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

“People ask me how many people are on the Codex You remember my answer to this? I'm like, it's somewhere between 10 and a few thousand. I mean, it's like a fake answer, but it's real in that we do see this as the culmination of what everybody works on here. Like everything that goes into model research, everything that goes into how models are good at CUA and browser use, everything about how model personality, all of the product work around front-end infrastructure, all of the user, like all of it is this product. At the same time, we are not accepting PRs daily from thousands and thousands of people on whatever they want. So we go to team, double digits of engineers, probably half that on the design side, a few product people, although product tier is kind of more of a zone defense play. And I think one thing that is very common among everybody on the Codex side or on the desktop side is”
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 more of it's that actually now is like it's easier to switch roles, it's easier to learn the best practices, it's easier to not tie your effectiveness in a role with the ability to use the exact tool, right? It's more of like, can you get yourself into this mindset, learn which things work and which don't, and then like focus on it, right? I spent so long feeling like I should not be a software engineer because I didn't care about assembly language or Memorizing TypeScript syntax. And it's like, there have always been parts of these roles that are that sort of gatekeeping that are like, well, no, being good at this role is being good at this tool. And I think that's what's kind of starting to erode. I just don't, I think people take this, the hyperbolize all of this.”
2026-06-28 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI Codex lead on the new shape of product work | Andrew Ambrosino · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a balance here where it's like not everyone can work on everything for one, both in terms of breadth and depth, right? Like this is why managers are not going to go away. Not everybody can work on everything. And also every discipline has a skill component to it. Which I think a lot of engineers are guilty of not recognizing that, like, well, engineering is a skill to it. It's writing code and like other roles are just people vibing. It's like, no, that's not how it works, right? Like, yes, you can use Excel. But you cannot work on the finance team, right? That is like that kind of stuff, right?”
2026-06-28 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI Codex lead on the new shape of product work | Andrew Ambrosino · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are some things that I'm afraid of. And I think that some companies. Like to be very extreme about getting onto the bandwagon of whatever people say is going to happen. And I think part of the danger in eliminating the concept of roles is that it can dangerously eliminate the idea that things are specialties with knowledgeable best practices, right? I've heard a lot of companies be like, we're getting rid of the product role, which I think is, by the way, a terrible idea. And everybody's just going to be like a builder. And then what happens is they don't like this whole discipline of product that's been built up and has like real best practices, real things that have been tried and failed and like real processes, like that just gets abandoned because people are like, oh, I wrote some code, right? Like that's not a great place to be in. I think that the boundary of like so-and-so, like this isn't your lane, I welcome that part going away.”
2026-06-28 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI Codex lead on the new shape of product work | Andrew Ambrosino · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I believe that this might have started with Xerox. First company I interned out, it was a company called Up There did the same thing.”
2026-06-28 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI Codex lead on the new shape of product work | Andrew Ambrosino · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There is a desire among all of us to try to do as much as possible in the app, even when it's not the best tool so that it can become the best tool. And so a lot of design we all work on by using the app and say, okay, what's broken about this? This is a whole thing we do, which is that we often don't improve our process so that we can make the product better to do it, which is a deeply uncomfortable place to be in. But week to week, it's changing.”
2026-06-28 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI Codex lead on the new shape of product work | Andrew Ambrosino · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the ways that we describe how the groups work together is that there's significantly more overlap in the roles than there used to be. And everybody's sort of defined less by the fence and the boundaries of where design stops and engineering starts, but more the average of where they're working, right? So like, you know, if you average up all of the things that somebody in our design team does, there's plenty of code writing things. There's plenty of things that are product work. But on average, like there are dots over here. right if you draw you draw it out on a diagram and this sort of speaks to the process too um especially because the entirety of the critics app has been informed”
2026-06-28 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI Codex lead on the new shape of product work | Andrew Ambrosino · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's been a lot written about role collapse, existential role collapse. There are no roles anymore. We haven't seen that. We have seen more role collapse in the Codex org than I think other parts of the company and other parts of the economy. I think part of this is that this was a technical product for engineers. And so our designers speak engineer, right? Our product managers speak technical language and write code. Alexander has a master's degree in computer science, which is I do not have a master's degree in computer science. So we've seen a lot of role collapse. And I think that one of”
2026-06-28 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI Codex lead on the new shape of product work | Andrew Ambrosino · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Depends on the week. We worked very closely together. We believe in while sitting together, being embedded, reporting lines, I don't know.”
