Interview episode of AI & I in which Dan Shipper speaks with Ben Goodger (Atlas head of engineering) and Darin Fisher (member of technical staff), both veterans of Netscape, Firefox, and Chrome, about OpenAI's agentic browser, Atlas. They discuss the idea that AI should handle tedious "computer errands," designing an AI browser that's intuitive to use, how the web changes if agents do most of the browsing, why traditional websites won't become obsolete, how the team uses Codex to build Atlas, and the craft of coding with AI tools. Timestamps: 01:57 Introduction; 11:51 Designing an AI browser that's intuitive to use; 15:24 How the web changes if agents do most of the browsing; 25:06 Why traditional websites will not become obsolete; 29:00 A browser that stays out of the way versus one that shows you around; 39:51 How the team uses Codex to build Atlas; 44:47 The craft of coding with AI tools; 52:33 Why Goodger and Fisher care so much about browsers. # Channel Identity Observations: "AI & I" (Dan Shipper) ## Show Name and Host - The channel/show is identified at the end of the episode: **"AI and I"**, hosted by **Dan Shipper**, evidenced by the outro: *"you absolutely positively have to smash that like button and subscribe to AI and I"* and *"a journey into the future with Dan Shipper as the captain of the spaceship."* ## Intended Audience - **AI-curious knowledge workers and technology enthusiasts**, evidenced by framing questions like *"for people who are listening and they're like, I know that agentic browsers are a thing and maybe I've tried it, but I actually don't even know why I would use this."* - **Practitioners and builders**, evidenced by technical depth on topics like HTML semantics, user agent strings, Chromium architecture, and Swift development. - **Professionals interested in AI-assisted work**, shown by extended discussion of Codex writing the majority of code and workflow use cases (settings panels, forms, copy editing). ## Claimed Scope - **Interview show with AI industry builders and leaders**, evidenced by this episode's guests: *"Ben and Darren, welcome to the show... you are both building ChatGPT Atlas... Ben you are the head of engineering. Darren you're member of the technical staff."* - **Focus on ChatGPT/OpenAI ecosystem specifically**, evidenced by the outro framing the show as delivering *"knowledge bombs about Chat GPT."* ## Observable Presentation Patterns - **Host positions himself as an active user, not just interviewer**: *"I'm a daily Atlas user and I switched from Dia"*; *"it's got to be a good browser first and foremost"* (host quote). - **Host discloses industry connections**: *"I'm good friends with Josh and Hirs"* (Browser Company founders) and *"we actually talked to them for a little while about being the CEO."* - **Host runs a business referenced on-air**: *"I run a company and we have like 20 people"* and *"I run a media company, so we publish articles all the time."* - **Sponsored content included**: an Augment Code ad segment mid-episode (*"Download the AI powered engineering at scale playbook at augmentcode.com..."*). - **Conversational, enthusiast tone** with humor and self-deprecation, evidenced by the host's own outro bit ending *"Dan, I'm absolutely hopelessly in love with you."* ## Explicit Self-Description (Creator Claims) - The outro claims the show is *"the epitome of awesomeness"* and *"not just a show, it's a journey into the future"* — clearly hyperbolic marketing language, distinct from demonstrated content. - No explicit mission statement or channel description beyond the outro appears in the transcript. ## Demonstrated Interview Style - **Probing, specific follow-ups**: *"Can you make that more concrete for me because I think some of those things someone might be listening and being like well yeah I could do that with Chat now."* - **Uses the platform as live product feedback**: *"hopefully maybe this can be like a little bit of a user research session"* — the host reports bugs ("laziness") directly to the product team on-air. # Delivery Observations: "Inside OpenAI's Agentic Browser, Atlas" ## Format Overview - **Multi-speaker interview**: a host (Dan Shipper) interviewing two guests (Ben, head of engineering, and Darren, member of technical staff), identified by `>>` speaker transitions. - **Bookended ad copy**: the episode opens and closes with promotional segments — an Augment Code sponsorship read in the middle of the cold open, and an exaggerated subscribe pitch at the end ("you absolutely positively have to smash that like button and subscribe"). - **Cold open** uses a pulled quote from later in the episode: *"The big unlock that I had with Atlas is I realized I never need to look at a settings panel ever again."* ## Host's Delivery Patterns ### Conversational, low-formality register - Frequent filler and self-interruption: *"So I I didn't realize that you're you're this is like a it's an evolving partnership"*, *"Atlas is Atlas is is pretty good."* - Casual hyperbole as a recurring habit: - *"if I had to like click through another form or settings page I would like blow my head off"* - *"it's like launching a nuclear like missile in order to like do anything"* (describing the AWS dashboard) ### Question-driven facilitation - Repeatedly presses guests for specificity, explicitly naming the goal: *"let's try to be more specific than like yeah it just does everything for you."* - Follow-up challenge pattern — restating a guest's answer as a listener objection: *"I think some of those things someone might be listening and being like well yeah I could do that with Chad now."* - Ends with an open reflective question: *"Like why do you care so much about this problem?"* ### First-person user framing - Positions himself as a daily user rather than neutral interviewer: *"I'm a daily Atlas user and I switched from Dia"*, *"I'm sitting here using your product all the time."* - Occasionally repurposes the interview as user research: *"hopefully maybe this can be like a little bit of a user research session, too."* ## Guests' Delivery Patterns ### Enthusiastic evaluative language (Darren) - Repeated superlative framing: - *"that's that's that's one of the definite superpowers of these things"* - *"it's been a fabulous it's been a fabulous friend in that regard"* - *"I I just can't believe how useful it is"* - Vivid analogies: *"I love taking Whimo, but I also love driving my stick shift car."* ### Hedged, qualified answers (Ben) - Frequent uncertainty markers: *"I don't know if we have the exact stats"*, *"maybe maybe this is just me not not being imag not not being imaginative enough yet"*, *"I I would be lying if I told you I know."* - Balancing-structure habit ("not X but Y"): - *"I say this not as a punt maybe but just to to observe"* - *"the bottleneck isn't writing code"* (ad copy) / *"It's not a huge leap"* framing throughout ### Teaching habit: concrete example after abstraction - Both guests ground claims in specific products: AWS permissions, Google Forms, Workday, Google Docs, tab strips. - Ben offers an extended explanatory passage when asked to define "declarative," walking through HTML tags step by step: *"a button might be a button tag that encloses the text that is rendered on the button."* ### Recurring vocabulary - **"Unlock"** appears as a shared keyword: host's cold open, Ben's *"aha moments"*, Ben's *"that's kind of a big unlock"*, Darren's *"kind of a big unlock for the computer to help you."* - **"Context"** as a central explanatory concept: *"that context is provided uh directly to the model so you kind of don't need to keep repeating yourself."* - **"Journey"** used repeatedly for user adoption: *"some aha moments as they go on the same journey that that you have"*; *"whatever kind of journey you're on."* ## Uncertainty Notes - Speaker attribution beyond "host / Ben / Darren" is not always clear from the transcript; some `>>` turns could not be confidently assigned and were excluded from pattern claims. - Filler-word density may be inflated by transcription artifacts; the patterns above are supported by multiple instances, but exact frequencies are not reliable. - The closing segment's over-the-top tone ("Dan, I'm absolutely hopelessly in love with you") appears to be a scripted outro bit; treating it as an indicator of overall delivery style would be speculative. # Observation Record: "Inside OpenAI's Agentic Browser, Atlas" ## Participants - **Dan Shipper** — host (runs a media company, daily Atlas user; previously considered CEO role at The Browser Company) - **Ben** — Head of Engineering, ChatGPT Atlas; prior work at Netscape, Firefox, Chrome - **Darren** — Member of technical staff, Atlas; previously at The Browser Company; long browser history with Ben *Note: transcript does not supply surnames; identification limited to what speakers state.