OpenAI Codex lead on the new shape of product work | Andrew Ambrosino
Source
Lenny Rachitsky
Author
Lenny Rachitsky
Date
Terms in this piece · Glossary
AI agent — An AI system that doesn't just answer once but works toward a goal in a loop — taking actions, reading the results, and deciding what to do next.
Why it matters
Most AI-coding takes tell you how to prompt better; this one describes how the product development process itself inverts when nearly everyone at a company—not just engineers—ships with Codex daily. Ambrosino runs that experiment from the inside, so read it if you're a builder or PM trying to figure out what your team's workflow actually becomes when coding stops being the bottleneck.
Key quotes
“Ninety percent of people at OpeningAI use Codex. Not ninety percent of engineers, that's ninety percent of the entire company.”
Andrew Ambrosino
“The implementation is actually not the expensive part anymore. It's dare I say taste.”
Andrew Ambrosino
“If research is listening at any company, please make the models better at deleting code.”
Andrew Ambrosino
“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.”
Andrew Ambrosino
“do not get married to your exact process. Get married to like the outcomes that you were uniquely able to deliver”
Andrew Ambrosino
Chapters
00:00Introduction to Andrew Ambrosino
02:30How AI is changing the shape of product work
06:32When to use documents vs. prototypes
10:25What "taste" actually means
12:06Why AI is still bad at design
16:18Is the design process really dead?
21:35What the design process looks like on the Codex team
23:41Are product functions disappearing?
27:22Team structure
30:12IC vs. management
31:37Planning roadmaps
35:16Building features that don't work yet
38:13The ambition problem: when you're too AGI-pilled
39:17The latest frontier: loops and autonomous development
46:52The power of computer use and browser automation
49:10Will we run all our SaaS apps inside Codex?
52:05The future vision for Codex
57:20The videographer who built a Premiere Pro extension with Codex
59:30Failure corner
1:01:50Lightning round
1:07:03BTS: How our producer uses Codex for editing
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