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Lenny Rachitsky: belief

28 Jun 2026 Lenny's Podcast OpenAI Codex lead on the new shape of product work | Andrew Ambrosino

“Something I think about along these lines is just AI is still very bad at actual design.”

— Lenny Rachitsky

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Speaker
Lenny Rachitsky
Attribution
Verified speaker
Claim type
belief
Recorded
28 Jun 2026
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

Transcript context

…Yeah. It's funny. There was a tweet, I'm too online. There was a tweet, I think it was yesterday from the head of product at Linear, I might be getting that wrong, sorry to anybody, who said, "People overemphasize the aesthetic part of what taste means." And they used, Paul Graham's great, but they used him as an example. Saying, "Paul Graham clearly has great taste and wears cargo shorts." We got to tease out what taste means a little bit and there's a lot of nuance here. I think it's all of the above to what you mentioned. There is an aesthetic part to it, but there's also a systems thinking part of it, like how does this fit in the system? There's a where are we going and what theme is this part of? There's how to present this. A lot of it is wider context. And obviously there are parts of taste that are like, "Hey, this interaction animation doesn't fit in the semantic meaning it's supposed to." It's too snappy for what it's actually trying to convey. And that's incredibly important and I focus probably too much on that. But there's the like, "What should this be?" If we can build anything, what's the goal here and how do we get there? That I think is actually the real taste question here. When I hear things like this, I always wonder where will human brains continue to be valuable as AI becomes stronger and better and doing more of the work? And it feels like taste is a part of it. Something I think about along these lines is just AI is still very bad at actual design. The output of AI is not great. Yeah.…

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