YouSaid · the spoken record

Alex Embiricos

lines on the record: 67
first: 2026-02-21
most recent: 2026-02-21
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“This is probably going to happen in much less than 10 years, but my mission sort of personally when I joined the company was I just felt like even with the models we had a year and a half ago, there was so much just capability overhang or just ability for these things to be useful, but we hadn't built the right products around that. And so people like me were getting more benefit than people like my grandma. What I'm most excited for is to get to a form factor for AI that means that they're just helping everyone regardless of whether they're in tech and especially if they're not in tech or especially if they're older. And so, you know, the concrete vision I have is like at some point we'll like add an agent to like our family WhatsApp or something and it'll just start like being useful to the family without anyone having to think harder about it than that there are many other ways that that could happen but I think concretely that's the most obvious thing we could do with like my grandma”
2026-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Codex vs Claude Code vs Cursor: Who Wins, Who Loses | Will All Coding Be Automated - Do We Need PMs | The Real Bottleneck to AGI | The Three Phases of Agents and What You Need to Know with Alex Embiricos, Head of Codex at OpenAI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we'll probably see both. We are putting a lot of effort into Agent Guardrails. Like I said, we have, we're basically the only company that cares about OS level sandboxing for coding agents. For instance, there's none that exists on Windows. We're the ones building that. And we're doing it in open source, so hopefully other people can use it. We think about that a lot. ChatGPT supports connectors so you can talk to your Google Docs or something. And we put a lot of effort into guard whales around what the agent can do with your Google Docs. Those are just two examples, but we think a lot about this. And I think probably, though, the way that we'll do it will not be sufficient. Like there'll be third parties who provide very bespoke things for very bespoke company needs, and there'll probably be a mix of both.”
2026-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Codex vs Claude Code vs Cursor: Who Wins, Who Loses | Will All Coding Be Automated - Do We Need PMs | The Real Bottleneck to AGI | The Three Phases of Agents and What You Need to Know with Alex Embiricos, Head of Codex at OpenAI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, one is just editing code by hand. I think probably another one, this is maybe spicier, but another one might even be actually managing the deployment and monitoring of systems by hand. I basically think that probably big companies will take a long time to deploy this, but many startups might actually kind of start building on a completely new stack that's fully AI managed. To be clear, the stack doesn't exist yet, but a fully managed AI stack where basically it's been built to give you really strong deterministic guardrails over what the agent can do and control over to whirlback deploys and everything like that. And so we'll get to a world where the way you start a company is you start by getting an agent and just asking it to build things. And then you get more agents in that. And then maybe eventually you add your co-founders to this service that you use to work with agents. And so you end up like maybe your main communication tool is actually your agent communication tool. And then maybe you're not actually hand holding this like.”
2026-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Codex vs Claude Code vs Cursor: Who Wins, Who Loses | Will All Coding Be Automated - Do We Need PMs | The Real Bottleneck to AGI | The Three Phases of Agents and What You Need to Know with Alex Embiricos, Head of Codex at OpenAI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I can tell you the most painful product decision we had to make. For a while, Codex Cloud was effectively unlimited, not free. You needed to pay for ChatGPT, but then you had unlimited usage. Every day that we left it that way, we knew that it would be harder to wind back at being unlimited. But we were just so focused on competing on our other things that had more PMF than we kind of punted that decision out. When we wound back that unlimited use to some more reasonable limit, there was a lot of blowback from users. And it was a very small minority of users who thought everything should be kind of like pseudo-free forever. But that blowback affected us everywhere because the social chatter doesn't really distinguish between these things. I think the lesson I learned the hard way there is like you can't make things unlimited for too long.”
2026-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Codex vs Claude Code vs Cursor: Who Wins, Who Loses | Will All Coding Be Automated - Do We Need PMs | The Real Bottleneck to AGI | The Three Phases of Agents and What You Need to Know with Alex Embiricos, Head of Codex at OpenAI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, there were so many different responses. The one that I heard obviously I think was right. The one that I heard was, well, one company's being pretty negative about the future and the other company us, OpenAI, is being really positive and just telling people they can build things into Dream. I thought that response was brilliant.”
2026-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Codex vs Claude Code vs Cursor: Who Wins, Who Loses | Will All Coding Be Automated - Do We Need PMs | The Real Bottleneck to AGI | The Three Phases of Agents and What You Need to Know with Alex Embiricos, Head of Codex at OpenAI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think they're building, yeah, AMP. It's out of the folks at SourceGraph. Their product has a great reputation of just being punching way above its weight. But I think the other thing that I really respect is that they helped initiate this whole standardization around agents.md and.agents slash skills, which are what I was saying earlier about making it so that it's easier for users to manage all these different agents that they're trying. We obviously put out agents.md, but they put out agent.md and basically Quinn started this all by putting out a tweet that said, hey, do you guys buy the domain agents.md, we'll standardize to your spelling. And as small as that was, that initiated this whole standardization that I think has been awesome in the community.”
