YouSaid · the spoken record

Andrew Ambrosino

lines on the record: 82
first: 2026-06-28
most recent: 2026-06-28
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

“And so, like, to me, I'm like, if I can come in and do my job at a different way every day, love it. But, like, that's not.”
2026-06-28 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI Codex lead on the new shape of product work | Andrew Ambrosino · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I hate repetition. This is like a me thing. This is why I'm not ever the best media person either because I just like, I hate repeating myself.”
2026-06-28 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI Codex lead on the new shape of product work | Andrew Ambrosino · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It It's also why I'm nervous to ever say, like, this is how something's going to be, because I think about my parents are open-minded people. They are into their careers, but just like. Stuff that works here is just not gonna work with everybody. There's no nice way of saying that The people who are here are self-selecting for. Like, oh, I'm somebody who just figures out the next thing to do. And that's just not most of the population will not be an early adopter of things.”
2026-06-28 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI Codex lead on the new shape of product work | Andrew Ambrosino · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know if you're married to the exact process you have right now. I don't know what advice to ever give, but if there's one piece, it's like, do not get married to your exact process. Get married to the outcomes that you are uniquely able to deliver and then do things like change your process to try things. You're like, I'm the best at understanding Figma Auto Layout.”
2026-06-28 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI Codex lead on the new shape of product work | Andrew Ambrosino · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To start I think they're all very different. And the things that make it tough for one person make it Easy for others. There's a lot, there's so much takes on this and like this triad, what's going to happen with this triad? Like designers are done or like should designers code? Are PMs cooked? Like do we not need engineers anymore because PMs are going to write all the code or designer's going to PM now and like everybody's cooked and everybody's so back and I don't know like there's some convergence there's some fluidity that is being introduced that I think is refreshing and great, especially for people with agency that want to be able to just like do the thing that needs to get done. And at the same time like we talked about there are some things that shouldn't go away but I think people should find the stuff that's worth working on and go figure out what to do on those things.”
2026-06-28 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI Codex lead on the new shape of product work | Andrew Ambrosino · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I want to ask everyone who works with me this because I feel like I'm not a motto person and then people tell me stuff I say all the time.”
2026-06-28 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI Codex lead on the new shape of product work | Andrew Ambrosino · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't have time for movies. So, what I do is watch our long Netflix things back to back. You know that thing that people do? Oh, I couldn't sit. I couldn't sit down and watch a whole movie. And I'm like, watch hour long episodes and keep, yeah. I did. There's something addicting about that week.”
2026-06-28 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI Codex lead on the new shape of product work | Andrew Ambrosino · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the magic school bus is back on Netflix. It's a new animated. It's got Kate McKinnon because Miss Frizzle is now professor frizzle and she's around, but she's not the main frizzle now. Kate McKinnon plays the main Miss Frizzle. I always liked the magic school bus.”
2026-06-28 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI Codex lead on the new shape of product work | Andrew Ambrosino · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like one guy does a boat, right? I think that's a good book. I think people need to read this when they're, especially, you know, nibbies.”
2026-06-28 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI Codex lead on the new shape of product work | Andrew Ambrosino · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so yes, actually, I am well versed in children's space. My favorite children's book ever is a very old one, and it's called The Big Orange Splots or something along those lines. Look it up. It's great. Go get it. If you hate HOAs, go get it. It's about this guy, Mr. Plumbean, who lives on a street where all the houses are the same. It's very neat street. And then one day a bird drops a large can of orange paint on his house and he says, F it, like I'm going all in. So he goes to the store, he gets paint, hammocks, alligators, and he's like totally redoes his house. And the neighbors, like, they're up in arms, right? Like, you know, HOA, property value, whatever, whatever. It's not about HOAs, but I'm very anti-HOA person. It's just really cool. And then like one by one, the neighbors go talk to him have what they refer to as lemonade, but like it's a very convincing lemonade because one by one they all start redoing their house.”
2026-06-28 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI Codex lead on the new shape of product work | Andrew Ambrosino · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, other books I'm reading right now are like. That style. I'm like, actually, the Roth Roar is not a terrible one. I feel like there's some less.”