2026-06-28 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI Codex lead on the new shape of product work | Andrew Ambrosino · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Baby cursor, you've seen this on Twitter. Like, we have baby codecs, right? A dramatically simplified code base that approximates all of the interactions of the production app and therefore is a lot quicker to vide code over, right? Because you can be like, well, what if the sidebar works like this? Or what if a pain came in and had like a group chat here? What if XYZ, right? That's like a huge tool that's part of the design process. So to say the design process is dead, I feel like it's both true and false, right? It's that If you are if you are tied to the tools in the like the exact like day-to-day specifics of the process, then yeah, it's dead. Like you're not going to have a good time. But to throw the process out completely or throw like the overlay of the process, the like, hey, we're at this point in the process. Like that is still more important than ever.”
2026-06-28 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI Codex lead on the new shape of product work | Andrew Ambrosino · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Process proper, right? We pulled prototyping into that. The problem now is that you can pull all of implementation into that. There's a mismatch between, I think, a lot of assumptions. Again, like you see this fully polished prototype that looks like it's ready to go out the door. And enough people at a company see that and they're like, can we release this now? But the appropriate, like we're actually in the early design process stage and nobody's just saying that, right? Like this is where we are with like a bunch of like multiplayer exploration, right? 90 people have this idea. It'll look really polished, but it's like, you know, this is actually that that's the design process now, right? Tying the design process to mediums media, like that's the scary part. It's that designers have more tools now to do this process with, right? You can put stuff into the current product and you can A-B test it. Or just, you know, use that as a prototype. Many companies right now have this idea of like a baby version of 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
“I think this is really exposing some areas where it falls down, especially because of the speed of implementation. And like once again, like that process is sort of predicated on the assumption that implementation is expensive and that you can really only afford to build once. And so you need to fully like exhaustively go through the problem space and the solution space before implementing, right? And then like kind of we saw with like, you know, Figma and origami and all of these tools that you can fast forward some of the insights by pulling interactive prototypes earlier into the process, right? That you can, you know, simulate production and like, you know, there ended up being sort of a meme about executives just being like, well, can we just do a prototype and then like expect it to, you know, work. But this thing was real, right? That this became part of the design.”
2026-06-28 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI Codex lead on the new shape of product work | Andrew Ambrosino · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I mean, when I ran a startup a number of years ago, we would do design hiring. And there was this sort of snarky article that came out about like the case study factory. And it was like mid SERP era stuff, right? And it was that designers were being taught about this process and valuing that above all else, above all outcomes even, right? And if something went through this process that two things were true. One, it would be good and the process would guarantee quality and guarantee impact. And also that if something, the thing was good, if it went through that process, even if you don't like it and nobody uses it. It's like. The process of user research and the divergence and the convergence, it's the right framework. It was always a little academic, but I think”
2026-06-28 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI Codex lead on the new shape of product work | Andrew Ambrosino · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably agree on a lot of us, Jonny and I. I wasn't a fan of the design, like the design process proper. I agree with her take that it is dead. And I genuinely was not a fan of this process before AI.”
2026-06-28 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI Codex lead on the new shape of product work | Andrew Ambrosino · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We weren't using it full time. Now we use it for everything. That's been a journey. But now it's like the things that we actually do while using it are different things. So what was the question?”