2026-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Codex vs Claude Code vs Cursor: Who Wins, Who Loses | Will All Coding Be Automated - Do We Need PMs | The Real Bottleneck to AGI | The Three Phases of Agents and What You Need to Know with Alex Embiricos, Head of Codex at OpenAI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I joined OpenAI, I thought that this was a little longer than 12 months ago, but when I joined OpenAI, I thought that we would all just be hanging out with our computer screen sharing within a year from there. We'd have this agent that we're just talking to. That was completely wrong. I think the rate of progress in multimodal models was slower than I expected. Multimodal means models that work with video and audio. So instead, what happened was that we saw that agents that work with your computer through code are the way. And so for me, that's been a complete rethink in terms of like how we bring the benefits of AI to just people generally. It's not through video and audio primarily.”
2026-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Codex vs Claude Code vs Cursor: Who Wins, Who Loses | Will All Coding Be Automated - Do We Need PMs | The Real Bottleneck to AGI | The Three Phases of Agents and What You Need to Know with Alex Embiricos, Head of Codex at OpenAI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think both costs are going to come down significantly. And I also think that if this is the year of agents being deployed broadly at work, then this is also the year where they're going to have to be connected to all these various systems. And I think that's going to be very sticky. And so I view this year as a race. And so I think you want to win that race and you should be okay taking some hit to margin in the meantime.”
2026-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Codex vs Claude Code vs Cursor: Who Wins, Who Loses | Will All Coding Be Automated - Do We Need PMs | The Real Bottleneck to AGI | The Three Phases of Agents and What You Need to Know with Alex Embiricos, Head of Codex at OpenAI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At least from when I was at Dropbox, the thing we were uniquely good at was desktop software. And desktop software, it's funny. It was never not back. But anyways, it's so back. Basically because if you're solving for productivity and knowledge work, yes, there are systems of record everywhere that you need to connect with, but everything at the end of the day happens on the user's computer, either in their browser or just like locally in apps on their computer. I do think that the fastest way we're going to see productivity gains from agents at work is going to be at first meeting users on their computer, working with the stuff.”
2026-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Codex vs Claude Code vs Cursor: Who Wins, Who Loses | Will All Coding Be Automated - Do We Need PMs | The Real Bottleneck to AGI | The Three Phases of Agents and What You Need to Know with Alex Embiricos, Head of Codex at OpenAI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't need to think about that one. That's kind of the thing I was telling you about earlier, right? When you're building tooling for people, like for end users, you have to think about that tooling as a system of engagement. If people don't want to use your tool, if it doesn't naturally feel like the easiest way to get something done, then people just won't use it. Again, I learned that from watching how Slack just absolutely took off. And so I think about that a lot now when we're building these agents. I'm like, if we build our agent purely as like, you know, workflow automation, then it's always going to be like pulling teeth to get that thing started, right? You're going to need to hire Accenture or someone to come in. They're going to need to deploy FDEs. It's going to be tough. But if you can build a system that people just love using, even if they only use it for partial tasks, over time, they'll get better and better at using it. And then you'll get connected to the tools you want over time. And then you can start laddering in automation. Obviously, these aren't mutually exclusive.”
2026-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Codex vs Claude Code vs Cursor: Who Wins, Who Loses | Will All Coding Be Automated - Do We Need PMs | The Real Bottleneck to AGI | The Three Phases of Agents and What You Need to Know with Alex Embiricos, Head of Codex at OpenAI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is just me, but when someone writes to me with some interesting thoughts and a link to an interesting project, that gets my attention much more than a normal resume does.”
2026-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Codex vs Claude Code vs Cursor: Who Wins, Who Loses | Will All Coding Be Automated - Do We Need PMs | The Real Bottleneck to AGI | The Three Phases of Agents and What You Need to Know with Alex Embiricos, Head of Codex at OpenAI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Basically, there's actually never been a better time to be an engineer because you have incredible tooling available to you to get incredible amount done. And your ability to ramp into a complex code base that you might be hired into has never been faster because you can go ask AI a ton of questions about the code base and you can ask it to plan out changes that would otherwise take you like days to research maybe. I think first off, I would say like you should be like very optimistic. But then of course about your abilities once you're at the job. Then the other question is how do you get the job? Because it's never been easier to build things, the thing that becomes scarcer is like agency, taste, and like quality, I would urge you to just build things and demonstrate your agency and your taste around what you build and like build things that are of high quality and then share those things. You know, we get a lot of inbound from folks, both applying for jobs through the careers page or also on social.”
2026-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Codex vs Claude Code vs Cursor: Who Wins, Who Loses | Will All Coding Be Automated - Do We Need PMs | The Real Bottleneck to AGI | The Three Phases of Agents and What You Need to Know with Alex Embiricos, Head of Codex at OpenAI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So earlier I made my joke about PMs kind of being optional. I think that's not actually true. You still need product people. But I do think that they have to be the perfect fit. And if you have someone who's not the perfect fit, they might just do more harm than good. It's kind of means that we're way more selective than I might have been in other roles.”