2026-06-28 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI Codex lead on the new shape of product work | Andrew Ambrosino · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Failed for like, I don't know, somewhere between 10 and 15 years before getting to this point. So I'm still surprised every day that things are going well. And I know it.”
2026-06-28 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI Codex lead on the new shape of product work | Andrew Ambrosino · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This project to bring what we've learned with the Codex app and marry it with ChatGPT. There have been, I don't know how many microfailures on this where we're like, this is the shape it should look like and then throw that in Slack and there's like a 2,000 message thread about how stupid we are and it's like this is the thing I love about opening eye is people will just tell us that right there's there's no holding back on like when we fail with product things internally It's why the external product has been pretty great is because it goes through these cycles of”
2026-06-28 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI Codex lead on the new shape of product work | Andrew Ambrosino · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Funny to hear that description play back at me. And like, this is perhaps the first time I've not felt like I was feeling. I mean, I was the startup founder for a long time. I ended up selling the company for parts, essentially, right? And it was just, it was years. It was a slog. It was heavily regulated spaces. The whole thing felt like a constant failure. I went to this other startup and we were trying. Do some AI tools, and it's also pretty locked down regulated industry. And Dad felt like just time after time of trying things in it, not working. So to me, it's been like, oh, I've failed actually quite a lot. And, you know, sometimes it's just a point in time where things line up, like skill set, passion point in the market line up. with this you know”
2026-06-28 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI Codex lead on the new shape of product work | Andrew Ambrosino · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Interact with these tools that you're already using and say, like, we don't need to build a better video editor for you, right? But like Codex and ChatGPT can use that video editor, right? It can interact, you can hand stuff off to it, right? So how can we do that? And that's often through connectors or computer use or even extensions in this case, right? And then there is Dan Shepard's thing, which is, hey, I have these web apps that you can click around and use, but I want to be able to open these in codecs and have codecs do extra stuff with it, right? And so there's kind of like two models that are almost inverse of each other that we're doing a lot with both at the same time.”
2026-06-28 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI Codex lead on the new shape of product work | Andrew Ambrosino · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That could be installed into Premiere Pro, that it could then talk to and say, hey, Premiere Pro Extension, can you please change this marker inside of the Premiere Pro app? That was pretty nuts when we saw that happening. A great model, right? There are these like specialty tools that specialize in things. And so we're trying to do two things at once with Codex and with NOT, with ChatGPT. One is how can we seamlessly”
2026-06-28 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI Codex lead on the new shape of product work | Andrew Ambrosino · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whatever you need to do. There's a great story about we had some videos that we shot in this room for the original launch of the Codex app. And our in-house DX videographer Brent then was tasked with editing all these videos, right? And he edited all the videos with codecs, which was one of the early like, whoa, what are people doing with this thing, right? In the process for why he decided to start using codecs was really interesting. He started just because he was curious if Codex could edit videos. And so Codex is not a video editor per se, right? It doesn't have any of that UI in it. But it was able to understand that he used Premiere Pro. It could do some edits by editing the files that were backing what was on screen in Permia Pro, but it couldn't do everything. So naturally what Codex then did was built itself an extension.”
2026-06-28 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI Codex lead on the new shape of product work | Andrew Ambrosino · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think what we see here is that it's a great home base. It's a great place to keep track of all of the things that you have to do across different surfaces and some of those things. You do all of it in the app. Some of those things, the app opens other apps to do, right? The app can connect to Excel so that, you know, yes, it has a spreadsheet editor inside the app. Is that good enough for people doing financial modeling at OpenAI for raising billions of dollars like probably not? And so the app talks directly to the add-on and Microsoft Excel on your desktop. When it's done, you can close Excel, right? And so it's not just about, hey, we're drawing a rectangle on the screen and everything needs to happen in that rectangle. It's this thing should be a home for you where you start work, you end work, you automate work into uses.”
2026-06-28 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI Codex lead on the new shape of product work | Andrew Ambrosino · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Somebody called it a super app, and wish they hadn't said that because now I have to hear about the super app all day, every day. We'll get past it. Graham.”
2026-06-28 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI Codex lead on the new shape of product work | Andrew Ambrosino · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If we can build the right extensibility primitives in the right general model, then you can do anything with us, right? And then our challenge is, well, how do you generalize it? But this is kind of going back to the best desktop app that we can build. Like, what does that look like? And so was Codex the developer tool, ChatGPT, like, where's this going? This is how we think about it.”
