RSS preview of Lenny Rachitsky

Rss preview of Blog of Lenny Rachitsky

I tested Grok Bot, Grok 4.6, and Cursor Origin - here’s my honest take

2026-08-19 05:30:31

This week I’m doing a solo breakdown of everything xAI and Cursor have shipped recently, including Grok Bot, Cursor Origin, and the Grok 4.6 model. I set up five Grok Bots, ran Grok 4.6 through my Claire Weighted Index against GPT-5.6 Sol, Claude Sonnet 5, and Opus 5, and spent time actually using Origin as a GitHub replacement. Here’s what’s worth your attention, what’s overhyped, and where I’m personally putting my time.

Listen or watch on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts

What you’ll learn:

The one Grok Bot feature no other agent platform has shipped yet, and why it made me actually use the product
What a week of real Grok Bot use revealed, and why I still reach for my OpenClaws
Whether Cursor Origin is a GitHub replacement or just a pretty redesign
Where Grok 4.6 landed on the Claire Index, and the one category where it genuinely surprised me

Brought to you by:

Bolt.new—Turn your idea into a real product

Jira AI SDLC—Get your tokens’ worth with Jira

In this episode, we cover:

(00:00) Why everyone’s quietly switching to Grok

(01:52) Grok Bot overview and setup

(03:22) My 5 Grok Bots

(04:30) The killer feature: multi-account connectors

(06:07) Grok Bot’s virtual machine and how it actually works

(06:41) Experience overview

(07:35) What I don’t love about Grok Bot

(10:08) Grok Bot use cases and my honest verdict

(12:20) Cursor Origin: the agent-native GitHub replacement

(13:47) What Origin actually looks like in practice

(14:59) Why I’m not switching from GitHub yet

(17:42) What would get me to move over

(18:52) Grok 4.6 and the How I AI Vibe bench

(20:41) Claire Index results: where Grok 4.6 ranked

(23:03) Design evals: where Grok surprised me

(25:00) My conclusion and how I’m splitting my time now

Tools referenced:

• Grok Bot: https://x.ai/bot

• Cursor: https://cursor.com/home

• Cursor Origin: https://cursor.com/origin

• OpenClaw: https://openclaw.ai/

• GitHub: https://github.com

Where to find Claire Vo:

ChatPRD: https://www.chatprd.ai/

Website: https://clairevo.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clairevo/

X: https://x.com/clairevo

Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].

Announcing Lenny’s Jobs: The best place in the world to find, vet, and land your dream job

2026-08-18 23:40:06

👋 Hey there, I’m Lenny. Each week, I share deeply researched product, growth, and career advice. For more: Lenny’s Jobs | Lenny’s Podcast | How I AI | Lennybot | Become an AI-Native Builder and some other favorite AI/PM courses

Subscribe now

P.S. Get a full free year of Cursor, Notion, Replit, Lovable, Factory, Wispr Flow, Linear, ElevenLabs, PostHog, Brain.fm, Waking Up, and more, by becoming an Insider subscriber (while supplies last). Learn more.

My goal is to help you succeed in your career.

I’ve spent thousands of hours on my newsletter and podcast sharing advice on how to get better at your work. But all that advice doesn’t mean much if you don’t actually have a job—or work you’re excited about.

Over the past six months, I’ve been thinking long and hard about what more I can do to help people who are struggling to find a job they love.

Today I’m excited to announce the launch of Lenny’s Jobs—the best place in the world to find, vet, and land your dream job 🙌

What makes Lenny’s Jobs unique and awesome:

A laser focus on four builder roles at tech companies: product management, engineering, design, and growth/marketing. We focus exclusively on these roles because they’re what most of you are looking for—and because these roles are starting to meld together. We aggregate open roles from top startups and big tech companies, and unlike any other job directory, we vet every company we include and filter out ghost roles and generic staffing-agency posts. This is the highest-quality directory of open tech roles you’ll find anywhere.

