Feb 22
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Alexander Embiricos leads product development for Codex, OpenAI’s advanced coding agent, helping shape the future of AI-assisted software engineering. Before OpenAI, he co-founded and exited Multi, a collaboration tool, and has deep experience building developer products that accelerate workflows. At OpenAI he focuses on turning AI into a proactive “software engineering teammate” that can write, review, and ship code across the entire lifecycle. ----------------------------------------------- Timestamps: 00:00 Intro 02:12 Will AI automate coding? 03:38 The "Compression of the Talent Stack": The future of engineers, designers & PMs 05:32 The bottleneck of AGI 09:43 Building for individuals vs top-down enterprise automation 10:28 The three phases of agent development 14:30 The importance of inference speed & OpenAI’s partnership strategies 17:04 The transition from "Pair Programming" to "Delegation" with GPT-5.2 Codex 19:17 Why the Codex app isn't a traditional IDE 20:03 The importance of plan reviews and automated code reviews 22:22 Building open standards and the "agents.md" convention 27:47 Winning strategies: Compute advantage, best models, and product execution 30:18 Measuring success: Moving from Weekly Active Users to Daily Active Users 31:40 Chat vs GUIs: The enduring UI of AI interaction 33:52 Designing interfaces for agent-to-agent interaction 35:24 The data moat: Coding data vs knowledge work task data 54:12 Advice for the Next Gen of Engineers 55:51 Lessons from competitors (Claude Code) 57:26 Lessons from Dropbox and Slack 01:00:39 Quick-Fire Round ----------------------------------------------- Subscribe on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3j2KMcZTtgTNBKwtZBMHvl?si=85bc9196860e4466 Subscribe on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-twenty-minute-vc-20vc-venture-capital-startup/id958230465 Follow Harry Stebbings on X: https://twitter.com/HarryStebbings Follow Alexander Embiricos on X: https://twitter.com/embirico Follow 20VC on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/20vchq Follow 20VC on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@20vc_tok Visit our Website: https://www.20vc.com Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://www.thetwentyminutevc.com/contact ----------------------------------------------- #20vc #harrystebbings #alexanderembiricos #productlead #codex #ai #openai #coding