2026-06-28 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI Codex lead on the new shape of product work | Andrew Ambrosino · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Complex as we feel is needed, right? It doesn't mean we don't have modes, right? You might want some modes for organizing your stuff and to sort of be like legible about the ways that you enter the experience, right? But we really believe strongly that what we've built here is the right shape to take on like really deep vertically focused things, right? work deeply with our finance team with our team working on science team working on legal right and and we say like”
2026-06-28 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI Codex lead on the new shape of product work | Andrew Ambrosino · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And let's essentially take the lessons of codecs and make it more general for general knowledge work tool. And those efforts went for a little bit. And the most annoying problem happened, which is nobody would leave the Codex app for the apps that were allegedly for these other personas. And I think the lesson in all of this was just that like the whole developer tool versus general knowledge work tool, like there's a lot of nuance here that isn't just one or the other. And I think we believe really strongly in this and that there are certainly in the same way that we talk about the average of your role as like what your role is now. This is true on the product side too. People who are doing Excel work don't want to see Git repository information. We know that. But we also know. We can tell a lot from what they're doing about what kind of work they do. And we can start simple, grow the product.”
2026-06-28 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI Codex lead on the new shape of product work | Andrew Ambrosino · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What we were finding, like we were converging on some pretty clear internal PMF on engineering, right, and research workflows. They were thrilled. They were loving it. We were like, all right, we just got to get the quality bar up before we release it to the world. We're convinced that this will be a thing. But then at the company, we spun up a few other workflows to say, hey, like this codex effort is onto something with these coding agents. We have people from marketing, from comms, from finance, from legal, from basically every discipline who are using this codecs app, even though it is actively hostile to these people, right? It is like trying to show them code. It's trying to ask for approval to run RG on the, you know, it's like it's doing all of these things that are actively not the right product surface for them. So why don't we take our other surfaces and add codecs to them? Like let's add it to the chat GPD desktop app. Let's add it to the Atlas browser.”
2026-06-28 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI Codex lead on the new shape of product work | Andrew Ambrosino · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We had coax as a CLI, right? And then we decided to build this app. And, you know, we were a little uncertain about the app. But had a lot of conviction in what it could be to start a developer tool, right? And it wasn't going to be an IDE. It was going to be this right-sized surface where it was like sort of a chatbot, but it was more than that. And you could see the code, but we weren't going to let you edit the code. There's a really interesting thing that happened at OpenAI in January and February. And it was before we actually released the Codex app, which is that we'd started to dog food the codecs app.”
2026-06-28 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI Codex lead on the new shape of product work | Andrew Ambrosino · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are we trying to do key mapping to VS Code or to Chrome or to our own thing or to linear? We want to have some sort of muscle memory that carries over, but got all these things that have sub-shapes of different products out on the market. What do we do?”
2026-06-28 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI Codex lead on the new shape of product work | Andrew Ambrosino · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, log into all your websites if you're, you know, so we've been iterating on this. I think the tough thing has always been what should the shape of this browser be? Like, is this something that is only for the agent, right? That like you've got Chrome, you open Chrome, you know, do your thing in Chrome. If you ask the desktop app, it opens up this browser that it can control really quickly, doesn't have the latency of playwright, whatever. But, you know, or are we trying to say this app is for everything and like we want you to use this as a browser and those have a lot of trade-offs. It's not super, you know, well traveled path, right? Like most browsers are browsers at the top level that got browser tabs. This creates a lot of really boring but TDS problems like keyboard shortcuts, right?”
2026-06-28 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI Codex lead on the new shape of product work | Andrew Ambrosino · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's been really interesting because obviously we've had a few attempts at the browser shaped activity, right? And operator and chatuk degent mode and Atlas. And now we have the in a browser inside of the desktop app. We also have the ability to install a Chrome extension where the app connects to Chrome. Like we've had a lot of shapes with this. And I think we've learned a lot of different things. There's a lot of play. There's a lot of really boring things at play. originally launched the app. It's an Electron app. The things that you can do with in-app browsers in there, it's like kind of janky. So we have the in-app browser was for development. It was for testing your front end on development. And we were like, it's not really for anything else, guys. Like, it's a developer tool, right? And then we switched over to our OWL stack, which had powered the Atlas browser. And so now, you know, multi-tab and we've got enterprise security so that you can actually.”
