Can Sar

A personal update: I’m joining OpenAI to work on Codex, the best agent app in the industry. After years building consumer products, my obsession since September has been to make Block one of the most AI-native engineering orgs in the world. I’m proud of what we’ve built: faster Eng velocity with RPI in October, an internal multi-harness ADE in January, Slack-based cloud agents in February, and AI woven into every step of product development. The team is just getting started. Along the way I tried almost every agent orchestrator out there — 30+ over the past year. Codex felt special from the day it launched. Lately, it’s started to point at something much bigger. What used to be scattered across prompts, tabs, tools, files, and handoffs is starting to come together in one place. The app is becoming the single surface for knowledge work — letting you accomplish more than you ever thought possible, while staying calm and focused. You can already see the early signs: making a slideshow and editing it right there, working inside a custom site built just for you and your team, handing off to the browser and the computer while you watch it go. Getting this right takes powerful models. But it also takes taste, product thinking, and real care for the person on the other end. You see that in the product, and you feel it the moment you talk to the team. I couldn’t be more excited to join the Codex team. Together we’re going to build the future of computing and knowledge work, and we’re going to build it for you.

@deestiv @Chris8711 Block has a major infrastructure piece named Trogdor but sadly few still know why.

@Chris8711 Strongbad was my duuude! Got my son to call his stuffed dragon Trogdor lol

homestarrunner

@benspringwater Early access please.

Introducing Sabbath: A modern app for an ancient practice. Shipping in July. Reply here for early access.

@gertig I’d have said “Whenever the model thinks it’s done.” Maybe that’s dodging the question but I think it gets the idea across?

Had a conversation with someone and they asked me how an agent knows when to stop working on something. This felt very much like a curse of knowledge moment. I explained that agents exist because models gained the ability to do tool calling, and that we use the lack of any tool calls as an indication to the harness that the model is done working. What would you have said?

It's time to fly.

@ajambrosino Team swag?

It’s not the emdash. It’s the cadence. The breathlessness. The hollowness. Jokes aside there seems to be a developing universal slop style (with different dialects in different mediums). Some is clearly AI generated but some feels like it evolved naturally by infinite copying of high performing phrases (especially on YouTube) which then got supercharged by AI and feeds back and forth.

@ElChaudhry For whatever it's worth, I'm a heavy em-dash user too, and their frequency really doesn't affect my impression of whether a text is written by AI! It's more about the cadence, the breathlessness, the hollowness.

Most distressing part of all this AI hoo ha is that I personally adore em dashes (as Broadsheet/splainer readers know). It isn’t my fault that Claude is a copycat who was trained on em dash junkies like me.

@matt_slotnick @noampomsky Apparently! Just confirmed.

@noampomsky wait what is RT bistro? there's now RT, RT rotisserie, and RT bistro?

ok the RT bistro burger is very good

a few months ago in an interview, someone asked me where we wanted to take the codex app. i answered with something along the lines of: we intend to make it the best app ever built for desktop, full stop. it probably felt like a little much, but i meant it. and it feels less potentially hyperbolic now than it did then. Codex is the best way to build software. it is now the best way to do many other things too. we will lean into both, and much of it will mean we blend a lot with ChatGPT. we will do this only when we can deliver something incredible and better than what the two separate current things can deliver alone. we will also combine the best parts of cloud and local environments (and yes, windows+linux). and the best of instant responses and long-running objectives, like /goal. we will do so with Taste™ outside of the incredible gpt models, 3 things have made the Codex app what it is: - an opinionated view of how agents should work with a high quality bar - a tight and honest dogfooding loop - you those 3 things will continue to be P0. LFG.

@ajambrosino Damn this is good.

@zeeg That was my sense with 4.7. Haven't checked on 4.8 enough.

Would it shock anyone if I told you Opus 4.6 performs better than 4.7 and 4.8

10 takeaways from OpenAI’s new report on knowledge work and Codex. codex isnt about coding anymore, but all knowledge work!

@Dimillian This looks really nice.

We also improved our diff view with an option to disable line wrap so you can review the code closer to how it looks on your computer. More improvements to code review to come soon.

New week, new features for Codex Mobile within the ChatGPT iOS app! Here is what’s new this week: You can now enable extra security with an optional FaceID lock for Codex Mobile. You can enable it from our new settings menu alongside new options 🧵

@RhysSullivan You should've seen it like 5+ years ago and before. Used to be much better :(

not sure how i lived so long without using 1password, it's so much better than what i was on before

@thsottiaux @sflorimm Felt like magic at the time.

@sflorimm Team ChatGPT and copy/paste into Vim

Are you team Claude or Codex right now ?

Things 3 is still my “favorite” task manager (I think I used the original pre-iPhone), but the lack of updates and features means I rarely ever use it for long. Giving it another shot with Codex managing things behind the scenes, but really wish I could extend it myself.

wow the vibe shift from codex to Claude to try opus 4.8 felt pretty quick - most builders I know back on codex and 5.5 full time within a few days. (Same ones who made the switch to codex cli around 5.2/5.3 launch)

@zeeg Sort of tough to judge what you’ve done already. How many times have you been? Heurigen? Heurigen in Grinzing? Do you like classical? Art? How many of the standard places of those and sights have you been to?

What's something I should do in Vienna that I've probably not done in the past? (yes ive seen the mozart impersonators)

@chrisalbon This looks fun!

You: running agents from your $700/night Airbnb overlooking the pristine pacific coast Me: running agents from the cafeteria of a kids trampoline playground We are not the same. (please invite me to your Airbnb dear god please)

@jxnlco From where lol?

Commute