Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:44:39 · Andrew Ambrosino, S1
Which things need my attention. I can kind of message back and be like, "All right, give me five questions and I'll answer them." And I can do that. [00:44:49] S1: How do you set that up? What's the workflow for somebody to set that up? Yes, that sounds amazing. [00:44:53] S0: Again, I think we're still in the discovery phase on a lot of this. And so right now it's like I'm making an automation that says, or scheduled task that says like, "Go through my Slack channels, these are the things that I care about and think are most important." So I'm still kind of defining that. These are things to watch out for different categories, here's some context. And that'll get set up as an automated task and then first few times it runs it might need some steering. And luckily with this app, I don't have to find out how to edit the instructions. I can just be like, "Hey, next time this runs, can you please worry about this instead? Or can you de-emphasize this work stream? Or, hey, this thing happened and it didn't come up in a brief, can you make sure that stuff in this shape?" So I can kind of coach it along the way. It'll update the way that it notifies me, stuff like that. [00:45:44] S1: Amazing. [00:45:45] S0: I think in the future though, this has been a core problem with the chatbot shape, is that I know how to set this up. I have time to set this up because for me, it's product discovery to set it up. But if you're not working at OpenAI, not developing this, you don't want to have to figure out all this stuff. We need to figure out that shape of things.
00:45:45 · Andrew Ambrosino, S1
[00:45:45] S0: I think in the future though, this has been a core problem with the chatbot shape, is that I know how to set this up. I have time to set this up because for me, it's product discovery to set it up. But if you're not working at OpenAI, not developing this, you don't want to have to figure out all this stuff. We need to figure out that shape of things. [00:46:06] S1: Yeah. What I'm hearing here is I don't think people realize that your app can act a lot like OpenClaw, people were so excited about. You just talk to it, set up this thing, check on this thing for me every day, and then tell me what's going on. [00:46:19] S0: Exactly, yeah. [00:46:20] S1: It's starting to become a part of all the products, which is amazing. So the way somebody would set this up is they just talk within the app and say, "I want to set up an automation to do this. Look at my Slack and these are the things I want to do." [00:46:20] S0: Yeah. [00:46:32] S1: Great. [00:46:32] S0: Yeah. And the app will say it'll set it up for you. If it doesn't have a Slack connector, it'll say, "Can I add the Slack connector? Yes or no?" You can hit yes to that. The least that we can do is make it so that if you don't know how to do something in the app, that you can just ask it. I don't think that's enough, but I think that's the least we can do.
00:46:32 · Andrew Ambrosino, S1
[00:46:32] S0: Yeah. And the app will say it'll set it up for you. If it doesn't have a Slack connector, it'll say, "Can I add the Slack connector? Yes or no?" You can hit yes to that. The least that we can do is make it so that if you don't know how to do something in the app, that you can just ask it. I don't think that's enough, but I think that's the least we can do. [00:46:52] S1: Yeah. A good example of this, I built this little app that filters spammy email from my inbox. So every email that comes in, and I built this in Codex, every email that comes in, it looks at it and decides is this unsolicited, kind of cold emaily stuff that I don't want to look at? And labels it and puts it somewhere else. And to set that up, one of the steps was you have to go into the Google Cloud console and set up all these hub, sub, hubbub, API things, and triggers. I don't know if you've ever used that interface. It's so annoying and slow. [00:47:20] S0: Right. [00:47:20] S1: So I was like, "Wait, what if I ask you to do it?" And I was like, "Okay, cool. Do this for me." And it just... You described computer use. I've never actually seen this happen on my computer before. It just takes over my computer and starts going there. [00:47:32] S0: It's like, "I don't care if you don't have a connector, man, I'll just start clicking." [00:47:35] S1: Yeah. And it figures it out. It's crazy just to watch it doing this thing.
00:47:35 · S1, Andrew Ambrosino
[00:47:35] S1: Yeah. And it figures it out. It's crazy just to watch it doing this thing. [00:47:39] S0: Designing the decision boundary between connectors. When to use the in-app browser versus your Chrome extension that's connected versus computer us was interesting. And all done through just feeling it out. [00:47:52] S1: I saw a great Twitter thread the other day where they describe all these three and what you use it for. So this person described it really well.
00:47:52 · S1, Andrew Ambrosino
[00:47:52] S1: I saw a great Twitter thread the other day where they describe all these three and what you use it for. So this person described it really well. [00:47:58] S0: These personal workflows are really interesting because some of them really click. People are trying all sorts of stuff. Everybody's making these personal systems. You ask everybody here what they do and everything's going to be different. And then certain themes arise and we're like, "You know what? That should be a first class experience on the app. We should take this thing that everybody seems to be setting up and just make that work." And I think memory is sort of in the shape where we've had a lot of people, and a lot of people at other companies too are like, "Well, I set up an Obsidian base or a Notion area. And I tell it how to basically build my mind palace and how to put..." It's like, "I don't know if everyone..." You shouldn't have to do that. There should be a memory feature that does that for you, that's pretty generic. So that's one. But then there are other things like they're your process of your job. And there's something that like, "Yeah, you should set that up." But I think we're constantly wading through what's working for individual people, what should enter the product? Versus stay, no, that's just how you do your job, right? What should become a primitive, what shouldn't?
00:49:06 · S1, Andrew Ambrosino
[00:49:06] S1: Yeah. This is the taste and judgment you spoke of earlier deciding these things. I want to talk about this browser use piece a little bit because I think people don't realize how powerful this is and what it could be used for. Reminds me, I don't know if you watched when Dan Shipper was on the podcast, from Every. He had this prediction that we're going to start using Codex to run our SaaS apps inside out. So instead of going in Chrome- [00:49:29] S0: I know, he Slacks me about this every day asking for stuff. [00:49:33] S1: Do you feel like this is where things go?zeolite Where we're just working within the Codex app using Notion and Linear and Salesforce inside with your agent kind of helping you along? Or do you think that's a kind of a different direction?