2026-06-28 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI Codex lead on the new shape of product work | Andrew Ambrosino · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's a little bit different than saying the model needs to be a better designer, especially design, but it is significantly deeper. It's about the abstractions and that like, oh, if tomorrow our company did a rebrand, the shallow version of this. Update 263 components one by one. The deep version is like the semantics between these two things that look different. Like they're both in list that have this style that convey this interaction pattern to the user. And I think that is still feeling a little out of reach with the current technology, right? That abstraction layer. So I think, you know, as we've gone through this process, we started the Codex app in November and”
2026-06-28 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI Codex lead on the new shape of product work | Andrew Ambrosino · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If I have a model that outputs linear's website every time, that's not the challenge here, right? There's an amount of like novelty that is more important in design than it actually is in software engineering. Like software engineering, you almost want it to over index unknown patterns, right? Whereas design, it's like, no, there's an element of randomness here and novelty, right? There's also the, you know, to me, like I spent a lot of time writing code or supervising code on the early codecs out. And even as the models get good at design, there's sort of an abstraction layer that is an interplay between the software design and the code that's being written. Like this thing over here in this corner should share X, Y, and Z in the code base with this thing down here, right?”
2026-06-28 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI Codex lead on the new shape of product work | Andrew Ambrosino · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can't really make the same case for design. Not that getting good at design isn't important. It's that it's not directly in that flywheel, right? Those are practical reasons. And I Those will go away. Like these models will get pretty good at design. There are some kind of murkier things that is going to be really tough. Like I have kind of a short list of them. One is there is an aspect of culture to what is considered good design in that you remember it was probably what last year where like every new website that came out was just a copy of Linear's website, right? Like Linear's website great design, great taste. Like if a model did that, I'd be like, wow, this is an incredible leaps here, 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, I tend to think that there are some practical reasons why it's lagged and also some. Harder problems to crack. I'm not in our research org, like I'm sure I'll get yelled at for sign house. I think design's a little bit harder to grade than software in that, you know, creating a loop where you can train the model and like what's good design and what's bad design is just a little bit more tedious and onerous than does the code compile? Does it do what it's supposed to be because the human aspect of taste is like part of the feedback mechanism you need? I also think that the labs historically invest in making their models good at things that accelerates AI research and that in the era, the early era of coding models is very clear that the model being able to write correct code would accelerate research, right? In a way that”
2026-06-28 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI Codex lead on the new shape of product work | Andrew Ambrosino · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Animation doesn't fit in the semantic meaning it's supposed to, right? Like it's too snappy for what it's actually trying to convey. And that's incredibly important. And I focus probably too much on that. But there's like the Like, what should this be? Like, if we can build anything, like the goal here and how do we get there that I think is actually the real taste question here.”
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 funny, there was a tweet. I'm too online. There was a tweet, I think it was yesterday from the head of Product at Linear. I might be getting that wrong. Sorry to anybody who said people overemphasize the aesthetic part of what taste means. And they used Paul Graham's grade, but they used him as an example saying Poghram clearly has great taste and wears cargo shorts, right? Like, you know, we gotta, we got to like tease out what taste means a little bit. And there's a lot of nuance here. I think it's all of the above to what you mentioned. It's the like, there is an aesthetic part to it. But there's also a systems thinking part of it. Like, how does this fit in the system? There's a where are we going and how what theme is this part of? There's how to present this. A lot of it is wider context. And, you know, obviously there are parts of taste that are like, hey, this inner.”
2026-06-28 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI Codex lead on the new shape of product work | Andrew Ambrosino · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“that like oh visually it's ready for pride but it's not actually the right model of where the research is going or what users are asking for or what's right for the business right not to overdo the taste thing but it's like it's once again it's like the taste to know like what to work on how to present that information like how to achieve the goals what medium to use is emerging as like the most important thing to do and that's it that's that's in every field”
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 too there's this part of the previous world was that the medium implied it had baked in a lot of signal around where in the process something was, right? So if you're seeing something that feels like the ab in production, that means that it's late in the process that assumptions have been de-risked, that design is looked at this, that this is a good business goal, right? And now those things are sort of divorced, right? And the reason it was that way is because it was hard to get resources to build a thing until it was properly de-risked. And now that's like just out the window, right? And so I think it's really important to start saying, look, we can have prototypes, we can have documents. Is it, are we clear around what this is doing, right? Because to your point, you do not want to over anchor on this thing that was meant to be an exploration, but now it looks so production ready.”
