YouSaid · the spoken record

Alexander Embiricos

lines on the record: 106
first: 2025-12-14
most recent: 2025-12-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I'm one of those people who has social media only for the purposes of having work. My phone turns black and white at like 9 p.m. at night. But yeah, so Twitter or X at NBRICO. And yeah, if you post an R slash codec, I'll probably see it. So you can go there. How can listeners be useful? I would say please try codecs. Please share feedback. Let us know what to improve. We pay a ton of attention to feedback. I think it's like honestly like 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 on those social media places.”
2025-12-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Why humans are AI’s biggest bottleneck (and what’s coming in 2026) | Alexander Embiricos (OpenAI Codex Product Lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But yeah, he loved this island that the family sort of like initiated from. I believe, I don't actually know where that shipping my mate lived. I think it was New York or something. But we all came from this island called Andros, which is a really beautiful place. And it's like there's more like livestock there. Not too many tourists go there. But I think he, like part of what I think is really cool is like he published a lot and a lot of his writing is about the beauty of that island, which I think is super cool.”
2025-12-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Why humans are AI’s biggest bottleneck (and what’s coming in 2026) | Alexander Embiricos (OpenAI Codex Product Lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, it's an enormous family, but it's like Greek. So, you know, these big families, everyone's your uncle. You know what I mean? Like my mother's Malaysian and also like everyone is my uncle or aunt in Malaysia too, if that makes sense.”
2025-12-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Why humans are AI’s biggest bottleneck (and what’s coming in 2026) | Alexander Embiricos (OpenAI Codex Product Lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and we had to put them together because we as founders realized that we often would be nice. And it wasn't actually the right thing to do. We would like to lay the difficult conversations and we were not candid. And so every time we would like remind ourselves of this motto and then we would become more candid. And then six months later, we would realize that we were in fact not candid six months ago. And we needed to be even more candid. So then the question is like, okay, like how should we be candid? It's like, okay, well, let's think of being candid as an act of kindness, but also think of that, both in terms of doing it and willing ourselves to do it, but also in terms of how we frame it's people.”
2025-12-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Why humans are AI’s biggest bottleneck (and what’s coming in 2026) | Alexander Embiricos (OpenAI Codex Product Lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know if I have a life model, but maybe I can tell you about the number one value, company value from my startup. Which is still something that sticks with me, which is to be kind and cand”
2025-12-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Why humans are AI’s biggest bottleneck (and what’s coming in 2026) | Alexander Embiricos (OpenAI Codex Product Lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All these different ways that you can adjust what it's doing without turning off the soft driving. So, like you can accelerate, you know, it'll like listen to that. You can turn a knob to change its speed. You can steer slightly. I think it's actually a masterclass in building an agent that still leaves the human in control.”
2025-12-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Why humans are AI’s biggest bottleneck (and what’s coming in 2026) | Alexander Embiricos (OpenAI Codex Product Lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I have been quite into combustion engines and cars. Actually, the reason I came to America initially was because I wanted to work on like US aircraft. But now I work in software. And so for the longest time, I've basically only had like quite old sports cars, old just because they were more affordable. And then recently we got a Tesla instead. And I have to say that I find the Tesla software like quite inspiring. In particular, it has the self-driving feature. And I've mentioned a few times today, like I think it's really interesting to think about how to build mixed initiative software that makes you feel maximally empowered as a human, maximally in control, but yet you're getting a lot of help. And I think they did a really good job with enabling sort of the car to drive itself.”
