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- [00:00]
A
Codex is one of those things where three months ago, six months ago, it was trash. If anyone from OpenAI is on the call and listening to that, I stand by that 100%. If you have a great general purpose coding agent on your computer, it's actually really great for any kind of knowledge work. If it can write software on its own, it can do any kind of knowledge work on its own.
- [00:19]
B
When I sign on during the day, Codex is the first thing I open. It is pulling in whatever I need from Gmail, Slack, Notion Stripe, all of our data sources. It's where I spend like 80% of my time working, overwhelmingly, because the app itself is just so good.
- [00:35]
A
There's a new operating system for how and where you're going to get your work done. And it's this kind of agent management interface. Hello, everybody. Welcome to Codex camp. Codex for knowledge work. Psyched to have you. Psyched to have you on this auspicious GPT 5.5 day after release day. Hope you're doing well. I'm here with our head of growth, Austin. Austin, say hello.
- [01:17]
B
Hello.
- [01:18]
A
We're psyched to have you. We are psyched to do this. Um, Codex is one of those things where, you know, three months ago, six months ago, it was trash. Um, and if anyone from OpenAI is on the call and listening to that, I stand by that a hundred percent. Um, and it was really built for senior engineers doing pair programming. So it was, it would argue with you, it would make you feel stupid. It was just, it was like a little autistic. Like, it, it didn't have any emotional intelligence. And I think OpenAI had this interesting strategy or this interesting theory, starting with GPT5, that your vibe coding was going to happen in ChatGPT and that was where all that stuff was going to live. And then senior engineers are going to use codecs to do all of their programming work, but we're going to hobble the model so it doesn't do anything bad. It's in a sandbox, all that kind of stuff. And I think basically what happened is Anthropic figured out that having a model that's pretty usable and fast and smart and also emotionally intelligent on your computer, that can access your computer, is a really, really great experience for programmers. And it means you could throw away a lot of the old stuff that you used to have in a programming environment where it was built for typing code. You could just type commands into your terminal and then it would start working. And then I think what Anthropic figured out is if you have a great general purpose. If you have a great coding agent on your computer, it's actually really great for any kind of knowledge work. If it can write software on its own, it can do any kind of knowledge work on its own. And we started to move from this world where programmers had been delegating, had been delegating their tasks, starting to delegate their tasks inside of cloud code to now any kind of knowledge work is being delegated inside of cloud code and cloud cowork and all that kind of stuff. And I think OpenAI, they had this original split, it's like, oh, you're going to do all your vibe coding in ChatGPT. And I think they saw what was starting to happen with cloud code and over the last maybe three months or so they have done this hard pivot on Codex where it has gone from a senior engineer only tool that is really for pair programming to I think like it's, it is my daily driver for this kind of work. I, I use Codex for everything from deep engineering stuff to writing to recruiting. I do a lot, actually do a fair amount of recruiting is really good for that. And I'll give you some use cases later but they sort of figured out that having this general purpose agent on your computer with the ability to write code, the ability to access your file system, the ability to have a browser and wrapping it in a desktop app is like the ideal, ideal next step for knowledge work. And I think that they built the best current version of that. And what it is starting to snap into focus now is that there's a new operating system for how and where surface for how and where you're going to get your work done. And it's this kind of agent management interface and that's whether or not you're using cloud code or cloud cowork in the desktop app or codecs in the desktop app. It's becoming this race between the model companies where every, each model company has their own surface like this for agent management, a desktop app for agent management that's at its core a programming agent that's used for knowledge work. Anthropic has cloud code and Cloud cowork, OpenAI has Codex XAI recently essentially bought Cursor. And Google is the only one that, I mean they have anti gravity, but I don't think no one is seriously using it for that yet. But I imagine Google will do this too. And that's the race, that is the race that's happening. And, and so I think for us who get all the benefits of being able to use these tools. It's really important to be bouncing around between these. So like, for example, using Codex so that you can feel what it's like to work in an agent first world, because once you add, once you add an agent that is like your primary way of accessing and using software and the Internet and all that kind of stuff, it opens up all this interesting stuff that wasn't possible before because you can send your agent out to go talk to other pieces of software and come back and you know, we can get into, into more of the details there. But I want to get into like the, more of the concrete use cases. But that's the world that we're starting to live in. You're doing work on your computer through Codex or Cowork and, and your agent is your interface to a lot of the work that you're doing and a lot of the, a lot of the software that you use and a lot of the stuff that you do every day. And, and that's actually really fun. It's really cool. There's a lot of good stuff here. And so I wanted to, I wanted to bring Austin in to help do this because Austin is our head of growth and I think he had his real agent pill moment, you tell me, Austin, but probably like three or four months ago and the agent pill moment was really Claude code. And I sort of remember you just being like, oh yeah, on a, on a Monday morning, being like, oh yeah, I just was on my computer all weekend. Like I, it was like 12 hours a day. I didn't go out or anything because I was using cloud code. And you started to use it for all those, all the kind of knowledge work tasks that a growth marketer would. And over the last couple weeks as we've been using 5.5 and I've been telling you for a little bit you should try Codex. It seems like you've actually just shifted everything over to Codex and 5 5. And so I think you're a great person to talk about sort of what you're seeing and. How this has changed, how these agent management interfaces have changed your workflow and then why you like codecs. And then I would love to get into some demos of your actual Codex workflow so that we can sort of see things from your perspective.
