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

ninety-five percent of engineers use Codex. One hundred percent of our PRs are reviewed by Codex.

For engineers, I don't know what job has changed more in the past couple years.

Engineers are becoming tech leads. They're managing fleets and fleets of agents. It literally feels like we're wizards casting all these spells, and these spells are kinda like going out and doing things for you.

What do you think people aren't pricing in yet?

The second or third order effects of the one-person billion-dollar startup. To enable a one-person billion-dollar startup, there might be a hundred other small startups building bespoke software. So I think we might actually enter into a golden age of B2B SaaS.

I've been hearing more and more there's this stress people feel when their agents aren't working.

There's a team that's actually doing an experiment right now with an OpenAI, where they are maintaining a one hundred percent Codex-written code base. They run into the exact problems that you're describing, and so usually you're like, "All right, I'll roll up my sleeves and figure it out." This team doesn't have that escape hatch.

You've shared that listening to customers is not always the right strategy in AI.

The field and the models themselves are just changing so, so quickly. They tend to, like, disrupt themselves. The models will eat your scaffolding for breakfast.

What's your advice to folks that are like, "Okay, I don't wanna miss the boat?"

Make sure you're building for where the models are going and not where they are today. There's a quote from Kevin Weil, our VP of Science here, and he likes saying: "This is the worst the models will ever be."

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