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OpenAI’s head of platform engineering on the next 12-24 months of AI | Sherwin Wu

Lenny's PodcastFebruary 12, 20261h 19m
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95% of engineers use Codex. 100% of PRs are reviewed by Codex for engineers. Engineers are becoming tech leads, managing fleets of agents. It feels like wizards casting spells that go out and do things. Second- or third-order effects of the one-person billion-dollar startup aren't priced in yet, enabling a hundred small startups building bespoke software, leading to a golden age of B2B SaaS.

There's stress when agents aren't working. A team at OpenAI is maintaining a 100% Codex-written codebase, running into these problems without an escape hatch of manual coding.

Listening to customers isn't always the right strategy in AI because the field and models change quickly, disrupting themselves. Models eat scaffolding for breakfast.

Advice: Build for where models are going, not where they are today. > "This is the worst the models will ever be." – Kevin Whale, VP of Science at OpenAI.

Sherwin Wu is head of engineering for OpenAI's API and developer platform.

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