- [07:23]
B
Yeah, that sounds great. So I, yes, my like agent pilled moments was spending a week going deep into cloud code in the cli, probably in like December into January, hooking it up to everything I do for work and for my personal life and finding That I use Warp as my like, CLI interface and finding that the things that could automate the things that could handle for me and then the way it could work as a thought partner to make my work better. It was like, this is the only way I want to do the kind of knowledge work that requires strategic thinking and data analysis and shipping, marketing copy. Like a bunch of stuff that can get you spread out across a bunch of apps and tools during the day. And maybe in February, you kept nudging me to be like, you really should try Codex. There were things you liked about it. And if someone says that at every. If anyone on the team says that, like, I'll go try it. And I like to push myself and play around with more engineering tasks, especially to see what these models are capable of. And so I tried to build a personal vide coded app in Codex because that was one of the things that you said that it was really good for. And my immediate response was like, I think it is better at building the app, but I can't tell because it's. Nothing has ever made me feel more stupid than Codex. Like two months ago, like I always. I use Compounded our Compound engineering plugin that Kieran Classen made for basically everything, including knowledge work, but especially if I'm trying to build an app or ship a PR to the site. So I made a plan. In the plan, it comes up with like three questions for, like, which direction we should go. And I had no idea what the hell it was talking about. It was like, do you do want any of these three? And every question I was like, please explain this to me in more detail. And its response was basically like, why? Like, why don't you just do what I'm recommending? And I found a way to. I basically stayed in Codex for all engineering stuff because I did like the results, even if I didn't love working in it. But I would say 80% of what I was reaching for was cloud code in the cli. And when we got our hands on the new GPT model a month ago, the first thing I felt was, at the very least, there's parity between the latest Opus model and the latest GPT model. For the kind of knowledge work I do, there's a few things that Opus does better, There's a few things that, that Codex does better. That feels a little more specific to me even, like I, I outside of design, which I still really trust Opus for, it feels a little more like, oh, there's some stuff I like better than this. But the real differentiator to me is that to me there's no comparison for how fast and powerful the Codex desktop app is as just like an app compared to the Claude desktop app. Like I have never been able to get cowork to work for me and I think it's because I've been kind of ruined by the Codex app. It's so fast, the sub agents are so good. The way in which it suggests and then ships automations for me is just like I can't imagine not using it. I wouldn't be surprised if any week the cloud desktop app is like just as good. Right? Like they could ship versions where it's faster and better. But I'm now at the point where when I sign on during the day I Codex is the first thing I open. It is pulling in whatever I need from Gmail, Slack, Notion Stripe, all of our data sources. This morning I was like, oh yeah, we need to do a run of show for this camp. I message Codex. I'm like, make the run of show. It knows exactly where to look because we've already had conversations about what we're going to talk about today. It pushed it to notion, it sent it to Slack. It was perfect. It was like, oh yeah, this is exactly what we should do. And yeah, it's where I spent like 80% of my time working overwhelmingly because the app itself is just so good. And then the model has now gotten good enough to be the daily driver for me.
- [11:31]
A
Yeah. And I, I feel, I feel the same way. I love to get into and, and for people, someone who, someone asked, are you we discussing the app or the cli. We're discussing the app, the desktop app. And, and I think you're making a good point that both of these companies I think sort of see the end game here and they're pushing in the right direction. And for a while at least it's going to be a horse race where every couple, every couple weeks or every couple months, like one is going to pull ahead and have this like sort of amazing thing going on. And then there the competitor is going to like Anthropic, for example, I think will release something in a couple weeks or a couple months. I don't have any inside information into this, but that will make it at least parody, if not better. And they're just going to keep trading and at some point I think that'll slow down and you'll end up with sort of separate ecosystems. But for now they're actually fairly easy to switch between. It's not Trivial, but it's pretty easy. Like you can kind of ask Codex, hey, can you go grab all my Claude stuff? And it'll go do
- [12:38]
B
I think it. It feels that way when you do it. It's funny. I'm in, I'm in New York right now. I usually live in la. Most of my friends who are in the knowledge work space have been asking me about like, what they should be using. They're all Claude code or Claude desktop app pilled. And when I tell them that I have fully transitioned to Codex, this like look of horror shows up on their face and they're like, do I? They're kind of like, do I really have to? And I of course tell them they don't. But I'm like, you really should right now. You really should. Like, I think you would get a big benefit from it. And I've been showing them why and it's interesting and to me unsurprising how resistant people have been to it. Because when you're a knowledge worker and you have all these new tools, the Claude desktop app is game changing. It's amazing, right? So the idea that the Codex app is maybe 30 to 40% better is like, that's a lot of work which we can get into. Kind of how I migrated. I can show some of that. It was very easy and the ways that I'm starting to use it. So I'm happy to dive into that and start sharing my screen and share.
- [13:34]
A
Yeah, why don't you share your screen? I think, yeah, I kind of agree with you. It's more of like an emotional thing of like, oh, I have to learn a whole new thing or whatever. But it's, it's pretty similar. Yeah, I would love to see some of your workflows.