2026-06-28 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI Codex lead on the new shape of product work | Andrew Ambrosino · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Constantly waiting through what's working for individual people, like what should enter the product versus stay like, no, that's just how you do your job, right? What should become a primitive? What shouldn't?”
2026-06-28 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI Codex lead on the new shape of product work | Andrew Ambrosino · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These personal workflows are really interesting because some of them really click. People are trying all sorts of stuff. Everybody's making these personal systems. You ask everybody here what they do and everything could be different. And then like certain themes arise and we're like, you know what? That should be a first class experience on the app. Like we should take this thing that everybody seems to be setting up and just make that work. And I think memory is sort of in the shape where we've had a lot of people and a lot of people at other companies too are like, well, I set up an obsidian base or a notion area and I tell it how to basically build my mind palace and how to put it's like, I don't know if everyone like you shouldn't have to do that. Like there should be a memory feature that does that for you, right? That's pretty generic. So that's, you know, that's one. But then there are other things like your process of your job and they're something that like, yeah, you should set that up. But I think this is we're constantly.”
2026-06-28 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI Codex lead on the new shape of product work | Andrew Ambrosino · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Designing the decision boundary between connectors when to use the in-up browser versus your Chrome extension that's connected versus computer use. Was interesting and all done through just like feeling it out.”
2026-06-28 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI Codex lead on the new shape of product work | Andrew Ambrosino · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and the app will say, you know, It'll set it up for you. If it doesn't have a Slack connector, it'll say I add the slide connector, yes or no. You can hit yes to that. Yeah. The least that we can do Is make it so that if you don't know how to do something in the app, they can just ask it”
2026-06-28 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI Codex lead on the new shape of product work | Andrew Ambrosino · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think in the future though, like this is been a core problem with the chatbot. Is that I know how to set this up. I have time to set this up because for me, it's product discovery to set it up. But if you're not working at OpenAI not developing this, like you don't want to have to figure out all this stuff. We need to like figure out that shape of things.”
2026-06-28 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI Codex lead on the new shape of product work | Andrew Ambrosino · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again, I think we're still in the discovery phase on a lot of this. And so right now it's like I'm making automation that says or scheduled task that says like go through my Slack channels. These are the things that I care about and think are most important. So I'm still kind of defining that. These are things to watch out for different categories. Like here's some context. And that'll get set up as a automated task. And then first few times it runs it might need some steering. And luckily with this app, you know, I don't have to find out how to edit the instructions. I can just be like, hey, next time this runs, like, can you please work? It'll update the way that it notifies me, stuff like that.”
2026-06-28 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI Codex lead on the new shape of product work | Andrew Ambrosino · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Basically, like, what has my job grown into, and how do I make this thing able to do everything I need to do? I will get up in the morning. I will see the daily brief that I have from everything from the 3,000 Slack channels that I'm in, like which things need my attention. I can kind of message back and be like, all right, give me five questions and I'll answer them and I can do that.”
2026-06-28 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI Codex lead on the new shape of product work | Andrew Ambrosino · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Deep research on all of the efforts that have gone into this area of research for the next version of this. There was a release or a series of releases in May-ish that introduced the Innet Browser. Computer use and artifact creation to the code of stuff. That was, I think, our codexes for almost everyone released. And everybody knows the term vibe coding. I think that was like our first vibe coordinated release. We're like, I had a notion doc somewhere with everything that needed to happen. And I was like automating, like going out to gather updates from pull requests from Slack channels and like updating the status tracker and like now this is pretty commonplace but at the time I felt like I was at the bleeding edge of like how to manage a product release. In short, like the way that I use Codex”
2026-06-28 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI Codex lead on the new shape of product work | Andrew Ambrosino · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we did that super quick dog fooding loop because you've got your personal dog fooding loop where you're like, oh, like I can't do this thing. I should fix that so that I can do the thing. Now I can do the thing. Now I can do more things, right? You know, we released that. And then the next challenge was, hey, people are starting to do some different shaped things with this, right? And now I need to grow this. And so I need to hire a few people and help. So then like my role changed at the same time that the role of the app needed to change. So I'm like, okay. I need to do more product discovery here. I need to figure out the right loops for seeing what everybody's working on and steering things that are off track. And so all of a sudden, that's what I started using the Codex app for, right? I did still write code. Like I've tried to align my own usage of it with the problem that we're trying to solve, right? And now I'm like, I need to build a spreadsheet that models this out. I need to kind of do.”