Unlisted roles you won’t find on any other job site. Every month I poll my audience on X and LinkedIn for roles they’re hiring for, many of which aren’t listed elsewhere. Along with submissions from our private reader Slack community, we integrate these roles into the directory. Look out for the “Lenny’s Community” tag in the feed.

The Lenny 100. To help you prioritize your search, I’ve curated a list of the top 100 companies I’d most want to join if I were looking for a job. These are companies that IMHO have the highest talent density, are tackling the most ambitious problems, have the biggest upside potential—and are actively hiring. I’ll update this list regularly.

Custom-built AI tools embedded within each job post. For every role, you can quickly rate your fit, prep for the interview, develop an outreach plan, customize your resume, and more. I’m really excited about the potential here.

A custom-built AI interview and career coach. Incorporating Noam Segal’s incredible set of AI skills that readers have been raving about, the AI coach will help you with everything from building your pitch to doing mock interviews to analyzing and debriefing to handling compensation conversations and negotiating job offers. I don’t believe there’s anything out there like this, and we have some big ideas for where this coach can go. Try it out!

An AI agent that emails you the best new jobs for you. Tell us what you’re looking for and we’ll automatically notify you of newly posted jobs that would be a great fit. Set it up once and you’re all set. This is the only feature available exclusively for paid subscribers.

Rich company data and tech-specific filters. Every job post includes up-to-date data on company funding, layoff history, headcount growth, compensation, and employee sentiment, so you can quickly evaluate opportunities without tab-hopping across six different sites. Plus, more than 100 tech-specific search filters—including investors, valuation, and tech stack—help you find exactly what you’re looking for.
Curated interview and career resources. I’ve organized a small but powerful collection of my favorite third-party content, tools, and courses that have moved the needle for many people I know on interview prep, speaking confidence, choosing where to work, and more. I also share my favorite podcast episodes and newsletter posts on career and interviewing advice.

The site is free to use (and will continue to be), but paid Lenny’s Newsletter subscribers get higher AI feature limits, unlimited personalized results, and the proactive AI agent that notifies you about new jobs. To activate these benefits, first create a Lenny’s Jobs account, then link your paid subscription here.

A huge shout-out to Amit Taylor, founder of TrueUp, who I’ve partnered with on numerous State of the Product Job Market reports, for building this site with me. Also, a big thank-you to Ben Erez, Tal Raviv, and Noam Segal for tons of great feedback as this came together. We’re excited to get your feedback and keep making it better and more useful to you. And we’ve got some big plans:

Integrated white-glove recruiting services: direct intros between standout candidates and great companies
Personalized career and skills development: coaching, training, and curated recommendations for the best stuff out there
Ongoing state-of-the-job-market reports: data-backed updates on how the job market, roles, and skills are changing so that you can stay ahead

I don’t want to overpromise here, but I firmly believe there’s no better place for product managers, engineers, designers, and growth/marketing professionals to discover high-quality open roles.

Check out Lenny’s Jobs and let us know what you think.

P.S. See if you can find the Easter egg where you can watch the latest episode of Lenny’s Podcast while browsing the site.

If you’re finding this newsletter valuable, share it with a friend, and consider subscribing if you haven’t already. There are group discounts and gift options available.

Subscribe now

Sincerely,

Lenny 👋

🎙️ How I AI: How a solo founder used Codex and ChatGPT to launch a fashion brand without engineers

2026-08-17 23:03:16

How a solo founder used Codex and ChatGPT to launch a fashion brand without engineers | Yana Welinder

Listen now on YouTube • Spotify • Apple Podcasts

Brought to you by:

Merge—Connective infrastructure for production AI

Jira AI SDLC—Get your tokens’ worth with Jira

Yana Welinder is the solo founder of Yana Bana, an AI-native fashion brand she’s building without an engineering team. In this episode, she walks through how she uses ChatGPT and Codex to turn hand-drawn sketches into realistic product images, operate professional 3D fashion software, research and contact manufacturers, and build a complete e-commerce site with voting and payments.

