2026-01-13 00:03:09
Every Monday, host Claire Vo shares a 30- to 45-minute episode with a new guest demoing a practical, impactful way they’ve learned to use AI in their work or life. No pontificating—just specific and actionable advice.
Brought to you by:
Brex—The intelligent finance platform built for founders
Graphite—Your AI code review platform
Alexander Embiricos, the product lead for Codex at OpenAI, shares how AI coding agents are actually used in production—from simple fixes to shipping full apps. He breaks down the workflows that make Codex effective at scale, including structured planning with Plans.md, parallel development using Git worktrees, and automated code review across nearly every OpenAI repo. The conversation covers how Codex users dramatically outperformed non-users internally, how OpenAI built the Sora Android app in just 28 days, and what changed with the release of GPT-5.2. We also explore why context matters more than clever prompts, why the real bottleneck is increasingly human judgment rather than code generation, and how AI tools are evolving from standalone destinations into deeply embedded teammates inside existing workflows.
• 3 Advanced Codex Workflows for Faster, Smarter Development with OpenAI’s Alex Embiricos: https://www.chatprd.ai/how-i-ai/advanced-codex-workflows-with-openai-alex-embiricos
• How to Use OpenAI Codex to Understand and Modify a New Codebase: https://www.chatprd.ai/how-i-ai/workflows/how-to-use-openai-codex-to-understand-and-modify-a-new-codebase
• How to Architect Complex Software Projects with OpenAI’s Plans.md Technique: https://www.chatprd.ai/how-i-ai/workflows/how-to-architect-complex-software-projects-with-openai-s-plans-md-technique
• How to Manage Parallel Development with AI using Git Worktrees and Codex: https://www.chatprd.ai/how-i-ai/workflows/how-to-manage-parallel-development-with-ai-using-git-worktrees-and-codex
The productivity gap between power users and everyone else is significant. When roughly half of OpenAI was using Codex, those users were producing about 70% more PRs than non-users. Now virtually all technical staff use it: “We’re now at the point where nearly all of technical staff is using Codex constantly.”
Automated code review has become OpenAI’s most widely adopted Codex feature. It’s enabled on nearly every repo at the company and reviews almost all PRs: “The hit rate on these is really high. We built this feature so that it only points out issues that it’s very confident in, because human attention is so scarce, we really want to protect it.”
Structured planning is critical for complex tasks. OpenAI published a blog post about effective planning with AI that includes a meta-plan template (Plans.md) that helps Codex create thorough, milestone-based plans. This approach was key to building the Sora Android app in just 28 days: “With coding agents, it doesn’t get easier, but you just move way faster.”
Git worktrees are a powerful way to parallelize AI coding tasks. Instead of running conflicting changes in the same codebase or creating multiple copies manually, use Git worktrees: “Git has this really nice affordance called a worktree, which basically lets one Git instance track multiple copies of the codebase.” You can even ask Codex to create and manage these worktrees for you.
The new GPT-5.2 model can solve problems previous models couldn’t—often with significantly less thinking time. Alex cites an example of a bug that no previous model could fix but 5.2 “fought for 37 minutes and was like, ‘This is the bug.’ And then in fact, that was the bug and he got the bug fixed.” The model can also deliver strong results with significantly less thinking time than previous versions.
The limiting factor in AI productivity is increasingly about human direction, not code generation. “Now that we can just have ubiquitous code and we can basically prototype things trivially, the hard parts become deciding what actually should make it in, thinking what a product should do, knowing a customer actually.”
Context is everything when prompting AI. Alex recommends: “I don’t usually ask for things from the agent without giving context. So I’ll say, ‘Hey, I want you to change this UI from this to this so that users do this’ or ‘because we don’t want people to be confused about XYZ.’” He believes product managers often make the best prompters because they’re used to not being the expert.
Being polite to AI protects your own humanity. While not an official OpenAI stance, Alex believes: “I think it’s important to be polite to everyone. And I think that if you start not being polite to chat, I think it can wear off on you. And you just start not being polite to other people in your life.”