2026-06-28 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI Codex lead on the new shape of product work | Andrew Ambrosino · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think I have the best job in the world right now. But one of the things that makes it very fun is that when we were developing the original Codex app, the goal for me personally was to make it the thing that I wrote the code with. I was like, I need to make this so good at development that I can build the code stop with this. And the codex app at that time was a development tool, right?”
2026-06-28 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI Codex lead on the new shape of product work | Andrew Ambrosino · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of like harness engineering stuff, a lot of different explorations. I'm like, okay, well, what if you came in overnight and did garbage collection of the code base to clean it up, right? One thing that I think all models suffer with right now is just they usually increase complexity. If researchers listening at any company, please make the models better at deleting code. But that becomes a problem right now when you try to put development completely on autopilot. And it's both on the human side and the code base side. So like feature requests, right? How do you teach a model which features to build, which ones to ignore, which ones to kind of like group together and reframe a little bit? How do you model how to build the right abstractions? Like all of this getting better. I don't think we're at place yet where we're like, we're just going to set up a loop that's improve the app and listens to.”
2026-06-28 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI Codex lead on the new shape of product work | Andrew Ambrosino · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, loops so last week, man. I mean, we talked about this, you know, one of the big questions is always, well, how much of the product is AI written? It's always hard to answer that question because if you're using the goalposts from last year, it's like, well, 100% of our product right now is AI written code. The question is more like, well, okay, fine. Is the code written supervised versus unsupervised, right? And that's like a totally different thing. I welcome the moving of goalposts because that means we're making progress. There have been a lot of explorations here around like autonomously developed software.”
2026-06-28 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI Codex lead on the new shape of product work | Andrew Ambrosino · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, this is a core challenge. Once there's a product. Exists or a feature that exists. It's really easy for people to find paper cuts and And they should, and people on Twitter like to remind us of this, and I thank them for that. Like, people should be focused on the futures that exist and make them more reliable and better. But this is why we also have a culture of bottoms-up exploration here, because sometimes, in the same way the Codex app came and disrupted ChatGPT in some way, right? This thing will get disrupted by a future effort. And that's part of the design is that you can't always as one team be good at both the disruptive piece instead of maintaining a product and its quality piece. At some point, you had to design a process that allows for both.”
2026-06-28 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI Codex lead on the new shape of product work | Andrew Ambrosino · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's the point that the models were out there, right? So we were like, we were too AGI pilled for the moment. And I think I think about that lesson a lot on this stuff. It used to be that, you know, failing market told you all these things about the shape of the product, about the communication of the product. And now it's like, no, you might need to release this thing six different times before it works. And that might like the shape might not change at all.”
2026-06-28 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI Codex lead on the new shape of product work | Andrew Ambrosino · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“it might not be ready yet um there's also this aspect of especially in research there's always a desire to be the most ambitious and to say okay but at the limit the model can just do this and it just doesn't work on the product side like if you if you go back to the original codecs release basically what it was is it said it was codex web and it wasn't good for interacting with it was like you give the model a task and it's going to go off do the task come back to you with it finished like doesn't sound that radical the problem is like it didn't do the task that well like it wrote code it was it was it was good but it was like that form factor was too early and then the cloud code comes out totally local like not hooked up to the cloud um doesn't pretend to be as it's not as agi pelt right it's like gonna ask you questions it's going to sit there you can't just delegate your life to it that worked way better right because”
2026-06-28 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI Codex lead on the new shape of product work | Andrew Ambrosino · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think we have a lot of that. I think sometimes the challenge is like you have to be very clear again about what stage of the design process that's in. People still have this muscle memory of like, oh, I wrote the code for this thing, therefore we should put it out there. It's like, no, no. That means you have an artifact now that we can test against for into future models, right? This happens with the in-up browser in the app that we have, right? We had a kind of a working version. I mean, go back to Atlas. We had agent working inside of Atlas. you know that was pretty cool we had an operator before that in chat gpt right that didn't work out very cool idea like there's some thread that you can draw between operator atlas codecs chat gpt that's like fundamentally the same feature but the re-releasing of it with different intelligence totally changes the outcome here and so i push people not to be stubborn about like no this isn't working so it's a bad feature like no”
2026-06-28 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI Codex lead on the new shape of product work | Andrew Ambrosino · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The shape of them. So, this is a great story about the coax app. I am very confident that the Codex app that we released in February, if that had been ready in November, it would have absolutely failed in the market. And the only difference was the models between November and February, right? And I think there's a lot to that, that this product with the exact same shape, I think, would have like it's outcomes were totally different depending on just a few months of timing.”