2026-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Codex vs Claude Code vs Cursor: Who Wins, Who Loses | Will All Coding Be Automated - Do We Need PMs | The Real Bottleneck to AGI | The Three Phases of Agents and What You Need to Know with Alex Embiricos, Head of Codex at OpenAI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that the war for Talon is incredibly hearous right now. You know, obviously at OpenEI, we have an incredibly strong brand, and so we're able to attract a lot of talent. But even so, we put a ton of effort into closing candidates that we're really excited about. Even we feel that it's not like you don't just get whoever you want for free.”
2026-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Codex vs Claude Code vs Cursor: Who Wins, Who Loses | Will All Coding Be Automated - Do We Need PMs | The Real Bottleneck to AGI | The Three Phases of Agents and What You Need to Know with Alex Embiricos, Head of Codex at OpenAI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I tend to agree. Again, it comes back to are you going into a gnarly complicated market where customer relationships and knowledge of the market are everything? That still seems great.”
2026-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Codex vs Claude Code vs Cursor: Who Wins, Who Loses | Will All Coding Be Automated - Do We Need PMs | The Real Bottleneck to AGI | The Three Phases of Agents and What You Need to Know with Alex Embiricos, Head of Codex at OpenAI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm tempted to just say, like, I don't know. I think it's a hard time to be an investor. The market is so dynamic. It's hard to say.”
2026-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Codex vs Claude Code vs Cursor: Who Wins, Who Loses | Will All Coding Be Automated - Do We Need PMs | The Real Bottleneck to AGI | The Three Phases of Agents and What You Need to Know with Alex Embiricos, Head of Codex at OpenAI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think this maybe changes what kind of founder you invest in, right? Like, I think there was this maybe temporary phase where that I liked personally as a product builder. There was this phase where you would invest in the person who can just build good product. And you could kind of ignore if they had a good thesis around a customer or go to market or distribution or anything like that because it was so hard to build good product, right? And I think that was an anomaly. If we look at where we are now, maybe that kind of founder is not the founder you should invest in because it's kind of relatively easier to build good product. And you need to go back to like investing the founder who's like thought through distribution, who has a good domain expertise of what to build for a specific customer, et cetera.”
2026-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Codex vs Claude Code vs Cursor: Who Wins, Who Loses | Will All Coding Be Automated - Do We Need PMs | The Real Bottleneck to AGI | The Three Phases of Agents and What You Need to Know with Alex Embiricos, Head of Codex at OpenAI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like things are built for humans, otherwise, what's the point? Even SaaS tools are built for humans. So for me, I think my question is like, does this SaaS company own a relationship with a human on the other end of things? And if it does, then I suspect it's not going away. Or does the SaaS company own some really important system of record? It's probably not going away. Maybe both of those two things, the interaction with the human and the system of record are more important than ever, actually. On the other hand, is the SaaS company a kind of a glue layer, but it doesn't own either of those two things. I'm not the expert here, but I'm more nervous about that kind of company.”
2026-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Codex vs Claude Code vs Cursor: Who Wins, Who Loses | Will All Coding Be Automated - Do We Need PMs | The Real Bottleneck to AGI | The Three Phases of Agents and What You Need to Know with Alex Embiricos, Head of Codex at OpenAI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I just want to slack you. And so we saw that there was this really big pull towards things happening in Slack, even if it was less efficient. And I think we're going to see something similar at work where if there is a single agent you can use for nearly anything, there will just be this giant pull and everyone will talk about how they use that one agent for things. Teams will share best practices with each other. There'll be hackathons around how to use that best thing. Yeah, and you'll end up with just a handful of these.”
2026-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Codex vs Claude Code vs Cursor: Who Wins, Who Loses | Will All Coding Be Automated - Do We Need PMs | The Real Bottleneck to AGI | The Three Phases of Agents and What You Need to Know with Alex Embiricos, Head of Codex at OpenAI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fluency, then they will also won't pull automation into their roles. But if you have this one thing that you can talk to about anything, right? So your onboarding is just like, go talk to this thing about anything you need. Then people will develop muscle memory to go to it. It'll become the center of gravity of work and people will pull in automation. So I think that that future makes much more sense. And I think like as the people building chat GPT were like really well set up to deliver that. This is kind of a stretch, but an analogy here is I used to work at Dropbox and for a while this is before Slack was big. And for a while, we thought we wondered if people should go comment on documents in Dropbox or if they should go talk about the documents in Slack. And it was obvious that it was more optimal for people to put comments on the right timestamp in the video and Dropbox or like comment on the document in Dropbox. So it was more optimal. However, what we saw is that Slack is just such a center of gravity of people just like talking to each other. Like nobody wants to comment on the Docker.”