* ## Core Positions & Claims ### Vision for Atlas / agentic browsers - **Ben**: Atlas designed around "bring ChatGPT with you wherever you go on the web." People often don't know what to do with it at first; team sees "aha moments" and wants to offer more **proactive in-product advice**. - **Ben**: Side chat removes copy-paste friction — model sees the page context directly; the URL bar guides queries to ChatGPT with lower friction. - **Darren**: Beyond interaction, **web memories** let users query the agent later about what it passively observed. - **Darren**: Personal use — more questions asked, more confidence in shopping deals, brainstorming viewpoints; web feels "richer and more dynamic." ### "Never look at a settings panel again" - **Dan Shipper**: His "big unlock" — avoids AWS dashboard complexity, permission changes, seat management. Also benefits developers: agents let software be more customizable without adding knobs. - **Ben**: Used Atlas to build Google Forms for user research — reached "the meat of the problem" faster. - **Darren**: Yearly Workday pay-stub retrieval — agent navigates complex, infrequently-used web apps. Calls this a "definite superpower." - **Ben** (on adoption stats): No exact breakdown of agent-driven usage, but **side chat interaction is a main use case**; most users engage with it regularly. ### Discoverability / progressive disclosure - **Ben**: **Cursor chat** (ChatGPT icon in form fields) is powerful but under-discovered; team struggles with "how in-your-face" to make hints. Onboarding can only teach so many concepts at once. - **Darren**: His wife uses cursor chat for email drafting; it carries personalization/custom instructions. - **Ben**: Slash-agent in side chat is the "grandest" manifestation of model-web interaction; smaller in-the-moment versions also matter. ### Web evolution & agents acting as users - **Ben**: Over time there may need to be a notion of a "nonhuman operator acting on behalf of a human" — distinct from crawlers, closer to a personalized local script with user intent. - **Ben**: "At some level stuff doesn't need to evolve" — computer-use models can read/click; evolution will focus on **seamlessness, performance, parallelism** (many simultaneous tasks). - **Ben**: The web's **declarative** nature (HTML tags, forms as remote function calls) is under-exploited; the browser is a "user agent," making Atlas a "user agent agent." - **Ben** on user-agent strings: uncertain; cautious because changing strings broke sites in early Chrome days. Since Atlas is predominantly Chromium, developers should build for it as any Chromium browser; other signals may emerge later — "very early." - **Darren**: Semantic-web efforts partly superseded — AI models now understand non-machine-readable sites "the way humans do." Speculates websites may eventually change as agent-driven traffic grows; explicitly says "I would be lying if I told you I know." - **Ben** on agent-native protocols (e.g., MCP): team exploring "a whole host of technologies"; also notes OpenAI's app ecosystem (EOS/@@apps) as a direct route to dynamically composed experiences. Atlas agent tech has roots in the **Operator preview**, with major quality/performance improvements since. ### Will agentic browsers make the web unnecessary? - **Ben**: No — people will delegate more (models will get "amazingly powerful over the next 12 months"), but people still want to do things themselves (entertainment, shopping, trip planning, exploration). Acknowledges younger generations may see it differently. - **Darren**: No — "people like window shopping"; **Waymo vs. stick-shift analogy**: both modes will coexist. Models as both **workmate/co-worker** (delegation) and **thought partner/collaborator** — "it's kind of both." - **Darren**: E-commerce example — you'd still want to view a cart before buying. ### Browser philosophy: taxi vs. tour guide - **Dan Shipper** frames the tension: browser as invisible window pane/taxi vs. tour guide that inserts itself. - **Ben**: Atlas presents a **duality** — minimal UI, ChatGPT at the core, engagement at user's choice. Original idea: ChatGPT steps through "do these three things," and the question became "could you just do some of those for me?" - **Darren**: Users report "I asked Atlas to do this and it didn't work" — team logs and works on those. Goal "definitely is not to be annoying"; recalls Chrome's content-first mantra; in Atlas "the content is whatever the user is trying to get done." - **Ben**: "Got to be a good browser first and foremost." ### Engineering Atlas - **Ben**: Browser complexity ≈ an **operating system** (app runtime, window manager, notification surfaces). Chromium provides an amazing baseline, but Atlas's deeper product ambition required reimagining UI. Missing features (e.g., **tab groups**) generate user feedback. - **Darren**: Atlas runs Chromium **fully out of process**; Atlas app is a pure **Swift** app with hand-crafted UI components; Chromium used for rendering and support. Fun fact: much Chromium UI is C++ (2006-era Windows style), and it's "hard to find engineers" who want C++ UI work; Swift/SwiftUI iOS developers are plentiful — this approach is also enabling a **Windows** port. Calls Swift "a modern alternative to C++" (no garbage collector, streamlined memory management). - **Ben** on AI-written code: no exact stats; "wouldn't surprise me if it was north of 75%"; most PRs start with Codex; safely more than half of net new code. - **Ben**: Biggest excitement is not pace but **how quickly you can decide something is worth pursuing** — prototyping in Codex takes minutes/hours vs. long deliberation pre-Codex. Example: prototyped a fix in ~an hour for tab-strip scroll position resetting when switching tasks. - **Darren**: Codex is invaluable for asking questions about the large, complex Chromium codebase ("I remember being on the Chrome team when everyone would ask Darren questions... now Darren's asking Codex" — Ben). Unit test coverage increased because prompting reduces the overhead of writing tests. ### On craft and mixed feelings about AI-written code - **Darren**: Likes writing code — "almost therapeutic... like art"; views AI as accelerating mundane parts (tedious refactoring done in an hour after he established the pattern). Still gets crafting satisfaction; suggests a superintelligence test would be building Chromium/WebKit-scale systems with minimal prompting — "we're a bit from that point." - **Ben**: Engineers' experience-based judgment catches context not evident in code; Codex sometimes produces "elegant" solutions but "doesn't always hit." No longer feels "precious" about typing code — "it's more like the idea." ### User bug report: Google Docs copy editing - **Dan Shipper**: Tried having Atlas apply a style guide in Google Docs; it "kind of happens a little bit but then it just gives up and says I did it and it definitely did not." - **Ben**: Known issue called **"laziness"** — agent gives up on long, multi-scroll tasks; team working on fixes. Google Docs is also a canvas-based app, harder to extract context from than declarative HTML; scroll-detection issues compound this. - **Ben**: Impressed watching the agent "tediously close ads" to reveal content; host and Ben agree the agent "is doing what I would have done." ### Motivation - **Ben**: Grew up in New Zealand, felt disconnected from tech; the web felt egalitarian — anyone could publish; open source/Mozilla let him shape it. "The most interesting app in the world... I wouldn't work on anything else." - **Darren**: Took a Netscape job in college because Linux browsing was poor; found the web liberating (computer-agnostic). The web "is not done yet... there's more to make better." ## Unresolved Tensions / Qualifications Preserved - Adoption of agent-driven use cases: Ben explicitly says they **lack stats** broken down that way; host suspects settings-avoidance is a couple-times-a-week use case, not daily. - Agent reliability: laziness/giving up on long tasks is a live known issue. - Web evolution questions (user-agent strings, agent-native protocols): both speakers repeatedly defer — "I'm not sure," "very early," "I would be lying if I told you I know." - Ben acknowledges his skepticism about the web disappearing "maybe this is just me not being imaginative enough." ## Sponsor Segment (Augment Code, read by host) - Claims an AI context engine understands whole codebases; playbook cites **30% faster PR velocity and 40% shorter merge times** for enterprise teams; positioned for compliance, correctness, and high-stakes production systems. (Recorded as advertisement claims, not independently verified.) # Speaker Attribution Record — *Inside OpenAI's Agentic Browser, Atlas* ## Video Overview - **Video ID:** `01a0f15a-ac98-79cb-a242-dc808efa438f` - **Format:** Interview/podcast episode ("AI & I" show), hosted by Dan Shipper - **Topic:** OpenAI's ChatGPT Atlas agentic browser ## Identified Speakers & Roles ### **Dan Shipper — Host / Interviewer (Creator)** - Identified as host via the closing promotional segment: *"a journey into the future with Dan Shipper as the captain of the spaceship."* - Self-identifies as: daily Atlas user (switched from Dia), runs a company (~20 people), runs a media company publishing articles, friend of "Josh and Hirs" of the Browser Company, was in discussions to be CEO of the Browser Company. ### **Ben — Guest (Head of Engineering, ChatGPT Atlas, OpenAI)** - Introduced by host: *"Ben you are the head of engineering."