- [13:46]
B
Cool. So this is the Codex app. I was going to do like a very, very quick tour. I think a lot of the audiences has seen it, but kind of like where I go and how I use it. One thing I love about the Codex app is like, I do think it's much better organized than the cloud desktop app. App. My, the ability to have these folders with persistent consistent chats inside of it that I can go check out. And then especially like the big differentiator is that because I do think this is much better for engineering for like, occasionally I will ship a PR for one of our products. It's great to not have to switch between the cloud code cli, the cloud desktop app and Codex that I can be here. I can be working on our, improving our KPI sheet which I'll like show what I was doing here and then I can go down to plus one and ship a PR for plus one. And the other thing I found because I did I tried the new, I tried the updates in the cloud desktop app last week when they, when they shipped it. And the stress test I put on it was make a go to market plan for our new product and ship a PR to sparkle in different chats. And it was so clunky and slow. And when you do stuff like that inside of Codex it just works like it just works really quickly and well. And that's the thing that like once you start feeling that it's very hard for me to turn away from it. So I have these different folders for some like vibe coded apps that I play around with for fun for my personal open claw where I can go and manipulate it here. And then the one with all of the chats is this like every growth os, all this is is a folder with a bunch of secrets and keys. So it's connected to everything we use for every and then some project instructional files that explain what the every business is, what we care about, how we like to work together. It has some like reviewer agents inside of it that are all informed by how compound engineering works. Inside of compound Engineering, Kieran's plugin, there is a compound engineering review step. Once you do some work that reviews for like security and a few different things that are oftentimes not as helpful for like I'm doing a strategic plan for a go to market initiative. And so inside of here there's like a fork for it for strategic alignment with the company goals for data, data accuracy. And having that inside of this folder means that as I'm making plans I can get reviews from the model in like a targeted way. Um, and so the first thing I wanted to show is like how I was talking to our editor in chief Kate yesterday to show her like how I would recommend getting started in Codex. And this is my recommended prompt. I'm happy to put it in the chat for people. We can put it in the email as well. And so all I did was I'm putting in the prompts here. I only have posted panelist access, so I'll send it later or something.
- [16:46]
A
Can't read it. Okay, yeah, maybe read it out. We can all agree that housing is expensive. Rent or mortgage, doesn't matter what you're paying. It stings every month, but Bilt can make it feel a little better. Bilt started out by rewarding members for their rent. Now, as of 2026, BILT members can also earn points on mortgage payments wherever they live. Every housing payment earns points you can use toward flights with top travel partners like United and Hyatt, Lyft rides, Amazon.com purchases and so much more. This is actually pretty cool and I have some friends that use this and like it a lot. Something that's underrated is that BILT members also get access to a neighborhood concierge. They can make restaurant reservations, book fitness classes and find new local spots, all while still rewarding you at 45,000 merchant partners. It's like having a personal assistant baked into where you live. It's simple. Being a renter and now owning a home is better with built make sure to use our URL so they know we sent you. And now back to the episode.
- [17:42]
B
Yeah, yeah, okay, I can zoom in as well I think. There we go. So through the plugin tool with Codex I went in and like did the manual clicks to connect all of the tools I use every day like Gmail, Slack, Notion and then I went to a new chat inside of this folder that was built through cloud code. Cloud code built this whole every growth OS system. There's a Claude MD file in there and it's saved locally. It's also synced and pushed to GitHub. And so I just opened that project inside of Codex when I started working here and I start a compound engineering brainstorm workflow because it is again just kind of like a thing I reach for of let's think about this thing together, me and the model. And basically what I said is like go take a look at the things I use the most which are Notion, Slack and Gmail and think of some automations that would help me with my work. I find that when I'm trying something new, whether it's a model or an app, having an agent, having a very smart frontier model, tell me how to use it, tell me what it should do is exactly where I want to start rather than thinking of it myself. I usually start here. Sometimes I will describe a very specific problem but this is very helpful for me and I think a good generic prompt for people to start with. And Codex comes back, it looks at what's going on for me and for the company right now and I thought these were really good that like it has this kind of follow up radar. This is a big thing that happens with people who do knowledge work, who do partnerships, who do social media marketing, that there's all this stuff coming at you across a Bunch of different sources. Like, what if it handled the triage for you? What if it had this kind of like command sensor? When we run a camp or an event, which usually requires a bunch of moving pieces and moving parts like Dan mentioned, for recruiting and hiring, we don't use a tool like Ashby or something. We kind of have it all synced through Notion because apps like this and agents can kind of like handle a lot of the pipeline and tracking work for us. And you can just ask it to automate it for you. And so it does that and it asks me like, which ones look good? What do you want to tweak for the, for the sake of this demo, I didn't give it any real feedback. I was like, looks good. And this is actually the thing I've always been most impressed with Codex for and for the models is that it's like, great, I made this automation for you. And I do find that they just work incredibly well. They require very little tweaking to be like, this is a thing I would and do use every day of. There's this set of instructions that it comes up with based on what it knows about me. I can change when it runs, I can give it additional insights, I can connect it to other things, but mostly it just works. There's. There's one that works for me that just at the end of each day now compiles all of the stuff that I haven't responded to yet, drafts the replies and we can kind of like knock it out together of what to say or like, actually all I need to do is just give like a thumbs up slack reaction to something and it'll do. That for me is kind of like a, like a dumb agent. Like I think of agents, like this is like the dumb ones that just do the right thing every time and then the smart ones, like an open claw or a plus one, the products we have coming, that's like, you'll work back and forth with it and like have it have like a. More of like a creative strategic partner. And Codex is good at building both. And I can, I can show kind of like the smart agent set up. But if someone is looking to be like, can I see what this thing can do to help me with knowledge work? I would start here in like a brainstorming automation state, because it is. And I think you'll also be surprised by how fast it is. And you'll be like, oh, I'm starting to get what this thing could do.