2026-06-28 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI Codex lead on the new shape of product work | Andrew Ambrosino · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Anything that you could have planned in November may have been true for December, but like isn't what happened, right? So it's hard. Like it is really hard to do planning. We generally need to know what do we think models are able to do on what timeline. And my last company, I kind of saw this shift where we were starting to use the models to drive features. And the product process fell down. It basically had to be like, let's list out all of the things that we think we are interested in doing for the next year or two. Let's prototype all of them, decide which things are ready now, and then just let the others sit and bake. And then every time there's like a new leap in models, let's try that thing again with it swapped out. Because like the whole premise of whether features were good or not were based on whether they were smart enough.”
2026-06-28 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI Codex lead on the new shape of product work | Andrew Ambrosino · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think we do anything revolutionary on that. We're not clever about planning. I think, like, The basic gist is the shorter term something is, the more detail it needs. And then it's not that we don't plan for nine months out. It's that that just has to stay very hazy because any amount of precision that you add to a nine-month plan right now is false precision. And like you're just going to waste time, you can say stuff, right? But like nothing that we planned, I think research is different. So I'm not speaking for research here, but like on the applied side when we do product, like.”
2026-06-28 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI Codex lead on the new shape of product work | Andrew Ambrosino · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think that's the core piece right now. And it also speaks to how I sort of see, I see versus management, which is that it's not that management is going away. It's not that everyone's in IC, but like everyone's kind of both now, right? If you're an IC, you're not typing code out character by character, right? Like you are managing something. You're managing agents. You're managing, you know, like you are managing work that is happening that comes together to do a certain thing. If you're a manager of teams, you're doing the same thing just at a different granularity, right? I generally look for obviously command over the discipline, but then the taste to say like, hey, you're going to have unlimited tokens. And I don't like we can't just be doing slop. Like, you need to be able to determine what signal, what's noise.”
2026-06-28 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI Codex lead on the new shape of product work | Andrew Ambrosino · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“and then you fill in the gaps and you're like look like we want to hire engineers to a product minded like we don't we don't want it to be like you know we've got a bunch of people writing a bunch of code that needs like full team reviewing it for like product coherence right like we want everyone to have these skills but i think like what people go deep on has to change right”
2026-06-28 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI Codex lead on the new shape of product work | Andrew Ambrosino · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and I have had a lot of conversations with Alexander about this analogy, which is that like if two product people are working too closely, that's often not a good signal and that like you kind of want like as a product org, you sort of want to do this like force directed activity where you're like where are the gaps, especially in this new world where curation and like, you know, steering and alignment is a lot of things where you're like, there's a ton of chaos happening on people throwing ideas all over the place, right? The whole like top-down, you know, year-long planning thing knocking. And so now it's like we need the tastemakers to guide things from inception to what the product should be. And that means you basically want company coverage. And so you spread out and you say, all right, who's best at what? Let's create some space between us so that we got full coverage, right? And that's kind of goes.”
2026-06-28 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI Codex lead on the new shape of product work | Andrew Ambrosino · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Agency and taste, right? A lot of former founders or people who were at larger companies doing founder shaped things. A lot of people with immense taste. At OpenAI, we let teams get very large. So we haven't said, hey, there's no management, but like the teams are quite large, right? It's mostly ICs. And I think that's good.”
2026-06-28 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI Codex lead on the new shape of product work | Andrew Ambrosino · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source