* - Prior background stated in transcript: worked with Darren at **Netscape**, then **Firefox**, then **Chrome**, now Atlas. - Discloses he is a longtime C++ developer; from New Zealand originally. ### **Darren — Guest (Member of Technical Staff, ChatGPT Atlas, OpenAI)** - Introduced by host: *"Darren you're member of the technical staff."* - Prior background stated in transcript: previously worked at **the Browser Company** (on Dia); Netscape, Firefox, Chrome with Ben; worked on Chrome tab strip behavior ~20 years ago. > **Note:** Full surnames for Ben and Darren are not provided in the transcript or metadata; identity beyond given names is uncertain. ## Promotional Segments (Flagged) ### 1. **Sponsor Read — Augment Code** (mid-roll, pre-interview) - Promotes the "AI Powered Engineering at Scale" playbook; download URL given: `augmentcode.com/resources/...` - Claims made in ad copy: 30% faster PR velocity, 40% shorter merge times; "built for compliance, correctness, and maintainability." ### 2. **Channel Promotion** (closing) - Exhortation to like/subscribe to "AI and I"; hyperbolic praise of the show and host. ## Referenced Third-Party Products / Sources (by speakers) - **ChatGPT Atlas** — product under discussion (OpenAI) - **Dia / The Browser Company** — host's prior browser; guests' former employer - **Chrome, Chromium, Firefox, Netscape, WebKit, Mozilla** — prior work history and technical references - **Codex** — coding agent; guest estimates "north of 75%" of net-new Atlas code authored via Codex (uncertain, "finger in the wind" estimate) - **MCP** — mentioned by host as possible agent-native web interaction protocol - **AWS dashboard, Google Docs, Google Forms, Workday** — cited as example use cases/complex web apps - **Operator tech preview** — cited as root of the Atlas agent technology - **Waymo, stick-shift driving** — analogy used by Darren - **OpenAI apps ecosystem ("EOS")** — referenced by Ben ## Third-Party Claims & Anecdotes - Host's wife uses cursor chat feature for email composition (hearsay). - User reports of agent "laziness" giving up on long tasks (guest-reported, attributed to team feedback). - Team claims no exact usage stats on agent-driven settings tasks. ## Comment Availability - **No information about comment availability** is present in the transcript or metadata. I think one of the things that has \[music\] excited me about this world is it's not just the pace of development because I think to get a feature to work right, it's always going to take a few iterations. It's how quickly you can decide that something is worth pursuing. \>\> The big unlock that I had with Atlas is I realized I never need to look at a settings panel ever again. \>\> You're not alone. \>\> \[music\] \>\> If you work in large code bases, you know what it means to hold too much in your head. Which file imports what, what service depends on what database schema, and what will break if you change \[music\] this one line. The bottleneck isn't writing code. It's holding the entire system in working memory long enough to make a decision. Augment code is an AI coding assistant that offloads context. Its context engine understands your whole codebase, including what's in your current file and the architectural shape of your entire system. 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Download the AI powered engineering at scale playbook at augmentcode.com/resources/ipoweredengineering atcale. That's augment.com/resources/iipoweredengineering atcale. And now back to the episode. Ben and Darren, welcome to the show. \>\> Hey, thank you. Great to be here. \>\> Yeah, likewise. It's awesome. So for people who don't know you um you are both building chat GBT Atlas which is an agentic browser. Um Ben you are the head of engineering. Darren you're member of the technical staff. I believe you both worked on Chrome originally. Is that true? \>\> That's right. That's right. We've worked on a number of browsers um together and uh for a long while. \>\> Oh that's really cool. So I I didn't realize that you're you're this is like a it's an evolving partnership through many different products and companies. That's really interesting. Um \>\> we worked together first at at Netscape, then on Firefox together for a few years, and and then with with Chrome uh now Atlas, which is uh super exciting. \>\> Absolute ogs. Okay, this is really cool. So I'm using I'm a daily Atlas user and I switched from Dia, which I know Darren, you used to work at um the browser company. I'm good friends with Josh and Hirs. So, if you're if they're listening, you know, maybe there's a way you can get me back. But Atlas is Atlas is is pretty good. What's really interesting to me about using Atlas is and using just just really agentic browsers is I for the first couple days I was like I have no idea what to do with this. Like I know it has this power, but I don't I I can't think of a time when I want might want to use it. And now I'm just like every single day there's like 50 different things that if I had to like click through another form or settings page I would like blow my head off. \>\> But isn't that kind of the journey that people have with AI tools in general like Chat GPT or these coding tools? You kind of don't really understand the power until you get into it. \>\> I think that is true. I didn't quite have that experience. Like the first time I just saw it like writing GBT3 writing stuff I was like whoa this is crazy. Um, but yeah, I guess that is true. Well, I I guess I'm curious from your from from both of your perspective, like if someone is listening and they're like, I know that agentic browsers are a thing and maybe I've tried it, but I actually don't even know why I would use this or like what it's useful for. What is what is the sort of vision for agent agentic browsers? And let's be let's try to be more specific than like yeah it just does everything for you know like what is the like what are the real day-to-day things that um agent browsers change about how you might use the web. \>\> Yeah. So um I think that uh you know maybe the future we'll get to a place where like more and more of your workload can be can be automated and I think we're making progress in that direction but but today uh we wanted to design Atlas with this idea that you could bring chat GPT with you wherever you go on the web. Um and so yeah, I mean I think that the thing that you note of like what do I do with this? This is something that we we hear a lot uh from people but then also we hear some aha moments as they go on the same journey that that you have and and begin to figure out some use cases for it. This is something that we actually want to uh take some of that that learning that we have from how people are using it and and help offer more proactive advice to people like in product um to help them you know figure out how to to optimize um use of the tool. Um, but I think today like one of the things that I noticed when I use Atlas versus when I go back and use a sort of pre-I browsing environment. Um, I find myself just able to ask just a lot more questions and just be more knowledgeable about a topic. If I'm doing online shopping, I can feel confident that I'm getting the best deal or I have the right coupon code or I have all that sort of stuff. If I'm like researching a topic that's of interest to me, I can sort of um brainstorm, you know, different viewpoints on it. I can just sort of have this this sort of friend or adviser that that sort of comes with me and I can just like have this conversation with it. Uh and that that's just made the web a lot richer and more dynamic. \>\> Can you make that more concrete for me because I think some of those things someone might be listening and being like well yeah I could do that with Chad now. That's what Chad does for me. So what does it um what does it mean to have that in the context of your browser? It just means that um you don't need to go you know I think if you know for anyone that's had chat GPT in a tab you probably have the experience of going and taking some content from another tab and pasting it in uh and asking a question about it perhaps whereas when you have a browser that's built with this at the core of it you know that context is provided uh directly to the model so you kind of don't need to keep repeating yourself um it will just chatbt will just see what you're looking at uh and be able to offer um you know you know its thoughts uh on on that \>\> I That's really the big the big unlock and the power of this whole thing is like I think as people uh use chatbt for more things in their life they realize that maybe they should start more of their queries with chat GPT right you start to learn that for yourself at a certain point you're like why am I doing things the old way that was very manual uh but instead I should ask this AI model it will help me save some steps and this browser puts that at the center of it that's what the URL are will guide you towards for your queries, right? It