- [21:34]
A
This is so sick. Your Codex usage is far surpassing mine. In terms of interestingness, I'm getting a lot of ideas. I want to just actually pause here. Normally we take questions at the end, but I think it would be kind of interesting if you have a question about what Austin has just showed. It would be nice to let people come up and just ask a question or two just to see what the vibe of the room is like. So please raise your hand if you have a question and we will call on you. Margaret, welcome. Please introduce yourself and ask your question.
- [22:13]
C
Hi, can you hear me? I'm Margaret. I'm in Plymouth. And my question is, what does your review step look like? So it's saying don't send, post, archive, or modify without explicit approval. So what does that look like? Is that, like, do you call up, say, hey, let's do the review flow now, or is it doing push notifications to your phone, or what? Thanks.
- [22:39]
B
Yeah, so for this, what I prefer, and I was actually talking to a friend at dinner last night who said they did the same thing on their own. They came up with this too. Is like, everything. I. I work primarily in Codex. I do all the drafting and setup in Codex. And then it's helpful for my brain to have the final review step actually live in the external app. So it will draft all the Slack messages and then I can go to Slack, where Slack has that, like, draft reply tab, and I can go and knock them out. And I do find that it, like, freshens up my. My brain a bit to be like, here's where I'll just make sure that this is what I want to send to a human being. Same thing for email. It, like, creates all of these drafts in. In Gmail and I'll actually go open Gmail and look at them and knock them out. I. I know some other people who just have it actually come up inside of Codex and they're like, yeah, sure, send it. It looks good there. I do the same thing for strategic planning. It pushes to a either proof doc, the, like, agent friendly markdown file that Dan made, or a notion doc. I use them for some different things and I just like, for, like, the last pass before humans engage with it to step away from this agentic space and have a final check in another surface. That's really the only time that I'm, like, leaving the app to do something.
- [24:03]
C
That's brilliant. Thank you.
- [24:04]
A
Sweet. All right, we'll do one more and then we'll keep going. Alex, please introduce yourself and ask your question.
- [24:13]
D
Hi, my name is Alex. I'm a musician and I do a Lot of gigs and get emails from clients all the time. So I have to sort my leads from, you know, my newsletters and all that informational stuff. So how do you make sure that you prompt Codex to keep those emails safe for me, the ones that, you know, that require a personalized response. And, and I just want to make sure that, you know, I don't send something that, you know, loses me money or something.
- [24:48]
B
Yeah. So for me personally, I rely a lot on Quora, the internal, like the, the app that Kieran runs at every. For like the AI email assistant that's a part of the. Every subscription. It's. It's really helpful now that inside of Quora there is a, like CLI and an API connector that I can work in Codex and tell it, tell Quora, which is managing my email filtering and my email rules, what I want and what I value. The way I do that is the same thing I would recommend whether you use Quora or not, which is to have the agent interview you to get an understanding of what the rules should be. I always find that I get a better result rather than saying what I think the rules should be. And so I'll do a brain dump using monologue or speech to text app saying, here's the problem I'm facing. My email's a mess. Let's figure out how to triage it. I think it would work perfectly well if you wanted to try starting it as an automation in Codex or a rule in Codex of saying like, I think these are the things I want to make sure I get. I think these are the rules I want to set. Like never send anything for me, only draft. I think I want to go through all emails at 3pm on weekdays, but go take a look at all my email. Go do a search, spawn sub agents to do a search. I'm always telling Codex to spawn sub agents to do different types of work across different workflows and then come back with a plan. Come back with a plan for like how you're going to set up my email. And then you could read the plan and see, oh, it looks like it's actually gonna brief or summarize or auto archive something that might lead to making money for you and that's where you can tweak it. And then the other step I take is that I set reminders for myself and I use todoist for all of my like reminder task tracking. It's also connected to Codex so I can just message Codex or message my openclaw and say like, just add this reminder to my schedule to to check how the new automation is working and like do do an audit of it. So you can see like it's been 72 hours. Let's see if I'm. See if I've missed anything. You can prompt the model to see like what have you been archiving and I find that really helpful. But I'm really excited by all of the work our product GMs at every have been doing to make it so that I can just prompt Codex or cloud code or inside of cursor, any agent to manipulate those apps how I want. It works really well with our other tools also.
- [27:35]
A
Thanks Alex. I will add to that one of the things that we found basically because Austin started doing it, I was like, oh, that's really interesting is that Austin started we have plus Ones, which is our hosted openclaw and Austin started setting up his plus ones with codecs and cloud code and realized that it's just a much better experience. So rather than for example the earlier version of Ones, we had like a whole dashboard and a whole onboarding experience where you had to kind of manually click a bunch of buttons and give it a lot of context. It's much easier if we just expose plus ones via a cli to Codex or cloud code and then you can just talk to Codex and it will take everything it knows about you from your computer and your past conversations and throw it into, throw it into a plus one setup and Austin showing this and it's. It's like a, it's really powerful and it's, it's part of what I'm saying about how the world is changing when you assume every user has access to an agent like this. Because we don't have to have a settings dashboard, we don't have to have an onboarding experience, we don't have to gather as much context manually. It can just be given to us for free by Codex. And that's really interesting.
