Lenny's Podcast / episode intelligence
Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
33 published records
01 / evaluation
“One of the most mind-blowing examples of acceleration, the Sora Android app, like a fully new app, we built it in 18 days and then 10 days later, so 28 days total, we went to the public.”
02 / evaluation
“And so Codex has been accelerating OpenAI over the course of the entire year, and the cloud product was a massive accelerant to the company as well. It just turns out that this was one of those places where the signal we got from dogfooding is a little bit different from the signal you get from the general market because at OpenAI, we train reasoning models all day and so we're very used to this kind of prompting and think upfront, run things massively in parallel and it would take some time and then come back to it later asynchronously.”
03 / recommendation
“Earlier I was mentioning like, "Hey, if you're an engineer, you should be getting help from AI thousands of times per day," and so we thought a lot about the primitives for that when we launched our first version of Codex, which was Codex Cloud.”
04 / uncertainty
“I know this isn't what you work on, but there's a lot of opinions, a lot of, I don't know, timelines.”
05 / uncertainty
“Built, you said, in 28 days and I don't know, 10 days, 18 days just to get the core of it working.”
06 / belief
“Codex is OpenAI's coding agent. We think of Codex as just the beginning of a software engineering teammate.”
07 / uncertainty
“I don't know if I have a life motto, but maybe I can tell you about the number one company value from my startup.”
08 / belief
“" You would start by first making sure they understand the code base and then you would maybe align on an approach and then you would have them go off and do bit by bit. And I think if you use Codex in that way, you'll just naturally start to understand the different ways of prompting it because it's a super powerful agent and model, but it is a little bit different to prompt Codex than other models.”
09 / belief
“I think the other side of it though is that it's still deeply worth understanding what makes a good overall software system. So I still think that skills, like really strong systems engineering skills, or even really effective communication and collaboration with your team, skills like that I think are important or are going to continue to matter for quite some time.”
10 / belief
“I think we might've been in this weird temporary phase where, for a while, it was so hard to build product that you mostly just had to be really good at building product and it maybe didn't matter if you had an intimate understanding of a specific customer.”
11 / uncertainty
“I always love meeting people working on AI because it always feels like this very, I don't know, sterile, scary, mysterious thing.”
12 / belief
“I think, honestly, the growth has been amazing, but it's still very early times, so we still pay a lot of attention and hope to do so forever. And also, I would say if you're interested in working on the future of coding agents and then agents generally, then please apply to our job site and/or message me in those social media places.”
13 / belief
“If I think of what I was doing in my startup, it moved way slower and there's always this balance with startups of how much do you commit to an idea that you have versus find out that it's not working and then pivot.”
14 / observation
“We're not going to have exactly a plan of where it's going in the next few months." The key is you all hire the best people in the world.”
15 / evaluation
“Probably looking at it and just making sure this is the right thing to do, yeah.”
16 / belief
“I was just, again, surprised or even shocked when I arrived at the level of individual drive and autonomy that everyone here has. So I think the way that OpenAI runs, you can't read this or listen to a podcast and be like, "I'm just going to deploy this to my company.”
17 / belief
“I think one thing is that the Codex team is growing. And as I was just saying, we're still somewhat limited by human thinking speed and human typing speed.”
18 / commitment
“I think we will very much get to the point, well, basically where the boundaries are a little bit blurred.”
19 / belief
“Not too many tourists go there. But I think part of what I think is really cool is he published a lot and a lot of his writing is about the beauty of that island, which I think is super cool.”
20 / belief
“I think the tweet was the gnarliest bugs that he runs into that he just spends hours trying to figure out nothing else has solved, he gives it to Codex, lets it run for an hour and it solves it.”
21 / belief
“I think if you don't believe it, you can't will it into existence. So you need a balance.”
22 / belief
“Agents aren't going to be as good at that, but also partially because I think that by trying to advance the frontier of a specific thing, you'll actually end up being forced to take advantage of coding agents and using them to accelerate your own workflow as you go.”
23 / belief
“If you think, again, an engineering teammate, they can also schedule a calendar invite or move standup or do whatever, right? And so in my mind, if we just imagine that every day or every week some crazy new capability is just going to be deployed by a research lab, it's just impossible for us as humans to keep up and use all this technology.”
24 / prediction
“I mean, there's a load of unexpected ways, but I think most of where we're seeing real traction with people using things are still for now very, I would say, coding adjacent or tech-oriented, places where there's a mature ecosystem or maybe you're doing data analysis or something like that.”
25 / evaluation
“By far, I would say the speed and ambition of working at OpenAI are just dramatically more than what I can imagine. And I guess it's kind of an embarrassing thing to say because everyone who's a startup founder thinks like, "Oh yeah, my startup moves super fast and the talent bar is super high and we're super ambitious.”
26 / recommendation
“What I'm hearing is this ready, fire, aim is the approach more than ready, aim, fire. And there's something, and as you process that, because that may not come across well, but I actually have heard this a lot at AI companies is because you don't know, and Nick Turley shared I think the same sentiment, because you don't know how people will use it it doesn't make sense to spend a lot of time making it perfect.”
27 / preference
“Another thing that we do that I think we might be the most user feedback/social media pilled team out there in this space is like a few of us are constantly on Reddit and Twitter, and there's praise up there and there's a lot of complaints, but we take the complaints very seriously and look at them.”
28 / evaluation
“I will say if you're like, "Hey, okay, well, the hardest problem I have is that I need to build a new unicorn business," obviously that's not going to work.”
29 / preference
“One example that comes to mind is when I was working on my startup and before that, when I was at Dropbox, it was very important, especially as a PM to always rally the ship and it was like make sure you're pointed in the right direction and then you can accelerate in that direction. But here, I think because we don't exactly know what capabilities will even come up soon and we don't know what's going to work technically, and then we also don't know what's going to land even if it works technically, it's much more important for us to be very humble and learn a lot more empirically and just try things quickly.”
30 / prediction
“More broadly, we think of Codex as what it currently is just the beginning of a software engineering teammate. So when we use a big word like teammate, some of the things we're imagining are that it's not only able to write code, but actually it participates early on in the ideation and planning phases of writing software and then further downstream in terms of validation, deploying and maintaining code.”
31 / evaluation
“I think the other really interesting thing is if we think about what is the most successful AI product to date, I would argue, it's funny actually not to confuse things at all, but the first time we used the brand Codex at OpenAI was actually the model powering GitHub Copilot.”
32 / evaluation
“We recently shipped the Sora Android app, and that was one of the most mind-blowing examples of acceleration, actually, because usage of Codex internally at OpenAI is obviously really, really high, but it's been growing over the course of the year, both in terms of now it's basically all technical staff use it, but even the intensity and know how of how to make the most of coding agents has gone up by a ton.”
33 / evaluation
“I like to joke today that AI products, and it's a half joke, they're actually really hard to use because you have to be very thoughtful about when it could help you.”