2025-12-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Why humans are AI’s biggest bottleneck (and what’s coming in 2026) | Alexander Embiricos (OpenAI Codex Product Lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's an anime called Jiu Jitsu Kaisen, which I really like. Again, it's got a kind of a slightly dark topic of like demons. But what I love about it is that the hero is really nice. And I think there's this new wave of anime cartoons where the protagonists are really friendly and like people who care about the world rather than being sort of like if you look at like some older anime like that started the genre like you know those like evangelian or akita and like those characters, the protagonists are like deeply flawed, like quite unhappy They didn't start the genre, but it was like a trend for a while to sort of poke fun at the idea that in these in these cartoons the protagonist was very young but being given a ridiculous amount of responsibility to like save the world and so there was kind of a wave of like content that was like critiquing this by making the character like basically go through like serious like mental issues in the middle of the show and I'm not saying this is better but at least it's quite fun to have like these like really”
2025-12-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Why humans are AI’s biggest bottleneck (and what’s coming in 2026) | Alexander Embiricos (OpenAI Codex Product Lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have been reading a lot of science fiction recently, and I'm sure this has been recommended before, but the culture. I think it's Ian Banks is the name of the author. Part of why I love it is because it's like basically relatively recent writing about a future with AI, but it's an optimistic feature with AI. And I think a lot of sci-fi is like fairly dystopian. But this is like people, sort of the joke, at least on the culture subreddit, is that let me see if I can get this right. It is a like space communist utopia or like I think it's a gay space communist utopia. And I just think it's really fun to think about to use the culture as a way to think about like what kind of world can we usher in and like what decisions can we make today to help usher in that world.”
2025-12-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Why humans are AI’s biggest bottleneck (and what’s coming in 2026) | Alexander Embiricos (OpenAI Codex Product Lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Depending on how long you have to think about it, I guess that would be the filter, right? Like, I think there's a lot of people thinking about the space. And so we're very interested in folks who sort of have already been thinking about what the future should look like with agents. And we don't have to agree on where we're going. But I think we want people who are very passionate about the topic, I guess.”
2025-12-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Why humans are AI’s biggest bottleneck (and what’s coming in 2026) | Alexander Embiricos (OpenAI Codex Product Lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So specifically, if you want to join the Codex team, then you need to be a technical person who uses these tools. And I think I would just ask yourself the question, hey, let's say I work to join OpenAI and work on Codecs over the next six months and crush it. What does the life of a software engineer look like then? And I think if you have an opinion on that, you should apply. And if you don't have an opinion on that and have to think about it first.”
2025-12-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Why humans are AI’s biggest bottleneck (and what’s coming in 2026) | Alexander Embiricos (OpenAI Codex Product Lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, yeah, another, maybe an easier version. We can edit all that out or up to you. But yeah, or I would just say you can drop us a DM, for example, I'm Enderico on Twitter and hit me up if you're interested in joining the team.”
2025-12-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Why humans are AI’s biggest bottleneck (and what’s coming in 2026) | Alexander Embiricos (OpenAI Codex Product Lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. We're working on it. So if you're an engineer or a salesperson or I am hiring for product person, please hit us up. I'm not sure the best way to give contact info, but I guess you can go to our jobs page or do they have contact for you, actually? Do listeners have contact for you?”
2025-12-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Why humans are AI’s biggest bottleneck (and what’s coming in 2026) | Alexander Embiricos (OpenAI Codex Product Lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Building in new pieces, like some new app or something, it'll be possible for you to set it up on a stack where agents are much more self-sufficient than not, right? But now let's say, I don't know, you mentioned SAP, right? Let's say you work in SAP. Like they have many complex systems and they're not going to be able to just like get the agent to be self-sufficient overnight in those systems. So they're going to have to slowly maybe replace systems or update systems to allow the agent to handle more of the work end to end. And so basically my sort of long answer to your question, maybe boring answer, is that I think starting next year, we're going to see early adopters, like starting for like hockey sticker productivity. And then over the years that follow, we're going to see larger and larger companies like Hockey Stick.productivity. And then somewhere in that fuzzy middle is like when that hockey sticking will be flowing back into the AI labs. And that's when we'll basically be at the AGI.”