2026-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Codex vs Claude Code vs Cursor: Who Wins, Who Loses | Will All Coding Be Automated - Do We Need PMs | The Real Bottleneck to AGI | The Three Phases of Agents and What You Need to Know with Alex Embiricos, Head of Codex at OpenAI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so I think this might end up with fewer providers that are capturing a lot of value in the long run. And here's why. And maybe this is a bit spicy, but I think that we are kind of in this temporary phase where we have agents that are really good at coding, right? And if you look back last year, like maybe more people thought we would have agents that are good at other domains too, but that didn't happen last year. So we only have PMF for coding agents, like in the industry overall, I would say, right? And then there's some very narrow other use cases like customer support, et cetera. But I think that's probably temporary. And then over time, we're going to end up with agents that kind of can do anything for you. This is kind of what I was saying earlier. Like there's just like a super assistant. You talk to it about anything. And then there is like specific UI that you can go look at if you happen to be deep in a specific function. So in that world, I don't think you want like 12 agents at the company and you have to like go, your employees have to go figure out the right one to talk to because then they won't achieve fluency. And if they don't won't achieve...”
2026-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Codex vs Claude Code vs Cursor: Who Wins, Who Loses | Will All Coding Be Automated - Do We Need PMs | The Real Bottleneck to AGI | The Three Phases of Agents and What You Need to Know with Alex Embiricos, Head of Codex at OpenAI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably this is an annoying answer for you. It's like some Like they do tell you in my mind, they give you a good measure of intelligence. And so you can put weight on those for intelligence. And especially before evals are saturated, I think when you see meaningful progress in those benchmarks, it's like very, very helpful. And then I think you have to pair that though with like what it feels like to use the model. And that's a vibe's thing. Like whenever I talk to any, even internally or even talking to like customers of our models, I'm always surprised by how vibes-based the evaluation of how it feels to work with the model is.”
2026-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Codex vs Claude Code vs Cursor: Who Wins, Who Loses | Will All Coding Be Automated - Do We Need PMs | The Real Bottleneck to AGI | The Three Phases of Agents and What You Need to Know with Alex Embiricos, Head of Codex at OpenAI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“System or internal tool or whatever, and can do the full iterative loop, including feedback from users, without having to go through human review. And that is a really hard problem to solve, both from an intelligence perspective, but also from a safety perspective and a controls perspective.”
2026-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Codex vs Claude Code vs Cursor: Who Wins, Who Loses | Will All Coding Be Automated - Do We Need PMs | The Real Bottleneck to AGI | The Three Phases of Agents and What You Need to Know with Alex Embiricos, Head of Codex at OpenAI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you go too far ahead to workflow automation before your end user is fluent with the tooling and can get it to work simply, then there's this disconnect and you just have this pipe dream idea that's not effective except for the most power users. But once you have this base where people are using your tool every day and they're configuring it and every time they use it, it gets better, then like the step up to letting it run independently in the cloud is a much smaller step up. So I think it's time for us to get back to building out the cloud product and making it super tightly integrated with the local product. It already is somewhat integrated. And the other thing I want to do differently is start thinking more about the bottlenecks. Like CodeGen writing code has become like basically trivial now. But the hard part is like what you were talking about with like code review. How do we know the code quality is good? How do we know we're doing the right things? And those bottlenecks, I think, are underappreciated still and underinvested in. So I think we want to get to a world where you can have an agent that is unbottlenecked, that you trust to own an entire micro.”
2026-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Codex vs Claude Code vs Cursor: Who Wins, Who Loses | Will All Coding Be Automated - Do We Need PMs | The Real Bottleneck to AGI | The Three Phases of Agents and What You Need to Know with Alex Embiricos, Head of Codex at OpenAI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Being less good at communicating with you while I was working, we addressed that feedback. And that's true even compared to the other competitor model that launched like 20 minutes before us and was like, maybe this is spicy that was like soda for 20 minutes. Soda means state of the art. And then we'd always been getting a lot of feedback on like the quality of the user experience in codecs. Our most popular surface was the IDE extension and our CLI, which is a command line interface, was less polished. But with the app, the feedback has been resounding from the market that this is like a really high quality experience. It's like simple, like unintuitively simple. And people are just loving using. Even our biggest credits are converted. So yeah, and then we had the Super Bowl ad and then we went to free. And so going back to your question of like, what have I most want to do differently? I have two things for you. The first is I actually want to get back to cloud. When we pivoted our strategy from like focusing on the cloud agent last year to working interactively, the thinking was very simple. It was just, and it's kind of like what I was telling you about FDEs actually.”
2026-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Codex vs Claude Code vs Cursor: Who Wins, Who Loses | Will All Coding Be Automated - Do We Need PMs | The Real Bottleneck to AGI | The Three Phases of Agents and What You Need to Know with Alex Embiricos, Head of Codex at OpenAI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. We are very attuned to it, right? Like if you look at the history of codecs, the first thing we launched last year was like this amazing idea that people were super excited about. It's like, hey, we're going to give the agent its own computer in the cloud. You're going to have as many of them as you want work for you in parallel on tasks. Super great idea, to be honest, it didn't work as well as what we shipped later. It was not the best. And then since August with GPT-5, we started pushing really hard on interactive coding, which is where most of the competition in the market is. You know, we went out an absolute tear. I feel like the public metric we had was like since August, we grew by like 20x and then like even like late in the year we like doubled from December to now I create the exact number there but like that was competing neck and neck but the shift that we feel last week is you know we felt like we had the most intelligent model that was cemented with 5.3 codecs we had feedback around our model being slower and like maybe less fun to work with and like”
2026-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Codex vs Claude Code vs Cursor: Who Wins, Who Loses | Will All Coding Be Automated - Do We Need PMs | The Real Bottleneck to AGI | The Three Phases of Agents and What You Need to Know with Alex Embiricos, Head of Codex at OpenAI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I feel like it's been a very good few weeks for us. So we're very, I'm pretty jazzed about everything that's happening. Feeling that I have the most. Yeah.”
