it's still hard to find them. Like, they're still sold out from Apple as of a few weeks ago. I think that so when OpenClaw to Hermes, which I never tried, but I've heard very good things. But then and then as of two days ago, Grok bot is just blowing up. And there is a little bit of the kind of SpaceX, Elon, Mafia kind of pumping it up right now. So in my mind, I'm going to wait till, like, a few of the normies come out and have a few weeks with it because it definitely seems like there's an influencer campaign happening as we speak on GrokBot. But the and this is actually a really good segue, the Mac mini question. It's the thing that I wanted to talk about today is that a lot of the power Mac Mini users that were using it for OpenCLO. Most of it have moved over to codecs, which I guess there's so many naming problems with ChatGPT for work or basically like Claude code for OpenAI. They've got a massive product confusion right now. But let's I'm gonna call it Codex so people know that it's like the Claude code for OpenAI. So Codex comes out, and it's first, it was pretty bad. This was, you know, six months ago or four months ago. Was lagging Claude code. And then they did a massive redesign of the app, 5.6. Soul came out maybe, I don't know, four weeks ago, six weeks ago. And a few things happened. One, kind of Soul reached parity ish with Opus. So that was a, like, a big step up. But more importantly, the Codex app leapfrogged the Claude code, Claude app from a lot of people's perspective. It was easier to use. It was faster. It's cheaper. It just seems like an overall better experience functionally. Some of the screens change. So it's just an enjoyable app to use. So you had user experience, cost, and performance all kind of like leapfrog. This was probably six weeks ago. The other thing that Codex seems to have done well on that I haven't really had the time to explore, I actually don't know where I would explore it, but their memory seems to be much better. Like, it just seems to remember stuff. And so now I do things in skills. I do things in scheduled tasks. Like, I don't even know which one's a skill, which one. It's just sometimes it's just a chat. It's just like, just do this. And the memory on Codex seems to have gotten a lot better. And so here's where the real kind of separation. So all that was, you know, step one.
00:06:15 · Khe Hy
Step two, and this is where the Mac minis come in, is that Codex obviously works on your local machine, kind of like Cloud Code. And, you know, it has access to your browser and, you know, it can use your computer and it has access to your cookies and all that stuff. That was really good. But it required your computer to be always on, right? So that's where the Mac Minis came in, is that people basically repurposed their Mac Mini to just be codex hosts. And codex, you know, it can run really well on your computer, right? Like everything we got used to with Cloud Code. But the thing that's a big difference maker is that you can directly access all of your Claude I'm sorry all of your codec sessions on your physical machine through your phone. So you basically have a mirror of your physical computer on your phone. So let's say you're logged into a site like DealCloud. DealCloud doesn't have an MCP yet. I think they just added one. And it's like pipeline management for private equity, and some public investors use it. And you want to update your deal tagging, your pipeline. And you're doing that using the browser, right? You're logged in browser because you don't have an MCP, right? So you say like, Hey, Codex, go in and, you know, there's deal A. We passed on deal B. We sent an LOI. And deal C, we're still diligencing. Go update deal cloud. So what happens is that because it doesn't have an MCP, it would pull up your Chrome browser. You'd be logged into deal cloud, and it would start clicking around, doing what you need it to do. Obviously, you can only do that on your local machine because it has your logged in credential. Here's where Codex comes in. Now you can initiate that from your phone. You could just be like, hey, update my deal cloud. Or maybe, like, a more simple example would be like, into all my bookmarked tweets and summarize them for me, right? Something that requires your logged in machine. And that's why the Mac Minis come in, is because then you want that machine to be always on. You don't want if your laptop's closed or sleeping or so on. So that ecosystem, and for folks that are very into like personal agents, customizable agents that are always on and that are mobile first, that kind of, that's where all the OpenCloud people went. Because it hit almost every problem, scheduled tasks being
00:09:13 · Brett Caughran, Khe Hy
[00:09:13] S0: a [00:09:13] S1: big one, right? Like scheduled tasks on Claude code require your computer to be on. So it's kind of running locally. So basically, you're still running all these things locally. But because you can access them from your mobile phone, your iPhone, it doesn't feel like you're constrained anymore. Like, you could just be on the go just doing your work. So that's I said a lot there, but let me, I'll pause and let you react and ask questions. [00:09:44] S0: No, it's interesting. I mean, the one fundamental question I have is what does this mean for Wall Street people who've been working to build fluency in the tools? I mean, a core part AI training on Wall Street the last eighteen months has been, really last nine months has been Claude fluency. And even a core part of your practice has been helping firms get up to speed on Claude code and Claude co work. Yeah. What does that mean now? Like what's the sort of the next step as Claude gets decommissioned in some of these instances?