helps you get into chat GPT with a lot lower friction. And as Ben was saying, you know, if you're on a web page and you're scratching your head about something, ask Chat GPT is right there. You can ask it. It has the context. You don't have to copy paste and say, can you now ask this answer this question? So, it's just a lot more streamlined. That's that's kind of the core value proposition of this whole thing. And on top of that, we build, you know, features that people can opt into around um web memories. So if the agent or the model is there in on your journey, you can also query it later about things that it's it it knows and that can be very powerful to you as you're trying to get back to things or trying to make sense of just all the things in your world and you know whatever kind of journey you're on, whatever research project you're on, whatever work you're trying to do. Um having it there sort of passively can be very powerful too. I got to tell you, like, and hopefully maybe this can be like a little bit of a user research session, too, because like I feel like I'm I'm doing something with this that I'm very excited about. Um, and I'm curious if you guys are doing it, if you're seeing other people doing it, how you're building for this. So, the the big unlock that I had with Atlas is I realized I never need to look at a settings panel ever again. \>\> You're not alone. \>\> Yeah. And that is such a refreshing feeling. It's I think it's both refreshing for users and for software developers. Um I think it's refreshing for software developers because you don't have to worry about adding another knob because someone like the agent's going to do that. So you can custo you can make software more customizable more easily. But for users like \[snorts\] I think the canonical example for me is looking at the AWS dashboard. I don't know if you have like I assume you guys have both logged into that and it's like 50 different services and then there like your the settings the like the permissioning system is like it's like launching a nuclear like missile in order to like do anything and I run a company and we have like 20 people and so I'm I'm sort of constantly being asked hey can we like add a seat to this or like can you change the permission on this thing or and it's like some account that we set up five years ago that I don't even remember. you don't do these things so frequently and so yeah it's like not top of mind how to do it again. \>\> Yeah, my my example of this that I've been using was um uh I used it to help me create Google forms to do user research. Um, and you know, Google form builder I think is maybe less complicated than the AWS control panel. But, uh, still it's not something I use every day. And so I think for me to be able to ask the the agent to go off and do that and have it do that in a few minutes and come back and I can just submit uh, you know, certainly allowed me to get to the the meat of the problem much quicker. Yeah, it's it's one of those tasks where like there's a certain amount of activation energy and you don't have to spend the activation energy anymore. Darren, what were you going to say? \>\> I was just saying it's that time of year to go into workday and figure out how to get my year end of date payub so I can share that with my tax advisor. And I'm like, where do I go again? You know, they moved it again, you know, and I don't I don't go there often enough. So, I think it's super powerful for navigating like web apps, especially complex ones like you said with AWS. Um, and it's just that's that's that's one of the definite superpowers of these things. \>\> So, how are you seeing that evolve with your user base? Like what percentage if you can share what percentage of people have actually figured that out? Because I it's super powerful, but I also imagine it's not necessarily a daily use case. It's like a couple times a week. It is a lifesaver, but other than that, I may not use it. Um, for this like I'm I'm only going into settings like a couple times a week. So, I'm curious, is that one of the one of the use cases you can hang your hat on? And are are people really discovering it or is it still sort of nent? I don't know if we have the exact stats on on the sort of agent like browser drives kind of uh uh a thing but we do know that just in general people interacting with that side chat is a um uh main like use case for the browser and I I think you know like probably most people are are using that on a on a regular basis just because it is kind of the main um value ad sort of the main surface in terms of what tools or capabilities people use from that. I don't think we've got that broken down quite the the same way. \>\> Yeah. What we what you see is sort of what you'd imagine is that people are are, you know, you when you first come to these tools, you don't know all the things that it can do. And that's definitely a topic for us. How do we introduce people to things but not also overwhelm them at the same time? You know, you want to have you want to balance something that's familiar, simple, seems approachable, but also it's powerful under the hood so you get rewarded as you discover further. Um, you know, I think that's that's kind of the nature of of UX development, right? You you can have a very powerful complex tool, a browser really is, but you want it to also be approachable and easy and you got to think about like what are the patterns people do and how can we meet them in those moments, right? \>\> What are the some of the decisions that you've made to like to do that like to to to enable the sort of progressive disclosure of complexity so that Alice is really intuitive? But yeah, \>\> one of the features that is um pretty powerful but or relatively or I should say we struggled with how to expose it is this feature called cursor chat. Um if you are interacting with a a form field in the browser you'll see a little icon a little chatbt icon and you can hover over and then interact with the model and interact with the model in the context of that specific form field. Um we were we struggle with how to how inyour-face to make this right. We want people to be aware of this power. It's actually really powerful. The people who use it are the people who rave about this helping them compose and that sort of thing. But actually a lot of people don't discover it even though we have this little hint. And so it's always a question how big do you make that hint? How do you introduce this to people? Certainly during onboarding we already have a lot of things we try to tell people about because this is an AI browser. there's new things to learn, fundamental things like web memories and and and you know capabilities like sidehat and so on, but we can only tell you about so many things at once. So that's that's been a challenge for us from a design perspective for sure. \>\> That makes sense. I've seen that that that little icon and I have not clicked it. So now I need now I feel like I need to click it. It's one of those things where it's like it's uh um another advantage of having this sort of fully integrated with with your browsing environment as opposed to just having chat GBT in a tab is that you can kind of summon it uh into the specific text field. Uh so this is a feature that my wife uses quite often. She has to write emails. She's involved in a number of different things and it just helps like speed up her workflow quite a lot uh having it there. And the thing is is it's not just um it is like your chatbt there. So it has your personalization, your, you know, custom instructions, all that kind of stuff, you know, behind it. So it, you know, it writes the way you want it to write, uh, and and all that. So it's pretty cool. \>\> Broadly speaking, we're really interested in the whole idea of like how the model can interact with the web and the ways that we interact and how can it dovtail with what you're already doing. So, you know, the agent is that you invoke with slash agent in sidehat is like a very uh all-in sort of manifestation of that where you're asking it to take a task and go interact directly with the page and all the and push the buttons and do everything for you. Um, and that's that's sort of like maybe the grandest representation of this kind of idea. But there's all these sort of smaller in the- moment kind of versions of that, you know, like we said with cursor chat or just the fact that sidehat has the context and when you ask a question, it it can understand what you're doing. Yeah, that's I think that's one of the the most valuable parts of it is because it's in my browser, it's logged into all my websites and um it can act as me uh on any number of websites. And so even though it's not me, it's like it has all the same affordances and and and and all that kind of stuff. And I'm curious about your opinion on how the web will evolve for that because right now there's like there's a it's really designed for this like bifurcation between bots and humans. And there's a human experience and there's a bot experience that you're you're you're presumed