2026-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Codex vs Claude Code vs Cursor: Who Wins, Who Loses | Will All Coding Be Automated - Do We Need PMs | The Real Bottleneck to AGI | The Three Phases of Agents and What You Need to Know with Alex Embiricos, Head of Codex at OpenAI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I would say that right now it doesn't feel like we're competing super directly, but I don't know if you saw our Super Bowl ad, the tagline of which is just you can just build things with the app, we noticed that many people who are less technical are starting to build things. And so the kinds of things they're building are much more.”
2026-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Codex vs Claude Code vs Cursor: Who Wins, Who Loses | Will All Coding Be Automated - Do We Need PMs | The Real Bottleneck to AGI | The Three Phases of Agents and What You Need to Know with Alex Embiricos, Head of Codex at OpenAI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I think the way that we think about these things is just like how do we move as quickly as possible? And so becoming able to set these things up in-house is very expensive in time and where a small team. So what I have observed so far is that if we need to run a data campaign at scale, we're usually going to enlist help from one of these companies.”
2026-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Codex vs Claude Code vs Cursor: Who Wins, Who Loses | Will All Coding Be Automated - Do We Need PMs | The Real Bottleneck to AGI | The Three Phases of Agents and What You Need to Know with Alex Embiricos, Head of Codex at OpenAI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that from what we've seen, and I would defer to my research team on this, but I feel like we feel like we have plenty enough data to build really good coding models. I actually think the place that's more interesting for getting data now is as we get into knowledge work tasks, that's kind of data that's not really available most places on the internet. And so you start to have really interesting brainstorms for how to help a model be good at it. Maybe you have to pay people to simulate doing tasks so that you can learn these trajectories for the model. Maybe you should acquire startups that are no longer in business but have a lot of data, like say their Slack or something. Yeah, I think that kind of knowledge work task distribution is much harder than coding.”
2026-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Codex vs Claude Code vs Cursor: Who Wins, Who Loses | Will All Coding Be Automated - Do We Need PMs | The Real Bottleneck to AGI | The Three Phases of Agents and What You Need to Know with Alex Embiricos, Head of Codex at OpenAI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's interesting. You know, to be honest, I'm not sure what that's going to look like. My quickest answer to this is that we've noticed as we build codecs that the best interfaces for codecs to do work are also tend to be the best interfaces for humans. So when people ask, oh, like, how can I make my code base more efficient for the agent to work with? The answer is often like, well, have you looked at it yourself and is it easy for a human to work with? So like a very specific example would be like running tests in the code base. Naively, if you just like set up most test runners, they just like emit all the outputs of all the tests. And so like as a human, it's really annoying because you have to go in and like find the one that failed. And it's like you've got to read hundreds or thousands of lines. Turns out that's terrible for AI as well. But if you filter it down to just only omit the failed test, better for humans, also better for agents. So probably the agent-to-agent interaction points will be very similar to like if there was a human in the loop. And that's nice because it means you can kind of atomically replace individuals.”
2026-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Codex vs Claude Code vs Cursor: Who Wins, Who Loses | Will All Coding Be Automated - Do We Need PMs | The Real Bottleneck to AGI | The Three Phases of Agents and What You Need to Know with Alex Embiricos, Head of Codex at OpenAI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By having to talk to another person. It'd be like if you had an executive assistant, but you could only work by talking to them. That's super annoying, right? So at some point, you want to get to the show notes and look at them yourself and edit them yourself. You want to edit the thing yourself. So I think we'll pair chat with functional graphical interfaces that are bespoke to what someone needs. So in my case, I will probably chat to do my podcast prep. But when it comes to actually looking at product and code, I probably want the Codex app that I can go into and get deep in. Whereas maybe if we're talking to a marketer, maybe that marketer will like chat to ask questions about the product. They're not going to download the codec just to ask questions about the product. But maybe they'll have a super custom GUI for ad analytics or something that they go into.”
2026-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Codex vs Claude Code vs Cursor: Who Wins, Who Loses | Will All Coding Be Automated - Do We Need PMs | The Real Bottleneck to AGI | The Three Phases of Agents and What You Need to Know with Alex Embiricos, Head of Codex at OpenAI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The simple answer is yes, but actually, I think there's two components here. If we just imagine the future, let's think of some sci-fi movie. What does AI look like? I believe that sci-fi is a really good predictor of what the future should look like, and usually it's pretty simple because it's a story, and I think simple is usually right. It's going to be some just like entity that I can talk to however I want about whatever I want, right? I shouldn't have to navigate to a place where I work with my coding AI and then I have this different place for my sales AI and I have to be like, hey, I'm now talking to sales thing and like do that. It's just like I'm just going to talk to a thing and it's just going to help. So I think what we're going to have is that we'll have chat or voice basically conversational interface will be sort of the pillar of everything that you can talk to about anything and that you can add into any group chat or whatever so it can like discover how to help you. But then if you're like a power user and you're very good at a specific thing, you probably don't want to be disinterred.”