The future of AI tools is contextual integration rather than separate destinations. Features like side chat in Atlas and Codex in your IDE represent a shift toward AI understanding your environment: “For me, the idea of an agent that I don’t have to map myself to its world is really powerful. So side chat is that. Codex is that too, right? You launch it in a codebase and it’s in your environment. You don’t have to go to it.”
The harness (interface to the model) matters as much as the model itself. As models evolve rapidly, the harness needs to adapt to get the most out of each new capability: “Every time we ship a model, engineers from the Codex team will test it, think about it, talk to the research team. They’re working super-closely together to figure out how to make the most out of the model.”
▶️ Listen now on YouTube | Spotify | Apple Podcasts
If you’re enjoying these episodes, reply and let me know what you’d love to learn more about: AI workflows, hiring, growth, product strategy—anything.
Catch you next week,
Lenny
P.S. Want every new episode delivered the moment it drops? Hit “Follow” on your favorite podcast app.
2026-01-12 20:03:51
Alexander Embiricos, the product lead for Codex at OpenAI, shares practical workflows for getting the most out of this AI coding agent. In this episode, he demonstrates how both non-technical users and experienced engineers can leverage Codex to accelerate development, from making simple code changes to building production-ready applications. Alex walks through real examples of using Codex in VS Code and terminal environments, implementing parallel workflows with Git worktrees, and creating detailed implementation plans for complex projects. He also reveals how OpenAI uses Codex internally, including how they built the Sora Android app in just 28 days, and offers insights on automated code review and the future of AI-assisted development.
Listen or watch on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts
How to set up and use Codex in VS Code and terminal environments for both simple and complex coding tasks
A practical workflow for running multiple Codex instances in parallel using Git worktrees to avoid conflicts
How to create detailed implementation plans using the Plans.md technique for complex engineering projects
Why context is critical when prompting Codex—and how to provide the right information for better results
How OpenAI uses automated code review to accelerate development while maintaining high quality standards
The key differences between vibe coding for prototypes versus building production-ready applications with AI
How the new GPT-5.2 model improves Codex’s capabilities with faster reasoning and better problem-solving
Brex—The intelligent finance platform built for founders
Graphite—Your AI code review platform
https://chatprd.ai/how-i-ai/advanced-codex-workflows-with-openai-alex-embiricos
(00:00) Introduction to Alex and Codex
(02:06) Getting started with Codex
(04:54) Using Codex for parallel tasks
(07:34) Understanding Git worktrees
(09:51) Terminal shortcuts and command-line efficiency
(12:16) How OpenAI built the Sora Android app with Codex
(15:37) Using PLANS.md for problem solving
(20:23) Using Codex for prototyping
(22:22) Deciding between what needs a plan and what doesn’t
(26:42) How to multiply the impact of Codex
(28:08) Implementing automated code review with GitHub
(30:01) Codex adoption at OpenAI
(32:08) Challenges and innovations in AI integration
(36:38) Recap and the Codex harness
(43:49) Atlas and personalized AI interactions
(49:09) Conclusion and final thoughts
• Codex: https://openai.com/blog/openai-codex
• VS Code: https://code.visualstudio.com/
• Cursor: https://cursor.com/
• Git: https://git-scm.com/
• GitHub: https://github.com/
• Atlas: https://openai.com/atlas
• ChatGPT: https://chat.openai.com/
• Slack: https://slack.com/
• Linear: https://linear.app/
• Sora app: https://openai.com/blog/sora
• How we used Codex to build Sora for Android in 28 days: https://openai.com/index/shipping-sora-for-android-with-codex/
• Using PLANS.md for multi-hour problem solving: https://cookbook.openai.com/articles/codex_exec_plans
• GPT-5.2 model: https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-5-2/
• SWE-bench: https://openai.com/index/introducing-swe-bench-verified/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/embirico
ChatPRD: https://www.chatprd.ai/
Website: https://clairevo.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clairevo/
Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].