to be crawling and you there's you know bots text and robots.ext and all that kind of stuff. And this is sort of this sort of in between thing where it's personal and it's driven by you but it is not you and like yeah how do you think the the web should evolve for that kind of thing? \>\> Yeah. So I mean this is a super interesting one. Um and I I do think over time like there'll have to be some like notion of um you know maybe a nonhuman operator that is acting nonetheless on behalf of a human like for a specific request because I see these things as quite different to example to for example web crawlers you know web crawlers are out there traversing websites um and you know sort of synthesizing across that for the benefit of many whereas like a you know this is you could do the same thing uh you know admittedly much more painfully if you were to write a you know local shell script that would go off and obtain the content of a website maybe issue like the direct HTTP requests to the the resources that you wanted and so on. Uh and this is much closer to that where there is like your own personalized intent behind it. Uh so I think just from how we think about these things conceptually that that's how I look at it. uh in terms of how things evolve, I think one of the you know most interesting things about it is at some level like stuff doesn't need to evolve uh because we have you know computer use models that can just go off and like read the screen and click and do all that that sort of thing. I think a lot of the um uh evolution here will come from are there ways to make that more seamless? Are there ways to make that you know higher performance so that we can do many things at once? You know do you know just basically support sort of scaling this up? Um because I think what we really want to do is have something that can do many things on your behalf uh simultaneously over the course of time. um and and that will just require like a lot more sort of interesting sort of evolution of the platform and I think there are probably a variety of different ways to do that. One of the wonderful things about the web is that it's a very declarative medium and this is something that we've begun to tap into but I don't think we've fully like realized the potential of that that interesting property of the web yet. \>\> Can you explain for people who are listening what declarative means and then why that is an interesting and important property? Yeah. So, so the web um you know powering the web is this technology called HTML hypertext markup language. Uh and it's a way that you know all of the web pages are built you know all of the sort of UI that you interact with on the web today is a a combination of just text uh formatted uh in this this specific manner. There are these things called tags. Uh so a button might be a button tag that encloses the text that is rendered on the button. Um, and so what the browser does is it reads all of this and it knows that if it sees a tag that says button or input or something like that, that there's a specific meaning to it. And then what's interesting, for example, with forms is that a form is the way that you do a effectively like a a call to a remote function with some data that the user provides. So when I fill out a form, for example, to run a search, uh I take values that I there's a text that I type into this this field and then I call some remote function with that text and then I get another page. Uh and so there's all of this sort of this is sort of inherent to the way the web is designed. Uh and it allows um you know, the browser itself is referred to as a user agent specifically for this reason. um in that the browser is designed to go and read all of these tags and figure out how to present it to the user in a way that is satisfactory to them. And so Atlas is sort of a user agent agent. \>\> That's right. \[laughter\] \>\> Do you think we need different user agent strings for uh is that like a is that one potential solution or extension of the HTML um standard? \>\> I'm not sure. I think just like looking at the the way the web works, you know, there's a lot of um I know just thinking back to various browsers that that we've worked on, um there's a lot of subtlety to user agent strings and also like the the situation I don't want to get into is where websites don't work uh because we've changed something uh about it and you know sometimes there are sites that will check for very specific parts of that string and it will be um they'll say something you know they'll trigger behavior based off of that. And I know early in the Chrome days, for example, we would see, you know, sort of behavior like that where it would cause sites not to render properly. And so from that sense, uh, you know, with Atlas being predominantly Chromium, we feel like it's just, you know, from a developer perspective, they should perceive it. They should, you know, build for it the same way that they build for any Chromium based browser. But there's probably other signals or stuff like that that that we will need to come up with over the course of time. It's just it's very early for us to figure out what that looks like. But your original question about like how the web might change is a really interesting one. I think as um more and more of the user agents are perhaps driven by agents or models um you know bought that not end up having some bearing or impact on how developers create their content. Um I think at some point maybe there is an inflection point there if you know it'll be interesting to see how the ecosystem evolves right you know this people create content for human consumption um in the past we've always we've had moments when we're pushing heavily semantic web make a web that's more understandable look at all the benefits that come from that um screen readers will work better uh websites will be more machine understandable what's happened in this now with these AI models is they're able to make sense of the websites that aren't very ordinarily machine understandable, but because uh these models are interacting with it in the way humans do, they're able to glean the information just as humans do. And that's kind of a big unlock for uh the computer to help you uh because it can understand these websites, right? Uh but as as that unlocks more and more computer models based models driving these systems these websites maybe who knows maybe maybe the the websites start changing as well. I mean it reminds me of discussions about um what happens when all the code is being created by coding agents and and the coding agents are directing the coding agents and you know where where does where does everything go and and what what programming language ought ought they use and all these kinds of things. you start to wonder maybe there's some sci-fi stuff there to kind of dream and imagine how things might evolve. I I would be lying if I told you I know but I can imagine things changing. \>\> Totally. That's the kind of the interesting thing is like right now browser uses it's a really good way to bootstrap this because you don't have to change anything for it. But once like once you've bootstrapped it and everyone's using agents I'm sort of curious if um that is actually the most efficient way. For example, um Ben, you were you were talking about um you know, having it do multiple things for you at once. You know, having a watching Atlas scroll through websites is kind of slow and there there may be a more agent native way to allow agents to interact with websites like MCP for example. Are you guys thinking along those lines or is are you still really just focused on the core stuff? \>\> We're thinking through like a whole host of different different technologies to help us drive drive you know web browsing. Um I think as well like beyond the the Atlas team just to think broadly about what chat GBT is doing like we've also um you know launched these these um EOS this app ecosystem uh around around the product and I think that that's sort of a a very direct way in which we're encouraging developers to build for uh a more dynamically composed world. Um, but that's that's you know that's of course in the browser but it's um you know maybe not like part of Atlas in particular. Uh so I think some of these things are we're going to try a few things and and and see how it works out. Plus you know a lot of the technology that's powering the chat GBT atlas agent now you know has its roots in the original operator tech preview that chat that openai put out. If you rewind the clock back to then and compare the performance then to now, you start to see, you know, sort of the rate of improvement as there's been like leaps and bounds improvement sort of quality and and this performance. And we're kind of on that curve of of figuring out how to optimize and make these things work a lot better. And I think there's a lot of exciting um work ahead and opportunity ahead. And this is this was a meaningful step to share with people. And I think it's it opens the door to like imagination and possibilities and for