2026-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Codex vs Claude Code vs Cursor: Who Wins, Who Loses | Will All Coding Be Automated - Do We Need PMs | The Real Bottleneck to AGI | The Three Phases of Agents and What You Need to Know with Alex Embiricos, Head of Codex at OpenAI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think Daily Active will be better soon. We just happen to use weekly active. It's like a standard here. And I think as we were getting started, it made sense. But I actually agree with the criticism there. It's like, we should probably just be a daily. I think we need to be getting to a world where for any given task that you have, your first instinct is to ask an agent to help. It's kind of like how with Google search, it's just like, okay, anything I need to do, I just go into this text box and I can get navigated to the right location. Then you had ChatGPT. It's like for any information I need, I can go into this text box, type it out, and get information that helps me. And I think the next phase that we'll see this year is like for any task I need to do as opposed to just get information. I go to this text box or this input and something happens that helps me. Even if it's not the full task, even if it's only a small part of it.”
2026-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Codex vs Claude Code vs Cursor: Who Wins, Who Loses | Will All Coding Be Automated - Do We Need PMs | The Real Bottleneck to AGI | The Three Phases of Agents and What You Need to Know with Alex Embiricos, Head of Codex at OpenAI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Question of product execution, and then that works for say like ProSumer. When it comes to enterprise, the go to market side is really important. Something that I've learned the hard way is if we go to an enterprise and we're just like, hey, we're here, like, feel free to use the stuff. That doesn't work. There's actually quite a lot of education that needs to be done and there's a lot of configuration that we need to support and sort of like education of the broader team. So that motion looks much more like coming in, pitching, meeting the head of developer experience or whatever, understanding how they want their team to operate, and then giving them tools to like propagate that mechanism of operating to the rest of the team.”
2026-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Codex vs Claude Code vs Cursor: Who Wins, Who Loses | Will All Coding Be Automated - Do We Need PMs | The Real Bottleneck to AGI | The Three Phases of Agents and What You Need to Know with Alex Embiricos, Head of Codex at OpenAI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so I think if we're going to talk about it more from an open AI perspective, obviously this is way above my pay grade, but I would say it's compute advantage and having the best models. And in order to achieve that, we then need to build businesses that generate revenue. And also that something that's really interesting, we noticed with having the Codex team, which is a sort of combined team of research and product, is also by building these successful products, we create a lot of pressure to improve the model in sort of a faster way. That's maybe the company perspective, right? If we come to the product perspective, I think the single most important thing we can do is build a really good product that people want to use. And like I was saying earlier, I think we really want to build products for individuals and then allow people to become fluent in those products and then pull in automation. And I think that may be counterintuitive, but will result in way more impact than anyone purely approaching it from like the enterprise workflow perspective. You know, I think that's mostly.”
2026-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Codex vs Claude Code vs Cursor: Who Wins, Who Loses | Will All Coding Be Automated - Do We Need PMs | The Real Bottleneck to AGI | The Three Phases of Agents and What You Need to Know with Alex Embiricos, Head of Codex at OpenAI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think so. For example, there are a bunch of recent launches, like even today, I literally just tweeted a thing this morning about a launch from Warp. No particular affiliation, right? And there are a bunch of cool ideas in there about how they framed up the way that their agent can work in the cloud at the same time as working locally. And for me, that's like inspiring. And I think I see all these things from various companies. And like one of the coolest things about the space is it's like we're all kind of inevitably reaching the same conclusions together and then building things out. And so, you know, on the Codex team, I think we have some massive advantages, right? We have the massive distribution advantage with ChatGPT. We have the massive capability advantage of training our own models to be good in our harness and building our harness to be good at the new models and no one else has early access to those. And so I think we're playing to win and we have a really big advantage or a number of advantages, but we're also playing this long game where, again, we serve our models to everyone, where we push for open standards so that everyone can use.”
2026-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Codex vs Claude Code vs Cursor: Who Wins, Who Loses | Will All Coding Be Automated - Do We Need PMs | The Real Bottleneck to AGI | The Three Phases of Agents and What You Need to Know with Alex Embiricos, Head of Codex at OpenAI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Open AI is like a really interesting and unusual place to work. But basically because we're playing such a long game for us, if the competition gets better, we learn. It's actually helpful for us. And so we're pushing really hard at growing codecs.”
