Dan Shipper: preference

Transcript context

…Let's do it. I'm so excited about this one. I think it's the coolest thing. So basically what happened was Anthropic realized at some point that, with Claude Code, if you put an agent on your computer and it runs on your computer, it has access to everything that you have access to. It uses the terminal, so it has basically superpowered access to it. And not only that, these agents really understand how to use the terminal because there's so much content online about that and it created this super powerful coding paradigm, which is Anthropic was really doing it first. OpenAI, for a while, was, in my opinion, very, very behind on this and then, in my opinion, has surpassed them recently. It's really interesting, but they were very early on this. When people were still thinking about coding agents or coding models as being really pair programmers, they were among the first to be like, no, and do it successfully. There were people before them, like Devin, who, I think, had the big cloud environment and OpenAI tried this too, but the real adoption seems to have happened when you put it on your computer. So they figured that out and then I think they figured out, along with their community, that once you have a coding agent on your computer that can build anything, it's actually really good for any kind of work you want to do. And people started just hacking Claude Code, essentially, to do all of their work. Anthropic then built Cowork, which is a little bit of a nicer wrapping around Claude Code, but is fundamentally the same thing. And then I think OpenAI made a couple of different bets, but their main bet on a programming agent was the earlier versions of Codex were very technical and they were super smart, but they were a little bit autistic. It was a little hard to ... They didn't quite get what you meant. They got exactly what you said. And I think maybe like three or four months ago, around the time that they launched 5.3, they started to move in this direction of, "Oh no, we get it. This model is fast. It's really good for general purpose, knowledge work type tasks." And then they launched the Codex desktop app. And I think the Codex desktop app takes ... If you look at all the lessons that Anthropic learned, they went from Claude code to Cowork and you can see that in the tabs on the Anthropic desktop app UI. I think OpenAI was just like, "We see where this is going. Let's just skip to that. " And so I think Codex right now, this is a horse race. They're going to have different positions, but I think Codex right now, it's my daily driver. I spend all my time in it, basically. I flip to Claude every once in a while, but I think they're getting the paradigm right. And it's clear to me that whoever is in the lead, because again, I think it'll change. Whoever's in the lead, it feels very obvious to me that all of the work that you do is going to be in one of those surfaces where, for example, when I'm writing a document, Codex has a browser in the app. ver's in the lead, it feels very obvious to me that all of the work that you do is going to be in one of those surfaces where, for example, when I'm writing a document, Codex has a browser in the app. It has an in-app browser. And when I'm writing a document, I just go into one of my Codex threads, which I have one thread for every project, and I just open the in-app browser, I go to the document, I usually do it in Proof, which is this online markdown editor I built. And then I just have Codex running and watching me in Proof and Codex can see what I'm doing. I can see what Codex is doing. It's all in one place, which is an extension of the same thing that made Claude Code work really well originally. And I basically feel like I have this parallel work buddy that not only can it respond and write in the document, but then it can go do research, it can use my computer to basically do anything that I can do on my computer and that's incredibly powerful. And I do this with everything. I've been at inbox zero for 10 days straight now, which if you know me, is crazy. I'm never like this, and that's because I literally just have Codex gather all my emails with Quora, which is our email agent. And then it renders a little page, and I think I showed you this at the Anthropic event. It renders a little page and I just monologue into it and just talk out each email. I'm like, "Okay, go research this. Oh, here's a question from our lawyers. Can you go collect all of the documents from the last four years and then put them into a report and send them?" And it just does it. And so all the stuff that I would procrastinate on, I don't really procrastinate on anymore. And so I feel like there's this, for a long time, I thought too that the optimal experience of AI was going to be take AI and put it in a browser. And I think the reverse is actually starting to happen and be really, really valuable in a way that I did not expect, which is take the AI agent that you use all the time on your computer and put a browser in it so it can see everything you're doing. And that is just like a magical combination that I think is very uncommon now. You can't even do this in Claude Code because they don't let you browse external websites inside of Claude Code. So it's very uncommon now, but I think it will be super common in a year.…

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