2025-12-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Why humans are AI’s biggest bottleneck (and what’s coming in 2026) | Alexander Embiricos (OpenAI Codex Product Lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And like, you know, you were talking about it's like you can have an agent watch all the work you're doing, but if you don't have the agent also validating its work, then you're still bottlenecked on like, can you go review all that code? Right. So my view is that we need to unblock those productivity loops from like humans having to prompt and humans having to manually validate all the work. And so if we can rebuild systems to let the agent be default useful, we'll start unlocking hockey sticks. Unfortunately, I don't think that's going to be binary. I think it's going to be very dependent on what you're building, right? So, I would imagine that next year, if you're a startup,”
2025-12-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Why humans are AI’s biggest bottleneck (and what’s coming in 2026) | Alexander Embiricos (OpenAI Codex Product Lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Me, I think that it's a little bit about when do we see the acceleration curves kind of go like this, or I don't know which way I'm mirrored here, right? When do we see the hockey stick? And I think that the current limiting factor, I mean, there's many, but I think a current underappreciated limiting factor is like literally human typing speed or human multitasking speed on like writing prompts”
2025-12-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Why humans are AI’s biggest bottleneck (and what’s coming in 2026) | Alexander Embiricos (OpenAI Codex Product Lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. And there's a lot of systems underlying in the training run. And so a system could go down, or there could be an error somewhere that gets introduced. And so we might need to like. Fix it or pause things, or I don't know, there's lots of actions we might need to take. And so basically having codecs run on a loop to evaluate how those charts are moving over time, sort of this idea that we have to how to enable us to train way more efficiently.”
2025-12-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Why humans are AI’s biggest bottleneck (and what’s coming in 2026) | Alexander Embiricos (OpenAI Codex Product Lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is an early idea that we're like figuring out, but the basic idea is that during a training run, there's like a bunch of graphs that today humans are looking at. And it's really important to look at those. We call this babysitting.”
2025-12-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Why humans are AI’s biggest bottleneck (and what’s coming in 2026) | Alexander Embiricos (OpenAI Codex Product Lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Codex writes a lot of the code that helps manage its training runs, the key infrastructure, we move pretty fast. And so we have a codex code review is like catching a lot of mistakes to actually cause some pretty interesting configuration mistakes. And we're starting to see glimpses of the future where we're actually starting to have codecs even be on call for its own training, which is pretty interesting. So there's lots there.”
2025-12-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Why humans are AI’s biggest bottleneck (and what’s coming in 2026) | Alexander Embiricos (OpenAI Codex Product Lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Still, I think that's deeply interesting to go down partially because that knowledge is still going to be like. 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 workflows.”
2025-12-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Why humans are AI’s biggest bottleneck (and what’s coming in 2026) | Alexander Embiricos (OpenAI Codex Product Lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. And so you still at various phases are going to want a human in the loop to help configure the coding agent to be effective. And so I think you still want to be able to reason about that. So maybe it's like less important that you can type really fast and like you understand exactly how to write, not that anyone writes for each loop or something, right? But it is, or you don't need to know how to implement like a specific algorithm. But I think you need to be able to reason about the different systems and what makes effective a software engineering team effective. So I think that's the other really important thing. And then maybe the last angle that you could take is. I think if you're on the frontier of knowledge for a given thing,”
2025-12-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Why humans are AI’s biggest bottleneck (and what’s coming in 2026) | Alexander Embiricos (OpenAI Codex Product Lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Systems without your help. I think it's going to look much more gradual where it's like, Okay, we have these AI coding agents. They're able to validate their work. It's still important. And for example, I'm thinking of an engineer who was working on Atlas since we were talking about it. He set up codecs that it can verify its own work, which is a little bit non-trivial.”
2025-12-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Why humans are AI’s biggest bottleneck (and what’s coming in 2026) | Alexander Embiricos (OpenAI Codex Product Lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How productive are they using the latest tools? They should be like super productive. And if you think of it in that way, they actually have less of a handicap than before versus a more senior career person because the divide is actually getting smaller because they've got these amazing coding agents now. So that's one thing, which is, I guess, the thing, the advice is just like, learn about whatever you want, but just make sure you spend time doing things, not just like fulfilling homework assignments, I guess. 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 system is engineering skills or even really effective like communication and collaboration with your team. Skills like that, I think, are important and are going to continue to matter for quite some time. I don't think it's going to be like all of a sudden the AI coding agents are just able to build like”
2025-12-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Why humans are AI’s biggest bottleneck (and what’s coming in 2026) | Alexander Embiricos (OpenAI Codex Product Lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think there's like a couple angles you could go at this from. I think the Well, the easiest one to think of it, at least, is just like be a doer of things. I think that with coding agents getting better and better over time, it's just what you can do as even like someone in college or a new grad is just like so much more than what that was before. And so I think you just want to be taking advantage of that. And definitely what I'm looking at hiring folks who are earlier career, it's like definitely something that I think about is how.”