2026-01-11 21:31:22
Aishwarya Naresh Reganti and Kiriti Badam have helped build and launch more than 50 enterprise AI products across companies like OpenAI, Google, Amazon, and Databricks. Based on these experiences, they’ve developed a small set of best practices for building and scaling successful AI products. The goal of this conversation is to save you and your team a lot of pain and suffering.
Listen on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts
Two key ways AI products differ from traditional software, and why that fundamentally changes how they should be built
Common patterns and anti-patterns in companies that build strong AI products versus those that struggle
A framework they developed from real-world experience to iteratively build AI products that create a flywheel of improvement
Why obsessing about customer trust and reliability is an underrated driver of successful AI products
Why evals aren’t a cure-all, and the most common misconceptions people have about them
The skills that matter most for builders in the AI era
Merge—The fastest way to ship 220+ integrations
Strella—The AI-powered customer research platform
Brex—The banking solution for startups
Get 15% off Aishwarya and Kiriti’s Maven course, Building Agentic AI Applications with a Problem-First Approach, using this link: https://bit.ly/3V5XJFp
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/areganti
• GitHub: https://github.com/aishwaryanr/awesome-generative-ai-guide
• X: https://x.com/aish_reganti
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sai-kiriti-badam
• X: https://x.com/kiritibadam
• LevelUp Labs: https://levelup-labs.ai/
• Why your AI product needs a different development lifecycle: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/why-your-ai-product-needs-a-different
• Booking.com: https://www.booking.com
• Research paper on agents in production (by Matei Zaharia’s lab): https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.04123
• Matei Zaharia’s research on Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=I1EvjZsAAAAJ&hl=en
• The coming AI security crisis (and what to do about it) | Sander Schulhoff: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-coming-ai-security-crisis
• Gajen Kandiah on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gajenkandiah
• Rackspace: https://www.rackspace.com
• The AI-native startup: 5 products, 7-figure revenue, 100% AI-written code | Dan Shipper (co-founder/CEO of Every): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/inside-every-dan-shipper
• Semantic Diffusion: https://martinfowler.com/bliki/SemanticDiffusion.html
• LMArena: https://lmarena.ai
• Artificial Analysis: https://artificialanalysis.ai/leaderboards/providers
• Why humans are AI’s biggest bottleneck (and what’s coming in 2026) | Alexander Embiricos (OpenAI Codex Product Lead): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/why-humans-are-ais-biggest-bottleneck
• Airline held liable for its chatbot giving passenger bad advice—what this means for travellers: https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20240222-air-canada-chatbot-misinformation-what-travellers-should-know
• Demis Hassabis on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/demishassabis
• We replaced our sales team with 20 AI agents—here’s what happened | Jason Lemkin (SaaStr): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/we-replaced-our-sales-team-with-20-ai-agents
• Socrates’s quote: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_unexamined_life_is_not_worth_living
• Noah Smith’s newsletter: https://www.noahpinion.blog
• Silicon Valley on HBO Max: https://www.hbomax.com/shows/silicon-valley/b4583939-e39f-4b5c-822d-5b6cc186172d
• Clair Obscur: Expedition 33: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1903340/Clair_Obscur_Expedition_33/
• Wisprflow: https://wisprflow.ai
• Raycast: https://www.raycast.com
• Steve Jobs’s quote: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/463176-you-can-t-connect-the-dots-looking-forward-you-can-only
• When Breath Becomes Air: https://www.amazon.com/When-Breath-Becomes-Paul-Kalanithi/dp/081298840X
• The Three-Body Problem: https://www.amazon.com/Three-Body-Problem-Cixin-Liu/dp/0765382032
• A Fire Upon the Deep: https://www.amazon.com/Fire-Upon-Deep-Zones-Thought/dp/0812515285
Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].
Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed.
2026-01-11 01:18:36
👋 Hello and welcome to this week’s edition of ✨ Community Wisdom ✨ a subscriber-only email, delivered every Saturday, highlighting the most helpful conversations in our members-only Slack community.