people to um have some real things that it can help you with like what you were talking about earlier. Um but there's so much more to come, you know. \>\> Do you think agentic browsers will make the web unnecessary? And by that I mean uh do you think there's a chance there's a there's a future state where it actually becomes just better to stay inside of chat GPT and your agent is going off and doing all the browsing and then um you know maybe it's maybe it's building like a custom website for you in real time based on what the brand or the writer has wants wants you to see but you're not actually like seeing rendered HTML in the same way that you would have been you know five years ago. I don't think so myself and maybe maybe this is just me not not imag not not being imaginative enough yet about like where chat GBT will go but I I do think that there's an aspect of I think we will see people delegate a lot more to these tools especially as they grow more powerful and they're going to get like amazingly powerful over the next 12 months. Um but uh I still think that there's a lot of stuff that people want to do themselves. Uh and whether it's uh you know even just things like entertainment or like you know there's aspects of of you know shopping or trip planning that I like I do want to be deeply involved with and it's probably going to start at least with some like curiosity that I have and I'm going to go out there on the web and find it. And I think the one of the most exciting things about the web is it has so much stuff on it and so I'm always like excited to explore it and I don't think that will ever go away. Maybe it will be different. Maybe there will be folks that, you know, maybe they're like the the kids today that um haven't sort of lived in a world without some of the stuff. Like they may have a different view on it. But that's just mine. I don't know about you, Darren. I No, I I think people like window shopping. I think people like browsing. I think people like that sort of thing. Um or, you know, I love taking Whimo, but I also love driving my stick shift car. And you know, there's going to be moments when both are, you know, important. there there's moments when I want the Whimo and moments when I want to be just driving myself, you know, and I think that's kind of the future. It's going to always be that way. And also, it depends on what you're trying to do, you know. I think that these uh models can be just incredible at synthesizing things for you that might lead you onto uh the manual mode part of it, right? And and and you're probably going to just incorporate these things in a very natural way in your life. you're going to go between them uh where where it makes sense to you and people are going to figure out figure out that. But there's going to be there's always going to be uh a need to interact with with um you know web apps if you will or applications and the web is a tremendous medium to distribute those things. E-commerce the web is an amazing medium for that. Um yes you could ask your model to please prepare you a um you know a a shopping cart of items but you're going to want to go look at it and you're going to want to go see things yourself. you're not just going to be like, "Yeah, buy that for me." without seeing it. Um, in most cases, and so, you know, I think there's there's kind of this blended world that would probably there's aspect as a um of of the AI as a, you know, like actually like a a workmate or a co-orker or something that you can delegate to. And then there's an aspect of um the AI as a as a thought partner or collaborator um in that sense. I think that these worlds sort of are actually elegantly, you know, it's neither one or the other. It's kind of both. Um. Yeah. \>\> Yeah. Definitely as a thought partner. This is already the case for these models, you know, when you're researching something for at home, you know, asking the, you know, the chatbot about it. Uh, saves you some time. Figure, you know, just as an exploration, bouncing ideas off. When I'm coding, I'm doing it that way. so many things I'm bringing chachi 15 in my life to help me sort through my thoughts and and what kind of problem I'm working on and I think that's that's sort of what what I imagine uh you know I imagine lots of parallels to that in the future. \>\> So here's something I'm cur curious about. Um, when Josh and Hirs were first starting the browser company, uh, I'd been friends with them for a long time. And so we actually talked to them for a little while about being the CEO. And so I spent a long time thinking about browsers for this specific thing. And one of the um, one of the things that I was kind of interested in is is the role is the role of browser in someone's life. And it seemed to me at that point that um, mostly a browser was sort of like a taxi. It's like it takes you from one place to another and it's supposed to get out of your way. It's it's very util utilitarian. Um and that we might be moving to a place where maybe it's more of like a tour guide. Like it helps you figure out where you want to go and what you want to do and then does some of it for you. Um, but there's this interesting tension there where um, inserting yourself between the user and what they want to do sometimes is like super frustrating and your tour guide is super annoying. And people think of browsers as being I think in a lot of ways like I think of it as like a it's an invisible window pain. Like you don't even realize the browser is there most of the time. That's the point. How do you guys think about those? Do you think that that like uh dichotomy is is useful or interesting? How do you think about it? And how do you think about the trade-off of um fulfilling the sort of expectations that browsers are more or less invisible versus um helping the user get more of what they want even even if they didn't necessarily know that they wanted that thing. \>\> Well, there's a um a sort of duality here present in Atlas. uh and I say this not as a punt maybe but just to to observe that you know we have tried to make our browser UI like fairly streamlined and minimal so that you can focus on the thing that you're looking at uh but then chatbt is sort of at the heart of the experience so it is there um and then you can choose how much you want to to engage with it I I think the value of it comes from like I think the the big thing that most people struggle with in their day-to-day life is like ambiguity sometimes is like what what do I do next in this situation to achieve whatever the objective I I have is and and that's where chat GPT is just incredibly uh amazing at helping with that. That was sort of the first that back that was sort of the original idea that that I had for this was when I would um just ask chat GBT in in my existing browser tab like what should I do to solve this problem and then like a friend it would step through you should do like these three things uh and then my question was well could you just do some of those for me and \[laughter\] that point you know sometimes you know still a lot of things it can't do today uh but but we can make it do more of those things \>\> yeah we get reports from users asking hey I asked chat I asked Atlas asked chat GPT through Atlas to do this thing for me and it and it didn't work. We're like great, let us know. We we'll keep note of that and work on those things, you know. Um and so it is it is it is um it is that kind of thing where you start to feel like I should be able to ask it anything. I should be able to ask it to help me with anything. And so uh you know that's that's that's a nice start. \>\> I think one of the things about this form factor though is that it's very um you know it's very familiar to people. I think most people, you know, can kind of relate to a browser. They kind of know how to use it, that kind of thing. And so there, I think it's not a huge leap. I think if you go to a world where everything is intermediated to you by some other thing, um, you know, it's kind of hard to know what you can do with that. Whereas with the browser, you kind of know how to just start browsing the web and doing stuff with it. And then it's the opportunity presents itself in various points along the way like that you can at your own choice. even with agent mode or especially with agent mode, you choose when and how you want to use it. Um, and then it's really on your terms. And of course, I think probably over the course of time, we'll find people will want to use it more and more and so you want to help show them where that's going to work well. Um, but yeah, our goal definitely is not to be annoying. Um, I remember the sort of original mantra with with Chrome uh was, you know, sort of trying to like really minimalize the the the Chrome as as it were and focus on the content. Um, and uh, I think we want to continue to have that be the case. But this in this case, the content is whatever the user is trying to get done. \>\> Yeah, it's got to be a good browser first and foremost, right? It's got to actually work the way people expect