2025-12-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Why humans are AI’s biggest bottleneck (and what’s coming in 2026) | Alexander Embiricos (OpenAI Codex Product Lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Might say try a few things in parallel. So you could try giving it a hard task, maybe ask it to understand the code base, formulate a plan with it around an idea that you have and kind of build your way up from there. And like sort of the meta idea here is it's, again, it's like you're building trust with the new teammate. And so you wouldn't go to a new teammate and just give them like, hey, do this thing. Here's zero context. You would start by first making sure they understand the code base and then you would like maybe align on an approach and then you would have them go off and do bit by bit. Right. And I think if you use codecs in that way, you'll just sort of naturally start to understand like the different ways of prompting it because it is a super powerful agent and model. But it is a little bit different to prompt codecs than other models.”
2025-12-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Why humans are AI’s biggest bottleneck (and what’s coming in 2026) | Alexander Embiricos (OpenAI Codex Product Lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Basically, the way we've trained Codex is like there's a distribution of languages that we support, and it's fairly aligned with the frequency of these languages in the world. So unless you're writing some very esoteric language or some private language, it should do fine in your language.”
2025-12-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Why humans are AI’s biggest bottleneck (and what’s coming in 2026) | Alexander Embiricos (OpenAI Codex Product Lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I will say, like, you know, if you're like, hey, okay, well, the hardest problem I have is that I need to build a new unicorn business, like obviously that, you know. Not yet. So I think it's like give it the hardest problem, but something that is still one question, right? Or one task to start. That's if you're testing. And then over time, you can learn how to use it for bigger things.”
2025-12-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Why humans are AI’s biggest bottleneck (and what’s coming in 2026) | Alexander Embiricos (OpenAI Codex Product Lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm really glad you asked this question actually because the best way to try codecs is to give it your hardest tasks, which is a little different than some of the other coding agents. Like some tools you might think, okay, let me like start easy or just like vibe code something random and decide if I like the tool. Whereas we're really building codecs to be the professional tool that you can give your hardest problems to. And that writes like high quality code in your enormous code base that is in fact not perfect right now. So yeah, I think if you're going to try codecs, you want to try it on like a real task that you have and not necessarily like dumb that task down to something that's like trivial, but actually like, you know, like a good one would be like you have a hard bug and you don't know what's causing that bug and you ask codecs to like help figure that out or like implement that, you know, the fix.”
2025-12-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Why humans are AI’s biggest bottleneck (and what’s coming in 2026) | Alexander Embiricos (OpenAI Codex Product Lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, there's a load of unexpected ways, but I think most of what we're seeing real traction with people using things are still for now very like. Would say coding adjacent or like sort of tech oriented places where there's a mature ecosystem or maybe you're doing data analysis or something like that. I personally am expecting that we're going to see a lot more of that over time. But for now, we're keeping the team very focused on just coding for now because there's so much more work to do”
2025-12-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Why humans are AI’s biggest bottleneck (and what’s coming in 2026) | Alexander Embiricos (OpenAI Codex Product Lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At that point in time, in AI could maybe go take a look and then surface the fact that it has an opinion on why this metric went down and maybe a fix right there, right when I'm looking at the dashboard. That would much more keep me in flow and enable the agents to take action on many more things. So in my mind, part of why I'm excited for us to have a browser is that I think we have then much more context around what we should help with. Users have much more control over what they want us to look at. It's like, hey, if you want to open, if you want us to like take action on something, you can open it in your AI browser. If you don't, then you can open it in your other browser. So really clear control and boundaries. And then we have the ability to build UX that's like mixed initiatives so that we can surface contextual actions to you at the time that they're helpful as opposed to just like randomly notifying you.”