00:10:19 · Khe Hy
[00:10:19] S1: Yeah. I don't think it's going to get decommissioned. At least right now, I think people are just adding because a lot of people kept chat GBT. So they're just turning Codex on and giving people two options. But the thing is that like It it requires, you know, now assuming all the systems are equal, then it's like, what system are you designing? Right. And so I think that what I've noticed in my training was a lot of the training, I'd say until like two months ago was just like, show me how to use these things, show me use cases and so on. In the last two months though, as people have gotten more fluent, it's like, it's what's the art of possible, right? Like what is possible? So, you know, I think of one of the great advantages of Claude Code and co work was the ability to schedule tasks. Right? Because that's where you could say like, Hey, every morning, you know, I'm a consumer analyst. I'm tracking inflation. You know, go to Dick's, go to Amazon, go to, you know, to adidas.com and pull up the price of, you know, Stan Smith's sneakers and save it in an Excel spreadsheet, right? And so the original, like the, so that was the first time you could start doing these things, like really automating agentic work was with a trigger. And so then the question though is, well, what do we wanna automate? Right? That's actually a harder question than how do I automate something? Yeah. And that once you figure out like, well, you know, some folks will go through the way back machine to look at like the number of stores that existed across, you know, going back quarters at a time using the internet archive, using the Chrome extension, right? All Codex does, like, Codex makes the idea... What do they say that? Execution is cheap. Ideas are precious or rare. And so now the execution, I would argue, has just been flattened, right? It's it's got an even... You have no excuse now. Maybe before you had an excuse like, Well, I'm not gonna scrape because I don't know Cloud Code or, you know, we haven't set up the Chrome browser or what have you. You don't have an excuse anymore. What data are you gonna go look up in your remit, in your landscape that was not possible for? And what are you gonna do with it? Right? And so I think it's the, you know, kind of it's like another the abstraction is moving up to like, what's the hard problem to solve now?
00:13:05 · Brett Caughran, Khe Hy
[00:13:05] S0: Yeah. Yeah. That's where I like I would chuckle. I would chuckle when I watch these YouTube's on like setting up an OpenClaw or an Hermes agent. And it's like all of this futuristic approach. And then at the end, the use case was creating a podcast summarizer or something that's like, all right, like, okay, how was that? Totally. And the sort of like tension to me in long running tasks and people would, oh, I have 20 agents working overnight. And I would be like, On what? Me, we're not even at that point for... Certainly, I come at this from a institutional grade, bottoms up fundamental research perspective where the individual components of that process are still not good enough getting closer. But just let an agent rip for twenty four hours on doing a full deep dive due diligence process. It's just going to be this long running slop chain [00:14:02] S1: that [00:14:02] S0: burns a lot of tokens. Yeah.
00:14:07 · Khe Hy
[00:14:07] S1: No, I hear you. And one of the things I'd be curious how you're approaching this with your clients is I feel like we're ending this era where I call it the faster horse era, where you do something like an earnings preview and it would take you a couple hours And then you used AI to make it better and faster. Like, you built a faster horse. And the faster horse era of AI, it's easier because you just like, you look at everything you do, and you're like, how do I make it faster and cheaper? But then there's another question that's like, now that you have this resource that's different and very powerful and has a different cost structure, what are you going to do with it? Right? So like one of the things that's like interesting with private equity you know, they're constantly receiving SIEMs, right? Confidential information memorandums. These are like deal opportunities, right? And so they could have hundreds. You know, the firm could see dozens of them a week, maybe more depending on the firm size. So, you know, in the old days, what you do, an analyst would review it and like, this is worth spending more time on. Let's take it to phase two. Right? But these are also, like, really information rich documents and pretty, like, opaque private markets. What if you could have a bunch of agents that go in and, like, basically scrape every KPI from every SIM and categorize it for you? Like it never made sense to do that before because you'd have to pay an associate, you know, a $100 to do that. It's not a good use of their time. But if it costs you, you know, 20 of Fable tokens, maybe it's worth doing, right? Maybe it's worth it. So I'm curious, like how people are if you're seeing that, like faster horse to like expanded art of possible.