Alexander Embiricos

The most effective way for AI agents to interact with and control computers is by writing and executing code rather than using accessibility APIs or visual clicking.

"One of our major goals with Codex is to get to proactivity. If we're going to build a super system, has to be able to do things. One of the learnings over the past year is that for models to do stuff,..."

Chat serves as a universal 'common denominator' interface that allows users to access complex AI capabilities without needing to learn specific tool configurations.

"I actually think Chat is a very good interface when you don't know what you're supposed to use it for... you start using it even outside of work to just help you. You become very comfortable with the..."

The primary bottleneck for AI productivity is the 'human-in-the-loop' requirement for prompting and manual verification of output.

"I think that the current limiting factor, I mean, there's many, but I think a current underappreciated limiting factor is literally human typing speed or human multitasking speed on writing prompts......"

Enabling long-running agent tasks requires a 'compaction' strategy coordinated across the model, API, and application harness to manage context window limits.

"For a model to work continuously for that amount of time, it's going to exceed its context window. And so we have a solution for that, which we call compaction. But compaction is actually a feature th..."

The guest repeatedly uses this term to describe a new mode of development where non-engineers (designers/PMs) use AI to build functional software and prototypes without deep technical mastery of the u

"They'll vibe code a animation editor and then they use the animation editor to build the animation"

For AI tools, Day 7 retention is a critical health metric to ensure the product is providing immediate, repeatable value rather than just novelty.

"One of the things that I'm constantly reminding myself of is that a tool like Codex naturally is a tool that you would become a power user of... it's just critically important to go look at your D7 re..."

In high-uncertainty technology environments, a bottoms-up, empirical culture is more effective than rigid top-down planning.

"OpenAI is truly, truly bottoms up... because we don't exactly know what capabilities will even come up soon and we don't know what's going to work technically... it's much more important for us to be..."

Radical candor is an act of kindness because it prevents the long-term damage caused by delaying necessary feedback.

"The number one company value from my startup... was to be kind and candid... we, as founders, realized that we often would be nice and it wasn't actually the right thing to do. We would delay the diff..."

AI is 'compressing the talent stack,' allowing designers and PMs to contribute directly to production code through AI-assisted 'vibe coding.'

"Our designers... have an entire vibe coded side prototype of the Codex app... if we like it, they'll vibe engineer that prototype into an actual PR to land. And then depending on their comfort with th..."

Unfiltered community platforms like Reddit provide higher-signal feedback on product flaws and 'real' user sentiment than more polished social platforms.

"A few of us are constantly on Reddit. There's praise up there and there's a lot of complaints... Reddit is a little more negative but real actually. So I've started increasingly paying attention to ho..."

AI coding agents enable tiny teams to ship high-quality, production-ready applications in weeks by automating the porting and implementation of existing logic.

"The Sora Android app, like a fully new app, we built it in 18 days and then 10 days later, so 28 days total, we went to the public... number one app in the app store with a handful of engineers. I thi..."