2025-12-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Why humans are AI’s biggest bottleneck (and what’s coming in 2026) | Alexander Embiricos (OpenAI Codex Product Lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To do, we'd have a little bit of context, and then we can help. And I think this is critically important because imagine this world that we reach, right? We have agents that are helping you thousands of times per day. Imagine if the only way we could tell you that we helped you was if we could push notify you. So, you get a thousand push notifications a day of an AI saying, like, hey, I did this thing, do you like it? It'd be super annoying, right? Whereas imagine going back to software engineering, like I was looking at a dashboard and I noticed some like key metric had like gone down.”
2025-12-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Why humans are AI’s biggest bottleneck (and what’s coming in 2026) | Alexander Embiricos (OpenAI Codex Product Lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lot of work is done in the web. And if we can build a browser, then we could be contextual for you. But in a much more first class way, we weren't hacking like other desktop software which have very varied support for what content they're rendering to the accessibility tree. We wouldn't be relying on screenshots, which are a little bit slower and unreliable. Instead, we could be in the rendering engine, right, and extract whatever we needed to to help you. And also, I like to think of like, you know, video games like, I don't know if you've played like, I don't know, say Halo, right? Like you walk up to an object. I mean, this is true for many games. You press, man, it's been a long time. This is embarrassing. Press X and it just does the right thing, right? And I was one of those guys who always read the instruction manual for every video game that I bought. And I remember the first time I read about a contextual action and I just thought it was like this really cool idea. And the thing about a contextual action is we need to know what you are attempting.”
2025-12-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Why humans are AI’s biggest bottleneck (and what’s coming in 2026) | Alexander Embiricos (OpenAI Codex Product Lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I worked on Atlas for a bit. I don't work on it now. But a bit of the narrative here for me to tell my sort of bit was like I was working on this screen sharing, like pair programming startup, right? And then we joined OpenAI. And so the idea was really to build a contextual desktop assistant. And the reason I believe that's so important is because I think that it's really annoying to have to give all your context to an assistant and then to figure out how it can help you, right? And so if it could just like understand what you are trying to do, then it could maximally accelerate you. And so I still think of codecs actually as like a contextual assistant from a little bit of a different angle, like starting with coding tasks. But some of the thinking, at least for me personally, I can't speak for the whole product, but was that”
2025-12-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Why humans are AI’s biggest bottleneck (and what’s coming in 2026) | Alexander Embiricos (OpenAI Codex Product Lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, the interesting thing with Twitter is it's a little bit more one to one, even if it's like in public. Whereas with Reddit, there's a really good upvoting mechanics and maybe most people are still not bots unclear. So you get good signal on what matters and what other people think.”
2025-12-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Why humans are AI’s biggest bottleneck (and what’s coming in 2026) | Alexander Embiricos (OpenAI Codex Product Lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That might be, I think we might be the most. Like user feedback slash social media pill team out there in this space is like a few of us are like constantly on Reddit and Twitter. And there's praise up there and there's a lot of complaints, but we take the complaints like very seriously and look at them. And I think that, again, because you can use coding agent for so many different things, it often is kind of broken in many sort of ways for specific behaviors. And so we actually monitor a lot just like what the vibes are on social media pretty often, especially I think for Twitter X, it's a little bit more hypey and then Reddit is a little more negative but real actually. So I've started increasingly paying attention to like how people are talking about using codecs on Reddit actually.”
2025-12-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Why humans are AI’s biggest bottleneck (and what’s coming in 2026) | Alexander Embiricos (OpenAI Codex Product Lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the things that I'm constantly reminding myself of is that a tool I codex sort of naturally is a tool that you would become a power user of, right? And so we can accidentally spend a lot of our time thinking about features that are like very deep in the user adoption journey. And so we can kind of end up oversolving for that. And so I think it's like just critically important to go look at like your like D7 retention, right? Just go try the product, like sign up from scratch again. I have a few too many like ChatGPT pro accounts that I've just like in order to maximally correctly dog food signed up for on my Gmail and they charge me like 200 bucks a month. I need to expense those. But I think just like the feeling of being a user and the early retention stats are still like super important for us because as much as this category is taking off, I think we're still in the very early days of like people using them. Another thing that we do.”