2026-01-06 21:45:22
👋 Hey there, I’m Lenny. Each week, I answer reader questions about building product, driving growth, and accelerating your career. For more: Lenny’s Podcast | How I AI | Lennybot | Lenny’s Reads | Favorite AI and PM courses | Favorite public speaking course.
P.S. Insider subscribers get a free year of 19 premium products: Lovable, Replit, Gamma, n8n, Bolt, Devin, Wispr Flow, Descript, Linear, PostHog, Superhuman, Granola, Warp, Perplexity, Raycast, Magic Patterns, Mobbin, ChatPRD, and Stripe Atlas (terms apply). Subscribe now.
Anthropic co-founder Ben Mann’s words continue to ring in my ears: “This is as normal as it’s going to be. It’s going to be much weirder very soon.”
In the swirl of so much change, there’s a growing divide between the people who understand where things are going and are benefiting from it, and those who don’t and will have an increasingly hard time. More and more, I see my mission as making sure you’re in the first group.
Through deeply researched essays, in-depth interviews with world-class operators working at the bleeding edge, a thriving online and offline community, free access to the latest and greatest AI tools, and the surprisingly helpful Lennybot (trained on all of the newsletter and podcast content, it’s very good!), your subscription gives you a giant leg-up on the fast-approaching weird future.
To help you get ready for the sure-to-be-absurd year ahead, below are the 25 best and most popular posts from the past year, plus a few all-time classics. I know I put out a lot of content, so if you’ve still got 50 tabs open with posts you’ve been planning to read, close them all and check out the stuff below.
As always, I’d love your frank and honest feedback on what you love and what I could do better in the coming year. You can always find me at [email protected].
Finally, to keep myself accountable, here’s a quick look back at my goals for 2025:
Launching a new newsletter or podcast vertical ✅ — How I AI has been a huge hit (go Claire!), and I’m in the process of exploring the next addition.
Lenny and Friends Summit 2.0 🟡 — Stay tuned for some news on this 👀
Making the paid subscription an absolute no-brainer by adding more killer perks ✅ — The Product Pass has been a wild success, and wait till you see what we’ve got coming this year.
Launching a product ❌ — I decided it wasn’t the right year for this.
Above all else, continuing to deliver a high-quality newsletter and podcast every week ✅ — I think we achieved this, though I can always do better.
Now here are my goals for 2026:
Keep increasing the quality and value of the newsletter (possibly cutting back the quantity a bit)
Invest more into supporting the community around the newsletter and podcast
Launch an additional newsletter or podcast vertical
Lenny and Friends Summit 2.0 👀👀👀
Carefully balance content cadence between AI and non-AI, IC vs. manager vs. VPs, and product management vs. adjacent skills
Here we go.
We’ve got some very exciting new products coming to the Product Pass in a few weeks, and to make room, a few current partners are rolling off the bundle: codes for Descript, Raycast, and Superhuman will expire on January 29th.
If you’ve been meaning to try any of these amazing products, this is your chance.
Head to LennysProductPass.com to grab your codes, and activate them by following the redemption instructions by January 29th. (Note: Descript is Insider-only, so if you’re at the Annual tier it’ll only be there if you grabbed it already.)
While you’re there, check out the other products too. Supplies are limited and deals do expire, so don’t miss out on the tools that you want to try out.
And now, the top posts from the last year . . .
