Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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.
00:56:06 · Andrew Ambrosino, S1
[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. [00:56:17] S1: Okay. But is that kind of the... Let's not call it a super app, but the idea is one place people go to do all the things. Is that the general idea? Or TBD?
00:56:23 · Andrew Ambrosino
[00:56:23] S0: Yeah. I think what we see here is that it's a great home base. It's a great place to keep track of all of the things that you have to do across different surfaces. And some of those things, you do all of it in the app. Some of those things the app opens other apps to do. The app can connect to Excel so that yes, it has a spreadsheet editor inside the app. Is that good enough for people doing financial modeling at OpenAI for raising billions of dollars? Probably not. And so the app talks directly to the add-in Microsoft Excel on your desktop. When it's done, you can close Excel. And so it's not just about, "Hey, we're drawing a rectangle on the screen and everything needs to happen in that rectangle." It's, "This thing should be a home for you where you start work, you end work, you automate work, and it uses whatever you need to do." There's a great story about, we had some videos that we shot in this room for the original launch of the Codex app. And our in-house DX videographer, Brent, then was tasked with editing all these videos. And he edited all the videos with Codex, which was one of the early like, "Whoa, what are people doing with this thing?" And the process for why he decided to start using Codex was really interesting. He started just because he was curious if Codex could edit videos. And so Codex is not a video editor per se. It doesn't have any of that UI in it, but it was able to understand that he used Premiere Pro. It could do some edits by editing the files that were backing what was on-screen in Premiere Pro, but it couldn't do everything. So naturally what Codex then did was built itself an extension that could be installed into Premiere Pro. That it could then talk to and say, "Hey, Premiere Pro extension, can you please change this marker inside of the Premiere Pro app?" That was pretty nuts when we saw that happening. It's a great model. There are these specialty tools that specialize in things. And so we're trying to do two things at once with Codex and with now with ChatGPT. One is how can we seamlessly interact with these tools that you're already using? And say, "We don't need to build a better video editor for you." But Codex and ChatGPT can use that video editor. It can interact again, can hand stuff off to it. So how can we do that?