2025-12-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Why humans are AI’s biggest bottleneck (and what’s coming in 2026) | Alexander Embiricos (OpenAI Codex Product Lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But now I think we're getting to this point where actually if I could only choose one thing to understand, it would be really meaningful understanding of the problems that a certain customer has. If I could only go in with one core competency. So I think that that's ultimately still what's going to matter most, right? Like if you're starting a new company today and you have like a really good understanding and like network of customers that are currently underserved by AI tools, I think you're at like your set. Whereas if you're like good at building like, you know, websites, but you don't have any specific customer to build for, I think you're in for a much harder time.”
2025-12-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Why humans are AI’s biggest bottleneck (and what’s coming in 2026) | Alexander Embiricos (OpenAI Codex Product Lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we might have been in this weird temporary phase where for a while like you could you could just 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.”
2025-12-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Why humans are AI’s biggest bottleneck (and what’s coming in 2026) | Alexander Embiricos (OpenAI Codex Product Lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm curious what you think. I still don't think ideas are worth as much as maybe a lot of people think. I think still think execution is really hard, right? Like you can build something fast, but you still need to execute well on it. Still needs to make sense and be a coherent thing overall. And distribution is massive.”
2025-12-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Why humans are AI’s biggest bottleneck (and what’s coming in 2026) | Alexander Embiricos (OpenAI Codex Product Lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the case of Atlas, like, by the way, I don't know if they've done any of this or not. I think they've done a lot of this. But maybe the next stage is enable it to load a few sample pages to see how well those work. So then, okay, now we're going to set up to do that. And I think for some time at least, we're going to have humans kind of curating which of these connectors or systems or components that the agent needs to be good at talking to. And then in the future, there'll be an even greater unlock where Codex tells you how to set it up or maybe sets itself up in a repo.”
2025-12-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Why humans are AI’s biggest bottleneck (and what’s coming in 2026) | Alexander Embiricos (OpenAI Codex Product Lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do think this is going to be gradual. I don't think it's going to go to all of a sudden nobody ever writes anything and like, you know, any code and it's just specs. It's going to be much more like, okay, we've set up our coding agent to be really good at previewing the build or like at running tests. Maybe that's the first part, right, that most people have set up. It's like, okay, now we've set it up so they can execute the bill.”
2025-12-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Why humans are AI’s biggest bottleneck (and what’s coming in 2026) | Alexander Embiricos (OpenAI Codex Product Lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think we will very much get to the point where, well, basically, where the boundaries are a little bit blurred. I think you're going to want someone who's understands the details of what they're building, but what details those are will evolve. Kind of like how now if you're writing Swift, you don't have to speak assembly. There's a handful of people in the world, and it's really important that they exist and speak assembly, maybe more than a handful, right? But that's like a specialized function that most companies don't need to have. So I think we're just going to naturally see an increase in layers of abstraction. And then the cool thing is now we're entering like the language layer of abstraction, like natural language. And then natural language itself is really flexible. You can have engineers talking about a plan and then you could have engineers talking about a spec and then you could have engineers talking about just a product or an idea. So I think we can also start moving up those layers of abstraction as well.”
2025-12-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Why humans are AI’s biggest bottleneck (and what’s coming in 2026) | Alexander Embiricos (OpenAI Codex Product Lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, no, no. So Atlas, not the whole week. Atlas was like. Really meany project. And so I was talking to one of the engineers on Atlas about just how they use Codecs for. And it's basically like we use Codex for absolutely everything. I was like, okay, how would you measure the acceleration? And so basically the answer got back was. Previously would have taken two to three weeks for two to three engineers, and now it's like one engineer one week.”
2025-12-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Why humans are AI’s biggest bottleneck (and what’s coming in 2026) | Alexander Embiricos (OpenAI Codex Product Lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So massive acceleration there as well. And what's quite cool is that we shipped Atlas on Mac first, but now we're working on the Windows version. So the team now is ramping up on Windows and they're helping us make codecs better on Windows too, which is admittedly earlier, like just the model we shipped last week is the first model that natively understands PowerShell. So, you know, PowerShell being the native shell language on Windows. So yeah, it's been really awesome to see the whole company getting accelerated by Codex. And most obviously also research and improving how quickly we train models and how well we do it. And then even design as we talked about and marketing. Like actually we're at this point now where my product marketer is often also making string changes just directly from Slack or like updating docs directly from Slack.”