2026-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Codex vs Claude Code vs Cursor: Who Wins, Who Loses | Will All Coding Be Automated - Do We Need PMs | The Real Bottleneck to AGI | The Three Phases of Agents and What You Need to Know with Alex Embiricos, Head of Codex at OpenAI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Our job is the distribution of intelligence. And so we're obviously building out codecs. And this is really unintuitive to a lot of listeners. But we put all this effort into training these models and then we serve these models to our competitors. And from our perspective”
2026-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Codex vs Claude Code vs Cursor: Who Wins, Who Loses | Will All Coding Be Automated - Do We Need PMs | The Real Bottleneck to AGI | The Three Phases of Agents and What You Need to Know with Alex Embiricos, Head of Codex at OpenAI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, it's interesting because I think on the one hand, we think about this. Obviously, we're running a business, but our mission here is to ensure that we safely deliver the benefits of AGI to all humanity. And so something that's unintuitive to people about the Codex team.”
2026-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Codex vs Claude Code vs Cursor: Who Wins, Who Loses | Will All Coding Be Automated - Do We Need PMs | The Real Bottleneck to AGI | The Three Phases of Agents and What You Need to Know with Alex Embiricos, Head of Codex at OpenAI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Over how the agent works with these systems, I think is critically important. And that's not something that you're going to want to do multiple times. And so, you know, we've been kind of building Codecs knowing that this is coming. And so we have the most conservative sandboxing approach. Sandboxing is kind of like a set of controls, OS level controls over what the agent can do.”
2026-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Codex vs Claude Code vs Cursor: Who Wins, Who Loses | Will All Coding Be Automated - Do We Need PMs | The Real Bottleneck to AGI | The Three Phases of Agents and What You Need to Know with Alex Embiricos, Head of Codex at OpenAI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Asking an agent to write some code. They're quite hermetic. And what I mean by this is maybe an analogy in TV would be like episodic, right? Like you can come in and you've got this open-ended agents file that any agent can read from. You've got these skills that any agent can use. And you can ask the agent to write some code and it produces a patch and that patch goes into Git. So kind of like both ends of this are pretty neutral, vendor neutral. So very easy to move between for now. As agents start to do work that is not writing code, but more general work again for software engineers or beyond for any builder, they're going to need to start interfacing with other systems. So as they start, maybe your agent is talking to Sentry, right? Or it's talking to your Google Docs or something, then I think these agents become much stickier because actually deciding to connect an agent to that system is a sticky decision. And if you're an enterprise really trusting that the agent is going to have access to these tools, but there are really good secure guardrails and sandbox and like control.”
2026-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Codex vs Claude Code vs Cursor: Who Wins, Who Loses | Will All Coding Be Automated - Do We Need PMs | The Real Bottleneck to AGI | The Three Phases of Agents and What You Need to Know with Alex Embiricos, Head of Codex at OpenAI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We've taken this kind of counterintuitive approach with Codecs to just build it super openly for the Codex core harness is open source and we're always trying to make it easier for people to switch. So for instance, when we first launched Codex last year, we created, like, created as even a heavy word. We just established convention, which is called agents.md. This is basically a file that you can put instructions for the agent in. And we didn't call it Codex.md. We just wanted it to be something that all agents can use. And pretty much every agent except Claude uses agents.md, which is awesome. And then just last week, actually, we helped push for putting skills, which are a standard for giving the agent instructions and scripts. We pushed for those to be sorted in sort of a neutral named folder called agents instead of in codecs or something. And again, everyone has jumped on it except the usual suspect. I think it's really great for the developers to have a lot of choice. And we're trying to make it even easier for people to try different things. Now that said, these coding tasks where you're”
2026-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Codex vs Claude Code vs Cursor: Who Wins, Who Loses | Will All Coding Be Automated - Do We Need PMs | The Real Bottleneck to AGI | The Three Phases of Agents and What You Need to Know with Alex Embiricos, Head of Codex at OpenAI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“PR hasn't even tested them or definitely hasn't reviewed the code. I think this is a problem. And so a common practice with codecs is to have codecs review its own PR or its own change. And Codex is actually incredibly good at this. We've explicitly trained the model to be good at code review. And that included things like making sure it's really good at creating high signal feedback so it'll basically have”
2026-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Codex vs Claude Code vs Cursor: Who Wins, Who Loses | Will All Coding Be Automated - Do We Need PMs | The Real Bottleneck to AGI | The Three Phases of Agents and What You Need to Know with Alex Embiricos, Head of Codex at OpenAI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are a few things here. First off, the spec for what you want to do or the plan becomes more important than ever. Think like architecturally, like how should this code work? We recently shipped a very prominent plan mode that works a little differently than others where you have the agent go off and propose how it's going to do something. It's like quite a long plan. And then it asks you questions about if you agree on how it wants to do it or if you want to have input. And this is very similar to like if you had a new hire who was new to your code base, you know, they had to present a sort of a request for comments to the rest of the team before they started doing the work. So even though that's not formally code review, I would say review of the plan is actually something that's becoming more important because we're entering more of this like delegation phase of working with agents. So that's an underrated thing. Then, okay, there's actual code review. I think a problem that I hear a lot of people talking about, especially in the open source world, is like a lot of AI slop. Like people will just be submitting PRs to these open source repos and they're trash and like maybe the user hasn't even, the person submitting.”