- [28:52]
B
Yeah. One of my favorite use cases was I got, I got really inspired by this interview Clairvaux did with Lenny where she said how much of a breakthrough she had when she stopped trying to just use an individual open claw as like a master super charged open claw and had this suite of six like specified open claws. I think that applies to any kind of like agent, like there's the new chatgpt, like provisional agents, like I, I got hooked on that. I think Claire's point was really good and my path towards making this suite of agents to help with the growth function at every was Just going to Codex, going to this folder. I actually just sent it the transcript of Claire's interview with Lenny and said like I want to do this too given everything you know about me and my work, make a plan to suggest six agents that we should provision into our Slack. Consider the fact that we might want to make some of them notion custom agents which I find work really well. It's just like do the same thing every day, every time. Some of them might need to be smarter automations but like do that, come up with a plan. The plan it made was really good and like I tweaked it a bit after seeing it but there was that and then now I have this suite of six agents in our, in our Slack that, that work really well for me. They still break. Like I find when you're making open clause and personal agents right now like they're going to, you should accept they're going to break a bit. But the really powerful thing is that rather than going back and forth with the agent or getting frustrated, I just go to Codex and I'm like I either screenshot or I can add Slack in Codex and say like go find this conversation where the stupid thing happened and fix it. And it does a really good job of just like changing the architecture of the agent and making a fix from there.
- [30:39]
A
I love that. Yeah, it's just a, it's such a, that's just a step change in how you work. And now, now I want to paste that clear interview too.
- [30:49]
B
I want to, I want to show one, I want to show one thing that I like. This is like kind of actually my favorite way to use this stuff for, for knowledge work. It's a thing that I like wish I had for so much of my career because this is one of the most like time consuming to me like frustrating things about, about knowledge work is that we are doing a real go to market market public launch for plus one soon. We're very excited about it and we've been having a bunch of internal meetings and Slack conversations around like how are we taking this to market? What is the strategy? What are we going to do? And we've done all of the work that kind of like only humans can do. The marketing case, the business case, the narratives and stuff. Not all of it is as refined as it needs to be because it still needs to be refined, but it's all sitting somewhere. And I had all these plans this week to make the go to market plan which is like one thing I'm responsible for and an inevitable thing that happens, that happens at everyone's job is like all this stuff came up, like, I've got to do interviews for hiring. We found out the release date for the new ChatGPT model. And so I had a day, I think it was Tuesday, in between meetings where I'm just kind of like, I'm prompting Codex this way. Hey, I, I kind of done most of the work, right. Like in our notion, every meeting is recorded in a single place and all the transcripts are there. We've cannot, we've talked about this a bunch in Slack. I have a template for a go to market plan that I really like and I can go to Codex and say like, can you just make the plan? And in my head what I'm thinking is like, maybe it'll get like a 6 out of 10 or a 7 out of 10 and we can keep nudging and I can keep like going along and so does that. What I'm asking for is like, why don't you start by doing the compound engineering brainstorm step to just ship a proof doc and I can see how close you are. And one thing that it doesn't really do super well unless I tell it to and I want to install this as like a workflow is that it doesn't go read our calendar of upcoming posts and launches. And so as it was going, I was like, oh, you always forget this. This is the message I'm sending of like actually look at everything that's scheduled because I have to account for that in the go to market plan. And then it makes a, it makes a plan as a proof doc. I went and looked at it and I was like, again, I maybe have five minutes in between meetings and I'm like, this is really good. Like you kind of have every, you have the architecture enough that I want you to like factor in one other change and then just shift the plan to notion. And the plan it shipped to Notion, I was reading it and I was like, this is basically 80 to 90% of the way there. And that's not because I'm relying on the model to come up with our go to market strategy. It's that I'm relying on the model to look at all of the things that we've already said and thought about the go to market strategy, piece it together and then review it. Right? Come with what will work, what's not. There's a lot of important context loading that happens here where like it knows what our target ICP is, it knows what our goals are, it knows how we think about narrative positioning. And before this was possible, the only thing I could have done was either block off a whole day to sit and do this or get done with my work for the day at like 6 or 7 and then stay up all night writing this. And this has been such a game changer for me. And the other part of it that I think I found is really helpful is that I don't make this plan for humans. I make this plan for humans and agents and primarily for humans to understand through agents. And so when I sent it to the team working on the go to market, they can read it and it's digestible to humans. But the thing that it's really helpful for is it's the full plan sectioned off all in one. And so Brandon, our COO who's deep in this product, can ask his plus one can ask Codex. You know, it's called code. Like let me know what Austin's plan is, like summarize it for me, let me know the business case. Brandon has to come up with the pricing modeling for the plan so he can work with an agent against the plan. And as someone who spent so much time in my career thinking about like literally how the, the proposal or go to market document looks like, how is it going to look when I present to the CEO like this two page plan for, for like a, for a budget I'm asking for like is it going to make sense to their eyes and like really fine tuning stuff. Giving up on that and just saying like is the plan really good and is it going to make sense to like Dan's agent, if he approves it to me, makes me work faster. It makes the work better. It means that I don't have to think about all this like kind of dumb stuff that doesn't matter that like it's to me a much more like powerful and fun way to work.