2025-12-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Why humans are AI’s biggest bottleneck (and what’s coming in 2026) | Alexander Embiricos (OpenAI Codex Product Lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so that's a really fun example of acceleration. And then Atlas is the other one that I think Ben did a podcast on Atlas, sharing a little bit about how we built there. Atlas is actually, I mean, it's a browser, right? And building a browser is really hard. And so we had to build a lot of difficult systems in order to do that. And basically we got to the point where that team has a ton of power users of codecs right now. And got to the point where they basically were talking to them about it because a lot of those engineers are people I used to work with before my startup. And so they'd say, you know, before this would have taken us like two to three weeks for two to three engineers. And now it's like one engineer one week.”
2025-12-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Why humans are AI’s biggest bottleneck (and what’s coming in 2026) | Alexander Embiricos (OpenAI Codex Product Lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So imagine what happened on the app store with a handful of engineers I think it was like. Or three, possibly, in a handful of weeks. Yeah.”
2025-12-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Why humans are AI’s biggest bottleneck (and what’s coming in 2026) | Alexander Embiricos (OpenAI Codex Product Lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pretty insane velocity. I would say it was like a little bit, I don't want to say easy mode, but there is one thing that Codex is really good at if you're a company that's like building software on multiple platforms. So you've already figured out some of the underlying APIs or systems. Asking Codecs to port things over is really effective because it has something you can go look at. And so the engineers on that team were basically having codecs go look at the iOS app, produce plans of work that needed to be done and then go implement those. And I was kind of looking at iOS and Android at the same time. And so, you know, basically it was like two weeks to launch employees, four weeks total. Insanely fast.”
2025-12-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Why humans are AI’s biggest bottleneck (and what’s coming in 2026) | Alexander Embiricos (OpenAI Codex Product Lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Course of the year, both in terms of like now it's basically like all technical staff use it, but even like the intensity and know how of how to make the most of coding agents has gone up by a ton. And so the SORA Android app, right? Like a fully new app, we built it in 18 days. It went from like zero to launch to employees. And then 10 days later, so 28 days total, we went to just like GA to the public. And that was done just like with the help of Codecs.”
2025-12-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Why humans are AI’s biggest bottleneck (and what’s coming in 2026) | Alexander Embiricos (OpenAI Codex Product Lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So they do a ton of product work, and they actually have an entire vibe coded sort of side prototype of the Codex app. And so a lot of how we talk about things is like, we'll have a really quick jam because there's like 10,000 things going on. And then design will go think about how this should work. But instead of talking about it again, they'll just vibe code a prototype of that in their standalone prototype. We'll play with it if we like it. They'll vibe code that prototype into or vibe engineer that prototype into an actual PR to land. And then depending on their comfort with the code base, like Codex CLIs and Rust is a little harder, maybe they'll like land it themselves or they'll like get close and then an engineer can help them land the PR. You know, we recently shipped the Sora Android app. And that was one of the most sort of mind-blowing examples of acceleration, actually, because the usage of Codex internally at OpenAI has obviously really, really high, but it's been growing over the”
2025-12-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Why humans are AI’s biggest bottleneck (and what’s coming in 2026) | Alexander Embiricos (OpenAI Codex Product Lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Similarly, I've seen some pretty cool prototypes on our design team about if you want to, well, like a designer basically wanted to build an animation. And this is the coin animation codecs. And it was like normally it'd be too annoying to program this animation. So they just vibe coded a animation editor. And then they use the animation editor to build the animation, which they then checked into their repo. Actually, our designers are, there's a ton of acceleration there. And like speaking of compressing the town stack, I think our designers are very PME.”
2025-12-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Why humans are AI’s biggest bottleneck (and what’s coming in 2026) | Alexander Embiricos (OpenAI Codex Product Lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source