An AI glossary—The most common AI terms explained, simply
Everyone should be using Claude Code more—How to get started with Claude Code, and 50 ways non-technical people are using it in their work and life
What people are vibe coding—Real-life examples of what non-technical people are building to inspire your own vibe-coding journey
25 proven tactics to accelerate AI adoption at your company—Practical advice from AI-forward companies like Shopify, Ramp, Zapier, Duolingo, Intercom, and Whoop
A guide to AI prototyping for product managers—How to turn your idea into a working prototype in minutes
Make product management fun again with AI agents—A guide to building AI agents
Product manager is an unfair role. So work unfairly.—How to thrive in “the great flattening” by redefining work norms
State of the product job market in 2025—There’s a lot to be optimistic about
The definitive guide to mastering the analytical and product sense interviews—A step-by-step playbook to help you ace your PM interviews
The ultimate guide to negotiating your comp—The step-by-step guide that’s helped hundreds of leaders secure life-changing compensation
The Magic Loop—A framework for rapid career growth
Why you’re so angry at work (and what to do about it)—A practical framework for transforming big feelings into wisdom
Why no productivity hack will solve your overwhelm—How the Internal Family Systems model can help you listen to your inner wisdom and get unstuck
How tech’s most resilient workers handle burnout—Introducing ARMOR: a new framework building on our tech worker sentiment survey insights
A builder’s guide to living a long and healthy life, with Justin Mares—For something a little different
2026-01-06 00:03:32
Every Monday, host Claire Vo shares a 30- to 45-minute episode with a new guest demoing a specific, practical, and impactful way they’ve learned to use AI in their work or life. No pontificating—just practical and actionable advice.
Brought to you by Brex—The intelligent finance platform built for founders
In this episode, Wade Foster (co-founder & CEO of Zapier) shares the actual way he’s leading real AI adoption inside Zapier—by using it hands-on himself to understand company culture, evaluate candidates, and find talent most recruiters never see. We get concrete workflows Wade uses everyday: building interview-evaluation agents, using tools like Grok to surface diamonds-in-the-rough candidates, and analyzing meeting transcripts to uncover Zapier’s “unspoken culture.” He also explains why AI fluency can’t be delegated, how leaders should create safe “play spaces” for experimentation, and why the definition of “top talent” is rapidly changing.
Biggest takeaways:
CEOs must do more than write an “AI memo.” Wade sees many executives fall into the “delegation trap”—writing a memo about AI adoption then expecting it to filter down through the organization. Instead, leaders should create “play spaces” like hackathons and show-and-tells where teams can experiment with AI tools without pressure.
You can build an interview evaluation agent in minutes. Wade demonstrated a simple Zapier agent that analyzes interview transcripts against job descriptions and company values, then recommends whether to advance candidates. This provides an unbiased second opinion that helps catch things human interviewers might miss.
Use Grok to find “diamonds in the rough” talent. While most recruiters focus on LinkedIn, Wade uses Grok to search X/Twitter and YouTube for potential candidates who match specific criteria. This surfaces people who might never appear in traditional recruiting channels—especially in communities that are active on these platforms.
Extract your “unspoken culture” from meeting data. Wade uses Granola’s meeting transcripts with a simple prompt to generate a document that reveals how the company actually operates—not just what’s in the official values doc. This uncovers specific behaviors and expectations that even the CEO hadn’t articulated, creating a powerful tool for hiring, onboarding, and performance management.
Top talent is still in demand everywhere. Despite AI transformation, Wade says Zapier remains “insatiable” for engineering talent and continues hiring across all functions. The difference is that “what it means to be top has changed”—the best people now leverage AI to multiply their impact.
Make AI fluency expectations explicit. Zapier has created rubrics that clearly define AI fluency expectations for different roles. This gives employees specific skills to develop rather than vague directives to “use more AI.”
AI adoption requires hands-on experience. When people actually use AI tools, “some of the fear goes away.” Users quickly discover both the capabilities and limitations, developing a more pragmatic view than the “boogeyman in the closet” portrayed in media narratives.
Use AI to test your stated values against reality. By analyzing how people actually communicate and operate, AI can reveal whether a company’s lived culture aligns with its stated values—giving leaders powerful insights for course correction.
▶️ Listen now on YouTube | Spotify | Apple Podcasts
If you’re enjoying these episodes, reply and let me know what you’d love to learn more about — AI workflows, hiring, growth, product strategy, anything.
Catch you next week,
— Lenny
P.S. Want every new episode delivered the moment it drops? Hit “Follow” on your favorite podcast app.