2026-06-28 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI Codex lead on the new shape of product work | Andrew Ambrosino · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“then it's really important to pick the right format for the point you're trying to make. If that point is product clarity around a vague area, then it might actually be a document. What you're trying to do is get something in people's hands to try out and to stress tests and interaction pattern, it's a prototype. But I think like this is kind of the funny thing now, which is that like it's really important to pick the medium.”
2026-06-28 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI Codex lead on the new shape of product work | Andrew Ambrosino · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a lot of this. And, you know, it's not just happening here. Like you've seen many product leaders say PRDs are dead and prototypes are in. And I actually don't believe this at all. I think that one of the interesting things that is happening right now is that because implementation has gotten so cheap across every medium, it's very tempting to jump straight to a prototype, especially if you're not an engineer, right? Especially if you've never been able to write code or never been interested or never had the time, it's really tempting to say like PRDs are dead. Let me just show you what I mean, right? What I've also noticed though is that for engineers, it's really tempting to write a lot of documents. A lot of documents that are not worth reading. There's no shade on people writing documents. It's that if implementation is abundant,”
2026-06-28 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI Codex lead on the new shape of product work | Andrew Ambrosino · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I guess the short answer is it's backwards. And it's not that people are doing fundamentally different roles or focusing on different things or that even skill sets have vanished or that roles have just disappeared. It's that it's backwards, right? The implementation is actually not the expensive part anymore. It's DRSA taste. But it's the curation process. It's like of those 90 attempts, like what's good about these? What should we fold into other aspects of this, right? How should we frame this? Should it be part of this other feature, right? How many segments should be in the toggle, you know, all of 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
“Opposite, right? It's been kind of research, ideation. Maybe there was some prototyping, but it was, you know, even when we got past waterfall, it was still kind of flavored of like, The implementation is expensive. And so, what you want to do is you want to de risk all implementation up front through documents, through research, through prototypes, because prototypes and designs are cheaper was kind of the assumption there. And that's changed. That's like totally changed. And right now, I'm sure there are 90 different explorations for there's this feature that we desperately need to do that I'm sure there are 90 different uncoordinated teams like implementing and trying, right?”
2026-06-28 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI Codex lead on the new shape of product work | Andrew Ambrosino · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the hardest things to do right now as a leader. Building these products is just sort of the inversion of the process in my mind, which I think a lot of people have talked about, which is that anybody can build anything. I generally believe now that starting from scratch, if you talk to these models, ours, anybody else is really. You can stand up whatever feature you want, right? And that's not necessarily the hard part of software, but that's like, that's really cool. And I think that has created environments where People are making oaths, right? You give people unlimited tokens, everybody at OpenAI is very authentic, has great ideas. And so everybody is building everything. Whereas I think, you know, you look back at product process that we've all run for a long time and it's been a little bit.”
2026-06-28 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI Codex lead on the new shape of product work | Andrew Ambrosino · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are some things that I'm afraid of. I've heard a lot of companies be like, we're getting rid of the product role, and everybody's just going to be a builder. And then what happens is”
2026-06-28 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI Codex lead on the new shape of product work | Andrew Ambrosino · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everybody to OpenAI is very authentic, has great ideas, and so everybody's building everything. And it's not that people are doing fundamentally different roles or focusing on different things. It's that it's backwards. The implementation is actually not the expensive part anymore. It's, dare I say, taste.”
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 design's a little bit harder to grade because the human aspect of taste is part of the feedback mechanism you need. That is still feeling a little bit out of reach for the current technology.”
2026-06-28 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI Codex lead on the new shape of product work | Andrew Ambrosino · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The quality bar for codecs had to be so high that there was never a hesitation that you have opening this app to do the next thing, that this was your natural choice, just like people have kind of come to open a browser tab, right?”
2026-06-28 · Lenny's Podcast · OpenAI Codex lead on the new shape of product work | Andrew Ambrosino · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source