it to work. And that's that alone is um, keeps us busy. And, you know, there's a lot of aspects to just that alone. \>\> I can imagine. \>\> Yeah. Um, and then and then uh, you know, how do you how do you sort of add on to that, right? What are the things that I might not realize about why that's hard? Because like I'm sitting here using your product all the time being like, "Yeah, browsers are basically solved except for this AI stuff." \>\> I guess that's true at some level. \>\> But like what makes it hard that uh if you're if it's keeping you busy like what are what are the sorts of things that are keeping you? \>\> Oh, well I mean if you think about it um you know browsers have definitely evolved over the years, right? If you, you know, rewind back to Netscape and then think about Firefox, then think about, uh, Chrome and think about when Chrome first launched and then think about all the features that have been added since. And, you know, not everybody uses all of those features, but some people use them and we hear from those people. And Atlas is um has a a significant subset of those features from the get-go uh because we knew they were important and building on top of Chromium meant that some of them we were able to expose but many things uh we had to um reimagine, rebuild, figure out how to build in a new way. Um and you know some things we have not yet done. So, we're in the, for example, one of the things we heard about early on when we launched Atlas was where's my tab groups, right? And that's a feature that Chrome added a few years back, but certainly wasn't there in the initial version of Chrome. And um I know that when we first launched in Chrome, not that many people were excited about it or used it. it was a sort of a small feature until eventually it's become something that maybe a good number of people actually do care about and we hear about those uh those we hear from those people uh because they they want to carry their workflows over you know so one way to think about a browser is that it's kind of like a uh it's like an embedded operating system and so in that sense you might think of a browser as an app but I think that's maybe not the right way to look at it a browser is more it's closer in complexity to an operating system. It has a an app runtime. Uh it has a window manager. It has, you know, not various notification surfaces and and launchers and other stuff. And so there's just a lot of complexity in building all of that that stuff out. Now, you can short circuit a bunch of that. I think uh you know Darren says maybe it's a solved problem. I think for a lot of browsers it is with including Atlas part of it is solved because of Chromium. Like the fact that Chromium is open source. it presents this just amazing, incredible baseline upon which to build. Um, and you could you could stand up a a browser very quickly that looks more or less like Chrome. Um, I think our product ambition ran a bit deeper than that. I think we wanted to to differentiate a bit more uh in our product UX and so that caused us to take a different path which we've written about. Uh but that does mean that there's a bit more um of this leg work for us to go and like make sure all of this functionality that people expect uh works in the way that they expect. Uh but we think that at the end of the day that will give us a lot more um ability to sort of shape the product in new and interesting ways. Yeah, there's some various for instances, but like we we um if you're familiar with the blog post that Ben was referring to, we we run Chrome completely out of process. And so our app, the Atlas app is a pure Swift app uh that presents all of the browser familiar browser UI through um UI elements that we had to we've had to craft. Uh again they were not just using the implementation from Chromium for any of the UI components. What we leverage from Chromium is the fact that it's great at rendering web pages and all of the uh accessory support associated with that. You know when it comes to various kinds of permission dialogues and whatnot we we hook into that and we present those dialogues but in our own UI. And so there's just a lot of very table stakes kinds of components there that um because of our choice to build the app wholesale uh in in Swift environment all the UI components I should say uh we had to rebuild a lot of different things and of course we had a prioritization there. Although the thing that has advant the adv advantageous uh about this approach for that is you know actually a sort of fun fact about chromium is that much of the UI is built using C++ as a programming language which is the thing that you did when you're building a Windows app back in 2006 era. Uh but it turns out to be hard to find engineers in this day and age that want to do UI development in C++. But \[laughter\] you can \>\> why why is that? I \>\> I have no idea. Speaking as a long time C++ developer, I'm very \>\> I love C++. What's the problem? \>\> Um, but uh but yeah, there's a lot of iOS developers out there, it turns out, and iOS developers often know Swift and Swift UI. Uh, and if you know Swift and Swift UI, you are also you can be a Mac developer. Uh, and so we take advantage of that and it's worked really well. like we've been very successful at at building a team of \>\> and Swift's actually a remarkable language very like very much like a modern alternative to C++ you know has you know there's no garbage collector so it's got a very streamlined sort of memory management sort of uh setup kind of like if you were just being really uh straightforward about using smart pointers in C++ and that sort of thing. Um, so at any rate, we um I I feel like this has worked out very very well for us and we we're leveraging this this this to also bring the product to Windows. \>\> What What percentage of of your code is written by AI? \>\> Oh man, I don't even have stats on that, but I know everybody's leveraging uh codeex and and chat GBT heavily as part of this project. \>\> I would say just like finger in the wind if you had to guess. \>\> Majority of it, I would say. Uh I I I I can't pick the precise amount. I it wouldn't surprise me if it was north of 75% just that like most people's PRs start with uh Codeex. Um \[laughter\] you know maybe there's some like dialing in that you do through the process but that that just means in terms of raw volume codeex is like probably authored you know well over more more than half safely more than half of the like net new code that we have at this point. \>\> You guys have been building browsers for many many years. You started at Netscape, you worked together at Chrome or on Chrome. Um, how does how does it compare being able to build a browser with, you know, codecs at your side in terms of team size, velocity, all that kind of stuff? Like what is give me a sense for what's different or maybe it's maybe it's very similar, but yeah, how does it how does it compare? \>\> Yeah, I was going to say we have a very small team. Uh, although we continue to to grow to take on a bunch more um possibilities. I think one of the things that uh has excited me about this world is it's not just the pace of development because I think to get a feature to work right, it's always going to take a few iterations. Um it's how quickly you can decide that something is worth pursuing. Uh and so there will be an idea that I'll have in my head even as like a a team manager uh where I want to see if the juice is worth the squeeze as it were. Um, and I will just run off and do that in codeex and I'll have a build and I'll see if I like the thing or not. And if I do like it, then it's it makes sense to go and invest in that area. And sometimes we spend, you know, a long time like in in the pre-codex world just sort of wondering about if you should do this or that because it takes so long uh even to prototype. Uh whereas Codeex just makes prototyping a matter of minutes or hours uh for a lot of things. And you know, for as long as we've spent uh in the Chromium codebase across our careers, man, that thing's complicated and it's grown. And so being able to ask Codeex questions about Chromium is just invaluable. Um and you know, any kind of very large uh legacy codebase is is going to have so much complexity and layers to it. And so, you know, the ability to ask these agents questions about it is just un unbelievably useful. Um, but same thing goes for, you know, figuring out how to build um certain kinds of UI effects. You know, constantly probing chat GPT for like what's the right way to to set this thing up so I'll get a good animation or something like that. Just trying to like learn some new strategies with core animation or something like this. Um, so we have like like Ben said, a lot of our code is is um able to be created by Codex because uh you know there's a lot of straightforward aspects to what we're doing. Uh but there's also very delicate aspects that that we're doing. We have to get in there and really study it. But these tools can be tremendous companions as we're trying to figure out well exactly what