- [35:45]
A
I totally, totally agree with that. You said so many things that are interesting there. The first one is just normalized sending agent documents around. And that's why we have proof. It's just such an easy way to send the markdown documents that we generate to each other and to review them together. And it's like I think there's this whole strand of AI stuff that's like make AI write in your voice. We even do this with spiral. But there's this other strand of just like normalize AI writing because I would actually prefer to read your agent's writing than your writing in a lot of cases because I know that it's just easier for you to get all that, that thinking together in a format I can read if you, if you have your agent write it. The thing I care about is do you stand by it? Have you thought about it? And if I talk to you about it, will it be clear that if I talk about a particular bullet point in it, like you've thought that through and as long as we have the trust that that's going to be the case, then I absolutely prefer the agent
- [36:43]
D
version in the future. Humans face a new problem. What do you do when your computer is doing your work for you? 1 Answer Take a Claude walk an idea by Every. Every the only subscription you need to stay at the edge of AI.
- [37:06]
B
Totally. Like my friend Rachel Carden who runs the great like substack newsletter, Liquid Bio about social media had had a really good piece this week about frustrations for people working in social for like this pressure they feel that everything has to run through AI and the quality going down. And one reason why is that there's that dichotomy of like, what do you actually stand behind? Like, are you running the something through AI and you like, you know, maybe your manager did it and they don't even know what it, what it said. And the thing I love about working at Every is like you, you show up to a meeting, you, you've like shared an AI written document ahead of time and the expectation is that you're going to stand behind all of it, that someone will ask a question of what's in that document. And you, if you say like, oh, I didn't even know that was in there, it's like you're, you're, you're exposed. Right. But the other nice thing is that we continue to keep investing in skills and workflows and tools to kind of ensure that never happens. Like, I have rules inside of this project file to be like, if, don't, don't add anything that I haven't like said in another context. I want your suggestions. Send your suggestions to me in the chat, but don't put it in a document. And like, depending on how big the context gets, these models can follow or not follow those rules. Which is another reason why I always leave Codex for that final review before it goes to the like humans I work with.
- [38:37]
A
Yeah. And I think that that last thing that, that, that I want to point out that you said is like a lot of the time that you spend working is about taking, thinking you've already done and putting it into a form that other people can read and Consume. And the important part is doing the thinking. There. There is something obviously about, like, I love writing. Writing is a good way of thinking. And sometimes you actually want to do the writing yourself because you want to think about it for certain types of things and certain types of people. But there's a lot of stuff, like company strategy, where a lot of the thinking happens out loud in meetings. And there's also times like, for example, I'm writing something that's sort of like a. It's like a retrospective on the last three and a half years of AI and like where I think we're going. And that's so hard to sit down and write, but it's much easier to just like, dictate. So I just took a monologue note where I was just like saying stuff. And it. I'm using the AI to help me like, figure out what I'm really trying to say. And in those cases, I think it's just so nice to record stuff, give Codex access to everything, and then just have it spit out a strategy doc and go through it to make sure it's stuff you agree with. But it's such a time saver. And especially if you're someone who like Austin or like me, like, you're in meetings a lot and so you don't necessarily have huge chunks of time in your day to like go do a big strategy document because you're just trying to stay on top of whatever's happening. It helps you do that in the cracks of your day and do a lot of that thinking. And I just. I love it for that.
- [40:12]
B
Yeah, me too. I want to show one more thing before we get into more questions because I want to show kind of like a more mix of knowledge, work and engineering y stuff that would never have been possible without these kinds of tools. And that I really love Codex for, which is I've been rebuilding our KPI tracker every week. I'll just like show it here for a bit. So we have so many different parts of our business at every. And it's very difficult to get all of those data points in one source of truth in a traditional tool like even Postdoc, which I really like. And a lot of our data runs through it to get one dashboard that is again, both human and human and agent facing that is up to date with all of the metrics we care about. I haven't found a great solution for just like going to Postdoc and having it do it. So I've been rebuilding our KPI sheets inside of notion with the goal in mind of anyone can point their agent to look at it and see how are new paid subscription trials doing, how are page views doing, how is monologue iOS MRR doing all versus plan, all of this stuff? Because one, it helps you work as a human, but it also really helps you automate agentic work. So that you can say, like, if your agencies that we're tracking behind on SEO for a keyword we should be winning on, they can go just like ship a bunch of landing pages for us to try to win more on it if the source of truths are good. And so I have been doing this big, kind of like to me, complex workflow problem in Codex of let's build the sheet together, let's have it live in a Notion database that all of our agents can point at. And I've done a bunch of different versions of it. The first version was like, can Codex one shot this right? Like, it has all the API keys, it has everything. I'm happy to give it the context on how we measure MRR and everything. And each time it was like a little off. It was like maybe 5 to 10% off of the formatting, the numbers, the framing. And our MRR number can't be 5% off. Like, we can't run a business with a source of truth is even 3% off. It has to be just exactly right. And so the thing that I forced myself to do, and it's weird now, I'm like, it feels so stupid that I have to do this, but it makes sense, is like, I'm going column by column, end to end, to ensure each column is exactly right and defensible. Because it's the only way that we can run and grow the business reliably and especially the only way we can confidently unleash agents to go take actions against what's happening in that KPI sheet. And it's so interesting to me that I'm frustrated that I have to do this, that the model can't do it for me. But it's just because of how powerful these models are gotten that I expect it to be able to do it. And this is a thing where I'm like, it's using Notion's workers tool, which is this dev tool, to build always on tool calls of our stripe, of our social. It's like creating little scripts and stuff, all stuff I don't really understand, but I understand the outputs. I understand that the output is a notion database that updates every six hours with all of our metrics. And it's just Nice that I can do that. And I don't need to hire a consultant to do it or like, I don't need to like, yeah, take away from our, like our engineers, times that work on our data. Like, I can do this now and I can do it just by like prompting the model and understanding how the metrics are supposed to work.
