Can Sar

TL: AI Coding @ Block.
Before: Founder/CTO @ Byzantium, Value Voting (YC S17), Apture (acquired by Google), Stanford CS PhD dropout.

[Can Sar @cansar]

@benspringwater Early access please.

[Can Sar @cansar]

@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?

[Can Sar @cansar]

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.

[OpenAI @OpenAI]

It's time to fly.

[Can Sar @cansar]

@ajambrosino Team swag?

[Can Sar @cansar]

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.

[Can Sar @cansar]

@matt_slotnick @noampomsky Apparently! Just confirmed.

[Andrew Ambrosino @ajambrosino]

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.

[Can Sar @cansar]

@ajambrosino Damn this is good.

[Can Sar @cansar]

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

[jason @jxnlco]

10 takeaways from OpenAI’s new report on knowledge work and Codex.

codex isnt about coding anymore, but all knowledge work!

[Can Sar @cansar]

@Dimillian This looks really nice.

[Can Sar @cansar]

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

[Can Sar @cansar]

@thsottiaux @sflorimm Felt like magic at the time.

[Can Sar @cansar]

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.

[dex @dexhorthy]

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)

[Can Sar @cansar]

@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?

[Can Sar @cansar]

@chrisalbon This looks fun!

[Can Sar @cansar]

@jxnlco From where lol?

[Can Sar @cansar]

@zeeg Do you have a sentry tattoo at least and make the team get them?