OpenAI Codex lead on the new shape of product work | Andrew Ambrosino
In a Nutshell
The core shift in product work is that implementation has become cheap, so taste, curation, and steering now determine outcomes—teams generate dozens of uncoordinated builds, and the bottleneck is identifying which attempts are worth folding in. AI accelerates coding far more than design because design feedback loops require human taste and novelty that current models lack, leaving an abstraction layer between visual output and coherent system design out of reach. The highest-value people combine high agency with strong taste to shepherd ideas from concept to production, and the winning organizations design processes that support both bottom-up exploration and ongoing optimization rather than trying to do both at once.
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90% of people at OpenAI use Codex. Not 90% of engineers. That's 90% of the entire company. The goal for Codex is to create the best desktop app that has ever existed. The quality bar had to be so high that there was never hesitation opening the app to do the next thing, making it the natural choice, similar to how people open a browser tab.
Since January, Codex usage has grown 6x with over 5 million weekly active users. Internally at OpenAI, nearly 100% of employees use Codex weekly, and that includes non-engineers.
Design is harder to grade because the human aspect of taste is part of the feedback mechanism needed, which remains out of reach with current technology.
Everybody at OpenAI is very agentic, has great ideas, and everybody's building everything. The implementation is actually not the expensive part anymore. It's taste.
The product process has inverted. Previously, research, ideation, and prototyping came before implementation because implementation was expensive, so teams tried to derisk everything upfront through documents, research, and prototypes. Now that has changed completely.
There are 90 different uncoordinated teams implementing and trying different approaches to the same feature. The curation process has become critical: of those 90 attempts, what is good about them, what should be folded into other aspects, how should they be framed, should they be part of another feature, how many segments should be in the toggle.
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