- [43:59]
A
It's amazing. I can't wait. Is the. Do you think it'll be ready on Monday?
- [44:04]
B
It'll be ready on Monday. Yeah.
- [44:06]
A
Yeah.
- [44:06]
B
Feeling really good.
- [44:07]
A
Because we've been, I mean, just having. It turns out that figuring out how much money you're making and how much you've grown is truly a philosophical question, you know, and you actually do need to like go in and like set that frame. And so we've been dealing with an outdated sheet because it's like, it's pulling numbers. But are the numbers correct? You know, even, even outside of AI and there's no one way to, for example, measure your mrr. You just want to do it the same way every time. So you have to decide. And that's kind of, it's kind of wild that it's like almost impossible to tell how much money you've made in an objective way. You have to just like pick. But anyway, that's just the way my brain works. I want to say, before we get into questions, one other thing that I use this for that was it like blew my mind from a knowledge work perspective is recruiting. So we're hiring a lot. And we were looking for an L and D head of L and D, someone to help us run courses. And there's this company in New York called General Assembly. And when I think about people who've run like really great courses about technology to teach people how to get hands on with like programming or design or anything like that, like, they're the company that I think of from the like 2010s in New York. And so I, my theory was that if we're hiring someone to do like build our courses, they would probably have a good person, probably would have worked at ga and Jason. Yes. Um, and I think J's quality has gone up and down. But at the beginning they were amazing. Um, and so what I did was I just said to Codex, hey, like, can you find, can you just get a list of GA alums? I'm like hiring an L and D director. And then I want you to filter and sort the list by people who have subsequently gotten into AI. And it did it, like, it just gave me a list of People. The first one I clicked on, it was like, I was like, this guy is perfect. And then I looked and he followed me on Twitter. So I just DM'd him. And like, I don't know if we're gonna end up working with him, but like, it was just one of those holy shit, light bulb moments where normally what we're doing is sorting through a ton of applications and like trying to find the right person. We're still gonna do that, but especially for any kind of like outbound effort, it can kind of find that needle in the haystack that you're looking for really, really well. So I highly, highly recommend. Okay, we've got about 10 minutes left and I want to take some more time for questions. So if you've got a question, please, please raise your hand. One thing that we have not gotten to actually is that if you are here, you are getting Codex credits. Austin, do you want to go through that really quick?
- [47:03]
B
Yes. So OpenAI has given us a code. I'm about to drop into the chat for 250 attendees of this camp to get a free month of ChatGPT Pro lights. That's about a hundred dollar value. And you can redeem it at this link that we will drop in the chat right now. Sick, Dan. I'm actually going to, I'm going to slack it to you so you can drop it in the chat because for some reason I don't have access.
- [47:34]
A
Okay, I'll do that. So, yes, this is, this is our gift to you as every subscribers. We try to do stuff like this all the time. We've been, we've given out. I think we've done cursor credits. We've done, we've done a lot, a lot of other stuff. We have more stuff like this coming. So we just want you to be able to try these tools, be at the edge with us and we just love having you as subscribers. So here is the link. It's $100. Oh, Notion. Yes, we did give out Notion. It's $100. And check it out. We will send it out in an email. May we. Actually, we may not send it out in an email because it's only 200 is limited to 250 people and that's pretty much exactly the number of people who are here. So if there's any left, we will send it. If there is one person, there's 251 people here. So there's. If that person. If you let us know, we'll figure something out for you. Interesting not available on my plan. Okay, we will have to deal with this. Let us, let us figure out what to do here. So correction, this is only if you do not have a plan. This is for new users and we'll try to get something for existing users and send it out as soon as we can. Cool. All right, let's do some questions. Rich, please ask your question.
- [49:19]
D
So I saw at the beginning you were using Compound Engineering as kind of part of your workflow. Are you using kind of like the off the shelf plugin or is there tweaks to it and kind of where does that work and maybe not work when you're outside of the, you know, kind of code creation workflow.
