Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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?
00:49:46 · Andrew Ambrosino
[00:49:46] S0: Yeah, it's been really interesting because obviously we've had a few attempts at browser shaped activity. And Operator and ChatGPT agent mode and Atlas. And now we have the in-app browser inside of the desktop app. We also have the ability to install a Chrome extension where the app connects to Chrome. We've had a lot of shapes of this and I think we've learned a lot of different things. There's a lot at play. There's a lot of really boring things at play. We originally launched the app, it's an electron app. The things that you can do with in-app browsers in there, it's kind of janky. So the in-app browser was for development, it was for testing your front end on development. And we were like, "It's not really for anything else, guys. It's a developer tool." And then we switched over to our Owlstack, which had powered the Atlas browser. And so now it multi-tab. And we've got enterprise security so that you can actually log into all your websites if you're... So we've been iterating on this. I think the tough thing has always been, what should the shape of this browser be? Is this something that is only for the agent? That you've got Chrome, you open Chrome, you do your thing in Chrome. If you ask the desktop app, it opens up this browser that it can control really quickly, doesn't have the latency of Playwright, whatever. Or are we trying to say, "This app is for everything and we want you to use this as a browser." And those have a lot of trade-offs. It's not super well-traveled path. Most browsers are browsers at the top level. They've got browser tabs. This creates a lot of really boring but tedious problems like keyboard shortcuts, right? Are we trying to do key mapping to VS code or to Chrome or to our own thing? Or to Linear? We want to have some sort of muscle memory that carries over, but got all these things that have sub-shapes of different products out on the market. What do we do?
00:51:42 · S1, Andrew Ambrosino
[00:51:42] S1: And this just highlights how extra challenging this app is where you have to allow it to work. For somebody that's never built anything from the more basic user, to power like Peter, OpenClaw trying to code with it. [00:51:58] S0: I'm not convinced I'm going to get Peter to use the app. I think he might be the last- [00:52:02] S1: He's a terminal hold out. [00:52:04] S0: ... terminal hold out. [00:52:04] S1: Okay. [00:52:05] S0: But I'm going to keep trying. [00:52:06] S1: Okay. Let me zoom out for a moment and talk about the big picture of where you're taking all this. What's the vision for Codex? Where does this go? What's it going to look like, I don't know, a year or two, 10 years?
00:52:18 · Andrew Ambrosino
[00:52:18] S0: We had Codex as a CLI and then we decided to build this app. And we were a little uncertain about the app but had a lot of conviction in what it could be as to start a developer tool. And it wasn't going to be an ITE, it was going to be this right sized surface. Where it was sort of a chatbot but it was more than that and you could see the code but we weren't going to let you edit the code. There's a really interesting thing that happened at OpenAI in January and February. And it was before we actually released the Codex app, which is that we'd started to dog food the Codex app. And what we were finding, we were converging on some pretty clear internal PMF on engineering and research workflows. They were thrilled. They were loving it. We were like, "All right, we just got to get the quality bar up before we release it to the world. We're convinced that this will be a thing." But then at the company, we spun up a few other workflows to say, "Hey, this Codex effort is onto something with these coding agents." And we have people from marketing, from comms, from finance, from legal, from basically every discipline, who are using this Codex app, even though it is actively hostile to these people. It is trying to show them code. It's trying to ask for approval to run RG on the... It's doing all of these things that are actively not the right product surface for them. So why don't we take our other surfaces and add Codex to them? Let's add it to the ChatGPT desktop app. Let's add it to the Atlas browser. And let's essentially take the lessons of Codex and make it more general for a general knowledge work tool. And those efforts went for a little bit. And the most annoying problem happened, which is nobody would leave the Codex app for the apps that were allegedly for these other personas. I think the lesson in all of this was just that the whole developer tool versus general knowledge work tool, there's a lot of nuance here that isn't just one or the other. I think we believe really strongly in this. And that there are certainly, in the same way that we talk about the average of your role as what your role is now, this is true on the product side too. People who are doing Excel work don't want to see Git repository information. We know that, but we also know that we can tell a lot from what they're doing about what kind of work they do.
00:54:52 · Andrew Ambrosino, S1
And we can start simple, grow the product to complex as we feel is needed. It doesn't mean we don't have modes. You might want some modes for organizing your stuff and to sort of be legible about the ways that you enter the experience. But we really believe strongly that what we've built here is the right shape to take on really deep, vertically focused things. We work deeply with our finance team, with our team working on science, team working on legal. And we say, "If we can build the right extensibility primitives in the right general model, then you can do anything with this." And then our challenge is, well, how do you generalize it? But this is kind of going back to the best desktop app that we can build. What does that look like? And so it was Codex the developer tool, ChatGPT, where's this going? This is how we think about it. [00:55:47] S1: It is so interesting, the point you made that the Codex app was so, you did such a good job getting people to be aware it existed. And so good to use and fun to use that everyone's starting to use that versus the ChatGPT app. So clearly the direction is combining them so that you're not creating this confusion, which I know is things people have been talking about, this idea of come bringing them together. [00:56:06] S0: Somebody called it a super app and wish they hadn't said that because now I have to hear about the super app all day, every day. We'll get past it. Great.