Tara Seshan — OpenAI’s product lead for Codex and ChatGPT Work, ex-Stripe, Thiel Fellow — maps the next era of AI on Lenny’s Podcast. Her thesis, stated in the first minute: after chat and coding agents comes the era of persistent coworkers you steer like teammates. ~82 minutes.
The three eras
- Chat → coding agents → persistent AI coworkers
- The “overhang”: the gap between what AI can do and what we’re actually doing with it
Steering, not rowing
- Agents do the rowing; your job is steering — the opinionated calls that stay human
- Steering climbs the abstraction ladder, but someone still owns the direction
- Multiplayer: steering agents alongside your teammates, not one-on-one
Ambition is the new differentiator
- The easy stuff is trivial now, so what separates you is how ambitious you can be
- The best users expand what they’re capable of — they don’t just automate
- “Build for 2–3 months out”: building for today or for a year out are equally wrong
One product, three modes
- ChatGPT, Codex, and Work collapse toward “you type the task, it picks the harness”
- Work mode is Codex under the hood, minus the coding UI
- Done beats perfect: ship the transformative thing, then iterate on the signal
Writing as thinking vs. reporting
- Automate the reporting, never the thinking
- “Start myself, end myself” — AI goes in the middle, not the first draft
Knowledge work ≠ coding
- Code verifies itself with tests; knowledge work has to show its reasoning
- The product frontier: make the model a collaborator that shows its proof of work
“You fail if you build for where the models are now. You fail if you build for where you think the models will be in a year. Both outcomes are equally wrong. The only way to build is 2 to 3 months.” — Tara Seshan