- [49:44]
B
So I find that there's no overwhelming need to fork your own version of compound engineering. I used it for a long time for all of my knowledge work and it was extremely powerful for me. And then maybe about two months ago, the main thing I noticed was reading the agent's response to especially the review stage of watching the reviewers that Kieran and Trevin had built that are very specific to engineering. I was like, oh this like the thing you'll see the agent do is say like I'm supposed to go through this review step. It looks like it's designed for engineering, it's thinking about security and front end design. When this is a go to market plan, the agent will then like change the path. The agent will be like, I'm going to review this for something else rather than reviewing it for security. And so the thing that I did was I went and forked a version of it that is actually publicly available on our GitHub called Compound Knowledge which is built exclusively from me. Taking the Compound Engineering plugin which is also public and you can go fork and going inside of. I think it started in cloud code. Now I update it in Codex and saying like I want to tweak this to general knowledge work. And this is the thing I was referencing around the like reviewers being much more specific to knowledge work around like strategic alignment and data accuracy. I think more than anything this is like a really fun way to learn and a fun way to like kind of like push yourself on using models. You're welcome just to go use this one. We'll include it in the, in the follow up email to the camp. But I think it's a cool like I learned a ton just by doing this. I had never made like a plugin like this before. And to make your own version of say you do like social media marketing and you want to make sure all the reviews go through your style guide, your like, past performance. I got a ton out of operating this way. If you just want the compound engineering to make your work better, it absolutely works really, really well for knowledge work. Just kind of out of the box.
- [51:59]
D
Got it. Yeah, no, interesting. Particularly using all the end of step pieces like compound. That. That's still apparently a valuable step for you.
- [52:13]
B
Yeah, the compound step is really valuable. We have inside of our notion a go to database of after you're done with a session, you can send the learnings from the session to actually a team wide shared compound source of truth. Whenever I'm done with any session in Codex or cloud code, the agents are instructed to ask me, should we compound this, save it somewhere for the learning and should we turn any workflow from the session into a skill so that we can just do it automatically each time?
- [52:49]
D
Got it. Cool. No, I'll check that out.
- [52:51]
A
Thanks.
- [52:52]
B
Cool.
- [52:58]
A
All right, Rory, please introduce yourself and ask your question.
- [53:02]
B
Hi, my name is Rory and I'm in your head. Is there anything about the way you work at every, like maybe taking some time after meetings, like ending them a few minutes early so that you can do those things that you'd recommend to teams that are adopting workflows like yours? Was that clear? Yeah, I think so. Like, but to say it back to you, like, what I'm hearing, which is like a very real challenge here, is that it's, it's so exciting and tempting and alluring to like, spend a lot of your day playing with stuff, also spend a lot of your day continuing to push on. Like, if I just get this automation right or this tool right, my work is going to be like a hundred times better and easier. And I actually find myself a lot, like on a lot of days, spending most of my time not in meetings, trying to build really good tools and automations that work well and not making the time to do the actual like, tasks that have to push the business forward. Like, like shipping the social posts for the day or whatever. And I, I don't really have like an awesome answer for it outside of the fact that like the, the playing around one is like kind of core to how we operate at every. It's. It's a thing that Dan, like pushes all of us to do. It's one reason why I love working here. It's also like, to me, the best way to learn and makes me better at everything I do. And then the, the, the only kind of like, guidance I've given myself is that like these Automations in Codex keep me on track to get the work done so that when I'm too deep in, in like playing around and building this like there's like a social automation tool I'm working on that I've been like deep in for a while. The Codex automations make it so that I like, you know, make sure Brandon gets what he needs for this like some like biz dev plan where we're doing. I do find myself over indexing on learning and playing because of how exciting and powerful the models have been and that more I have to continue to pull myself into the required day to day tasks and the urgent stuff that's happening.
- [55:23]
A
Yeah, and I also sort of read your question Rory and you tell me if this is wrong but as how do we do more of the AI stuff the more of the playing to even, to even get started on this stuff in our day to day if we're like busy all the time. And I. And what are the organizational practices that we have for that? And yeah, I just think like Austin said, it's just like a culture, it's a cultural thing. We just love playing around and that's like, that's part of our job. And I think there's this, there's this thing happening right now where the tools and the workflows are changing so fast that just focusing on how your job currently works, you can run as fast as possible and someone using a new tool with a new paradigm and a new workflow is just going to beat you by default. And so if you just give yourself some time to play around, it may feel like a waste of time, but you're leveling yourself up to a different game at a different level. And I think that's really important. And some of the organizational practices that we have to help people do that are really around. So one of the things we do twice a year is called think week and we just literally don't do any of our day to day work and we just spend a week together just like playing around with new stuff and building stuff and learning and being together and you don't necessarily have to do a whole week of that, but I think it's really good to maybe do that once a quarter for a day or something like that and just give people the time and space to if you can. Sweet. All right y'.
- [56:59]
B
All.
- [57:00]
A
So that is our program for today. Thank you for coming. We love seeing you, we love doing this with you. Remember, every is the only subscription you need to stay at the edge of AI. We would love it if today you would go tell one of your friends to go subscribe to every we want to get more people in here. We just think we're. We're right at this point, amazing point in history where we get to surf, ride this big wave together and figure it out. Together, together. And please, please tell your friends. See ya.
- [57:30]
B
Thanks, y'. All.
- [57:40]
E
Oh my gosh, folks, you absolutely, positively have to smash that, like, button and subscribe to AI and I. Why? Because this show is the epitome of awesomeness. It's like finding a treasure chest in your backyard, but instead of gold, it's filled with pure, unadulterated knowledge Bombs About Chat GPT Every episode is a roller coaster of emotions, insights, and laughter that will leave you on the edge of your seat craving for more. It's not just a show, it's a journey into the future with Dan Shipper as the captain of the spaceship. So do yourself a favor. Hit like smash, subscribe and strap in for the ride of your life. And now, without any further ado, let me just say, Dan, I'm absolutely, hopelessly in love with you.