2026-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Codex vs Claude Code vs Cursor: Who Wins, Who Loses | Will All Coding Be Automated - Do We Need PMs | The Real Bottleneck to AGI | The Three Phases of Agents and What You Need to Know with Alex Embiricos, Head of Codex at OpenAI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Depends how you define IEE. So the formal definition, right? Integrated development environment. I mean, that phrase is so squishy that literally anything could be an IDE, right? So I don't think that's very useful if that's the answer, then yes, you could even argue the Codex app is an IDE. I don't think it is. Like for me, I think of an IDE as like a really powerful editor. And we explicitly didn't build editing into the Codex app because we wanted it to be really clear how you're meant to use it. So it has a lot of affordances for managing multiple agents, for delegating, for reviewing changes. It has really prominent skills, which are an open standard that are really useful for doing non-coding work, stuff like triaging tasks or monitoring deployees or something, but it doesn't have text editing.”
2026-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Codex vs Claude Code vs Cursor: Who Wins, Who Loses | Will All Coding Be Automated - Do We Need PMs | The Real Bottleneck to AGI | The Three Phases of Agents and What You Need to Know with Alex Embiricos, Head of Codex at OpenAI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm just going to fully delegate this task. It's like I'm going to do a plan with it, make sure we like the spec that it's going to do. And then I'm just going to go let it cook. And this is quite a different way of working. So it's like it's changing literally as we speak. And so part of why we built this Codex app that we released last week is because we wanted to build a form factor or user experience where it felt like very ergonomic to be delegating instead of pairing with an agent. And so like delegating to multiple agents at once. And so even at OpenAI, this is changing massively. I don't have a percentage stat for you, but I would say like the vast majority of code is written by AI. And I would say that now probably most people are not even opening IDEs. Maybe if they are opening IDEs to like, maybe you want to own the interface, right? So you'll help flesh out the interface between two modules and then AI fills it out. Or maybe you want to like collaborate on a plan, but then have AI fill it out. The code itself is not being written by humans anymore.”
2026-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Codex vs Claude Code vs Cursor: Who Wins, Who Loses | Will All Coding Be Automated - Do We Need PMs | The Real Bottleneck to AGI | The Three Phases of Agents and What You Need to Know with Alex Embiricos, Head of Codex at OpenAI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I'll speak for myself and then for the team. I would say most people that I know are basically not opening editors anymore. And this was a step function change that happened in, it's been happening gradually, but I'd say the key external market touchpoint for this was like GPT 5.2 codex, where all of a sudden the model was way better at running for longer handling tasks end-to-end, managing its context and following instructions. And so we kind of saw this inflection point. And that's actually part of why we built the app. So I think before GPD 5.2 codecs, the kinds of AI features we were using to write code were like tab completion or maybe you were pair programming with the model. And in my mind, you still needed to be at your laptop with your hands on the keyboard-ish. And like, it might go off and do a little bit of work, but you kind of still need to be there and drive. It's just like candling these small things for you. And then at the time of GPT 5.2 codecs in December, we kind of switched to actual.”
2026-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Codex vs Claude Code vs Cursor: Who Wins, Who Loses | Will All Coding Be Automated - Do We Need PMs | The Real Bottleneck to AGI | The Three Phases of Agents and What You Need to Know with Alex Embiricos, Head of Codex at OpenAI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know, I think I struggle with that. I think fundamentally in this new world where anyone can build, and it is increasingly easy to build things, what is hard, right? I think having a good relationship with a customer, knowing what they need is as hard as ever, maybe even harder as it's just like there's just more stuff in the market to choose from. The other things that are hard are like building the right thing, having a really high quality thing. But going back to the sales and marketing thing, I don't think that goes away because I think that's, as I said, I think that's just gotten harder as the markets, any given market gets more competitive with more software out there.”
2026-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Codex vs Claude Code vs Cursor: Who Wins, Who Loses | Will All Coding Be Automated - Do We Need PMs | The Real Bottleneck to AGI | The Three Phases of Agents and What You Need to Know with Alex Embiricos, Head of Codex at OpenAI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is just my opinion, but I don't think we're gonna end up in this kind of monopolistic world. I think there's so much competitive pressure that there'll be multiple answers to this. But I will say that we have news coming out of our partnership soon, and I'm very excited for these kinds of things to ship. It's going to be awesome. But even so, with GPT 5.3 codecs, that model is significantly more efficient than prior models. And so in the feedback we've heard is that people actually feel like now this is like a very competitively fast model than before. So there's a lot of things you can do just in terms of the model. There are also things you can do like improving how you do inference. So we recently rolled out a change where in the API those models are served like 40% faster and in codecs they're served 25% faster. So I think speed matters a lot and we're kind of approaching it from all angles, like both the hardware, how you do inference, and the model level.”
2026-02-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Codex vs Claude Code vs Cursor: Who Wins, Who Loses | Will All Coding Be Automated - Do We Need PMs | The Real Bottleneck to AGI | The Three Phases of Agents and What You Need to Know with Alex Embiricos, Head of Codex at OpenAI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source