Biggest takeaways:

The prompt is the spec, and the spec is everything. Before generating a single image, Yana creates a detailed “fashion prompt” describing the silhouette, the way the fabric should behave and move, and even the sound it should make. That upfront work leads to dramatically better results. The lesson applies far beyond fashion: the more clearly someone can define what “good” looks like, the better both AI and humans can deliver it.
For designers, following the vision matters more than producing something impressive. Many image models can create a beautiful garment, but it often looks like something that already exists. ChatGPT Images 2.0 stays much closer to Yana’s original sketches. For creative professionals with a specific point of view, accurately following the design is far more valuable than generating something flashy.
AI agents can make specialized software accessible without years of training. Yana used Codex to operate CLO, a professional 3D fashion design tool, and create the CAD files she needed for 3D printing, even though she had never learned to use the software herself. This points to a much bigger shift: people may no longer need to master every complicated tool before they can produce professional work with it.
AI is making previously impractical ideas possible. Yana designed a Ruth Asawa–inspired gown featuring large sculptural forms that would have been extremely difficult to produce before. The limitation was not the lack of 3D printing but the enormous amount of CAD work required to prepare the design. AI removed that bottleneck. Similar bottlenecks are hiding in nearly every industry, often preventing great ideas from being worth pursuing.
The near-term future is agents working through purpose-built software. Codex cannot create a finished CAD file on its own. But Codex operating CLO can produce exactly what Yana needs. That same pattern appears throughout her workflow: the AI serves as the orchestration layer, while specialized software handles the execution. SaaS is not disappearing; it is gaining a new kind of user.
Voice-first, asynchronous work is already changing what one person can accomplish. Yana can start a deep research task, step away to sew or drape fabric, then return and continue the work through voice. The AI keeps working while she focuses on the physical parts of her business. For a solo founder, this kind of asynchronous collaboration can dramatically expand what fits into a single day.
When the best path is unclear, humans and AI can work in parallel. One of Yana’s hardest remaining challenges is turning her designs into accurate sewing patterns. Instead of betting entirely on one approach, she has human patternmakers and Codex working on the problem at the same time. It is a practical way to move quickly under uncertainty: test both paths, compare the results, and let the better solution win.

Blog and detailed workflow walkthroughs from this episode:

Workflows for an AI-Native Fashion Brand: https://www.chatprd.ai/how-i-ai/workflows-for-an-ai-native-fashion-brand
↳ How to Use AI for Fashion Design and Visualization: https://www.chatprd.ai/how-i-ai/workflows/how-to-use-ai-for-fashion-design-and-visualization
↳ How to Build and Run an E-Commerce Business with AI as a Technical Co-Founder: https://www.chatprd.ai/how-i-ai/workflows/how-to-build-and-run-an-e-commerce-business-with-ai-as-a-technical-co-founder
↳ How to Prototype Complex Garments Using AI and 3D Modeling: https://www.chatprd.ai/how-i-ai/workflows/how-to-prototype-complex-garments-using-ai-and-3d-modeling

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.

How a solo founder used Codex and ChatGPT to launch a fashion brand without engineers | Yana Welinder

2026-08-17 20:04:02

Yana Welinder is the solo founder of Yana Bana, an AI-native fashion brand built with AI as her technical co-founder, starting from hand-drawn sketches and ending with runway photos, CAD files for 3D printing, and a live Stripe-connected pre-order site—no engineers required. A former product leader, she brings an operator’s rigor to her creative process: her “fashion prompt” is a detailed spec covering silhouette, volume, fabric beavior, movement, and sound, and watching her use Codex plus computer use to navigate 3D design software that’s entirely new to her is a clarifying demo of what today’s toolset actually makes possible.

Listen or watch on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts