managing editor @every. formerly @mitsmr @medium @portfoliobooks @penguinrandom. also writer, singer, vegetable eater.
New York, NY
Joined October 2009
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Kaushik Viswanath retweeted
Codex is one of the most important untold stories in the history of technology.
A year ago, it was a scrappy effort in a quiet corner of @OpenAI. Its cloud product hadn’t found PMF, and the team was starting over from scratch.
Less than 12 months later:
- Codex swallowed the flagship ChatGPT desktop app from the inside (it literally runs as com.openai.codex on your Mac)
- Codex and ChatGPT for Work hit 40M+ weekly users across engineering and knowledge work
- Its leader @thsottiaux was elevated to run all of OpenAI’s core products, including ChatGPT, Codex, and the API
How did they pull it off?
They trained their own dedicated model line, separate from ChatGPT, with researchers and product builders sitting on the same team
They built four different products in a single year (cloud → terminal → IDE sidebar → a desktop app with no code editor at all) as every model leap made a new form factor possible
They used Codex to build Codex—so a handful of people could prove a new product in weeks instead of arguing for it in meetings
I had a front-row seat to the whole arc—from their failed Cloud launch, to OpenAI’s offices the night before GPT-5 dropped, to the day Codex took over ChatGPT.
And I spent months interviewing @gdb, @thsottiaux, @embirico, @mia_glaese, @aambrosino, and @edbayes to get inside how it all went down.
Here is the full, behind-closed-doors story of the team that remade OpenAI:
every.to/p/how-codex-happene…
We’re pushing the boundaries of how stories like this are told.
This piece is completely agent-native—designed to be read alongside your agent inside ChatGPT’s in-app browser:
- Every interview transcript is included in full: Click any quote and you (or your agent) can see the exact conversation it came from.
- Built for your agent to explore: Ask your agent to pull out product lessons for your team, cross-examine the transcripts, or find insights I missed when writing the piece.
It’s a story about the future of software—built to be read with an agent:
every.to/p/how-codex-happene…
The Every Agent has been the most useful thing I've encountered at any workplace so far. Constantly amazed by what it's capable of.
BREAKING:
Introducing the @Every Agent—an agentic coworker in Slack built to help you AI-pill your company.
It comes with:
- Everything you'd expect from a premium company agent. You can delegate difficult, long-running—like opening PRs, writing reports from large datasets, and monitoring social or customer feedback—and get high-quality results all from Slack
- Every's best workflows, pre-installed and always updated. Compound Engineering to Compound Writing. We add more all the time.
- Personalized Frontier Alerts. to help you keep up with new models. When we drop a Vibe Check, the Every Agent will read it and let you know if the new model is relevant to your workflow.
- Zero markup on tokens. What we pay is what you pay—as token prices go down, so does your bill.
You can try it today with $15 in free credits per person, up to $500 per workspace.
After that: it comes with your $30/month Every subscription, plus tokens at cost.
Add the Every Agent to Slack: every.to/agent
Why it's hard to AI-pill your coworkers
If you’re the AI-pilled one at work, you know the problem: you discover something incredible in Claude or Codex, but getting your coworkers to try it is another matter.
The problem is that most of your AI use is invisible. You do it alone, in a terminal or a chat window.
Your coworkers see the finished report or the five new ads, but they never see the request that produced them, or the corrections you made along the way. When you describe it afterward, it sounds like magic, but nobody learns a magic trick without seeing how it’s done.
Why a company agent, in Slack, solves this problem
When you use a company agent like the @every agent you go from prompting in private, to prompting in public.
In a Slack channel, a coworker who would never open a terminal scrolls past a thread with your agent interaction and thinks: I could do that too.
This lets you show instead of tell your coworkers about your discoveries. New AI tools and workflows then spread naturally and virally across your organization.
That's why we made the @every agent for ourselves—and why we're releasing it to you today.
Add the Every Agent to Slack: every.to/agent
Kaushik Viswanath retweeted
Zohran Mamdani quotes Jawaharlal Nehru in his victory speech:
"A moment comes rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance."
Kaushik Viswanath retweeted
America First is when you hand billions to Argentina and Israel and withhold money from American cities.
BREAKING NEWS: @russvought is freezing infrastructure funding to New York City on day one of the shutdown.
Kaushik Viswanath retweeted
Brief thoughts on this weak piece of propaganda peddled by pro-Beijing talking heads:
I have to say, there's something immensely ironic about the Dalai Lama arguing his reincarnation should be determined by a tax-exempt Swiss foundation incorporated in Zurich (dalailamafoundation.org/who-…), while Beijing insists on maintaining the traditional centuries-old Golden Urn selection process.
And the even bigger irony is that everyone will doubtlessly denounce China for "destroying Tibetan traditions and culture" for doing so.
Kaushik Viswanath retweeted
Now Mr. Modi got very emotional tonight and said that this was the first election after his mother's death.
A few days ago in a TV interview he had said that after his mother's death he felt he was not a biological product but was divinity in a human avataar.
Kaushik Viswanath retweeted
We’re up to at least three movies Sam Altman catastrophically missed the point of
Kaushik Viswanath retweeted
The world really should pay more attention to what’s happening in India
-@ECISVEEP, as a Constitutional body of our great country, can take Suo Motu cognizance of such flagrant communal polarisation by a political party during election time
We must wait and watch what @ECISVEEP under @rajivkumarec will do on this.
Will the ECI act against the BJP?
Kaushik Viswanath retweeted
NEW: Swiggy has gamified health insurance for its food delivery workers. Divided into gold, silver & bronze, their insurance changes weekly as per the category they fall under that week based on the points earned.
My latest for @restofworld: restofworld.org/2024/swiggy-…
Kaushik Viswanath retweeted
Internet shutdown in Leh. What sort of democracy is this? Even though these protests in #Ladakh have been nothing but peaceful & despite multiple assurances from our leaders, they've shut down the internet. What is the Union govt so scared of? #PashminaMarch #LadakhProtest 1/N
Kaushik Viswanath retweeted
Penned a few thoughts comparing the current protests in #ladakh for #6thSchedule to the agitation for Scheduled Tribe (ST) status in the 1980s, the lessons we can learn from our past & why the Ladakh BJP leadership has failed the people in their hour of need. #CLIMATEFAST
Kaushik Viswanath retweeted
In which I write for @newslaundry that, when it comes to substantial matters that scrutinise the union govt, there’s little or no difference between CJI Chandrachud and his predecessors.
I tweet but once a year so RT please?
newslaundry.com/2023/12/28/c…
Kaushik Viswanath retweeted
This summer, @NilChristopher and I traveled to Sunguvarchatram, India, to find out how Foxconn prepared for the upcoming launch of iPhone 15.
This supply chain shift brought Chinese and Indian workers together in an unlikely way 🧵 restofworld.org/2023/foxconn… via @restofworld
"What Managers Everywhere Must Know About Caste" by @HariBapuji, @kamini_gupta_, @SChrispal, & @thomroulet.
Glad to have helped bring this important topic to the pages of @mitsmr. Special thanks to @caselchris1 for her editorial input.
sloanreview.mit.edu/article/…
Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson's 1000-year history of technology and society has warnings for our current moment of excitement about AI. I had the opportunity to interview them about it for @mitsmr.
Why the Power of Technology Rarely Goes to the People
Thank you for featuring our work, @mitsmr.
@baselinescene and I enjoyed sharing some of the key insights from our new book Power and Progress.