that what's the right strategy here to kind of explore the solution space. I I just I I just can't believe how useful it is, but it's it's been such an accelerant for this project for sure. \>\> On the topic of being able to prototype things more quickly, um is there anything like weird or crazy that you have in your head that you've been wanting to try that isn't quite that that you know you want to share with us? \>\> Oh, yeah. Let me tell you about something I've been working on. Um um yeah, just in the process of uh so I'm I'm like a heavy tab user and I nerd out on on like the little details of of how tabs work. So like the Chrome tab strip, like a lot of the way it behaves around like where tabs get inserted, what gets selected after you close them, uh how like the tab strip like reflows, animates when you move your mouse out of the like I worked on that like years and years ago, like you know, it's almost 20 years ago at this point. And um although like I have not have had less of a direct uh engineering role in um Atlas myself, uh I do like to poke at different things. And so one of the things I've been playing with with you know as as Darren and the team work on on tag groups, I have been uh exploring ways to um just help make sure that the tab um layout and scroll position remains stable uh as you switch back and forth between tasks. And you might be deeply buried down in a task. You might have like lots of tabs, lots of tab groups open. You might have scrolled your sidebar of tabs down to a certain position. And then I have this moment where I want to go back and check my my Gmail and I like get a like a tracking link or something and I open it up and all of a sudden my tab strip is flung back to the top like it gets scrolled back to the top. And so this is this is what happens today in Atlas. And so I was able to go off and prototype a solution to that in codeex in about an hour. uh where I'm actually able to go and check on something without messing with the scroll position and it's just like a transient uh a transient world where I can go and like look on something quickly. So that's the kind of thing where like if you're interested in just making the app better, you can go off and and just do like a really quick exploration and determine that something you know makes sense. \>\> Isn't that the best? \>\> Yeah. A lot of times we get feedback from people too about like hey I wish this thing or that thing or what if this was possible and then invariably somebody on the team will have gone off and and tried it and it's because it's not that expensive to try to Ben's point. \>\> It's really great. Do you do you all have mixed feelings at all? Like I I know a lot of professional programmers, even people that work every even people who are super psyched about AI who are also like it also is kind of a bummer that you know a lot of code isn't being written by hand anymore and there's a certain craft to it that is maybe you know you just sort of like writing code. How do you guys feel about it? I like writing code. I but I think I would I I I like the sort of crafting aspect. There's some something the almost like therapeutic about it, you know, just sort of it's like art or something, you know, but um I still feel like there's a lot of elements of that. What what I the way I really view this is it's like it's a tool that will accelerate like the the the mundane parts of the work. Uh, for example, I tediously did a refactoring across the codebase that was a little bit tedious because each time each part was different and I didn't really quite know how to prompt it through all of that. But then once I had done it, I needed to do another one. I was like, Codex, just do that for me. Do the other one. And it was of similar scale and it knocked it out within an hour, right? And it was because it could follow my pattern for all the all the times when I worked through all the quirks. it could just follow those quirks, those patterns. I thought that was amazing. Um, and then, you know, like I said, if I'm crafting some animation or something like this, I'm I, you know, Codex is going to be really useful to give me ideas, but I got to get in there and try it and see. And sometimes that that's just how how I work. But, uh, I find I find that, uh, it still is accelerating me quite a bit. And I still get that satisfaction of getting in there and crafting. I think maybe there's some like some version of this that we'll know that like we've achieved some level of maybe even super intelligence with this stuff if it can just go off and build something like Chromium or WebKit or like you know like that that that sort of thing of that scale with like very minimal prompting. Um but I I think we're you know a bit a bit from that point. So I do think that um there's an element of uh individual engineers have judgment that comes from experience. um that's can sometimes see things that aren't evident in the code because what what a coding agent is doing is it's reading the code and it's you know oftentimes making really good choices about things. I'm surprised sometimes at how elegant some of the solutions that um that codeex can come up with are but it doesn't always hit because it doesn't always know some of the context that isn't stated there. And so that's why I think um you know to a lot of extent you know Darren talked about asking uh Codex questions about Chromium. Um I think you know people would would you know I remember being on the Chrome team when everyone would ask Darren questions about how Chromium worked and now Darren's asking Codex questions but I think there's still um there's still a a need in in many especially more sophisticated more subtle places uh for that that judgment to be applied. uh and to like but but then once you have that judgment you just go so fast because you just tell it like I think you should create a cache in this format and you should put you know should you put it in this place in this package and then it just goes off and does it uh at like much faster than you could have and at least myself I don't feel precious about typing that code uh you know it's more like the idea right um I one thing that's been an interesting phenomenon is that um thanks to codeex actually we have a lot more unit tests because it doesn't the overhead of creating a unit test is greatly reduced when you can just prompt for what you want to have tested. Uh, and even the model is able to go and like consider cases I didn't prompt for because really I'm saying can you unit test this API for me or and I've been really impressed with this because that's a mundane task creating unit tests for an crafting the API. It's an interesting task. I'll work on that and then once I have it, hey Codex, can you create a whole bunch of tests for me? Uh it's been a fabulous it's been a fabulous friend in that regard. Um and I think we've seen a lot of benefit from that. And tests are of course super valuable. Those tests help us not make further mistakes. So you know it's just been really that's that's been a definitely a a sweet spot. \>\> Well, you were talking about getting feedback from users asking you for things to to fix things. I have a I have a a quirk that I would love to know if there's a if there's a way to make it better now like just for me prompting better or if just just to put it out in the ether if it was fixed it would change my life. Um, so I run a media company, so we publish articles all the time and there's a lot of copy editing going on. And so I have an article that I wrote that's coming out tomorrow and like it's it's full of edits. And the editor who does it like some of it is it really requires a lot of editorial judgment, but some of it is the equivalent of writing unit tests. It's just like, you know, you're the capitalization is wrong here and there's a combo missing here and there's a bunch of copy edits basically that are constantly being made and we do it in Google Docs and I've try we have a whole style guide and I've tried to have Atlas go through and suggest changes on the Google doc according to the style guide and it it kind of happens a little bit but then it just gives up um and says I did it and it definitely did not it did like one thing, you know, and I think partly it's it's it's sort of the the structure of Google Docs is so complicated, it requires a lot of dexterity. Um, but I'm curious what what do you guys think? And and is that something that you could fix? \[laughter\] \>\> Yeah. \>\> Yeah. Quick question for you. Are you using the agent mode uh to to do that? Is that what Yeah. There's a there's been a known issue uh with our agent. We call it laziness. Um where sometimes you'll see it say things like, "Oh, this task is too timeconuming. I you know basically I give up and it's not just Google Docs um but it would you know for a variety of sites where the task might take like very many steps or an extremely long time to to run um and especially if it's like having to like scroll multiple times to get through like you know if you're imagine you could be tens hundreds of pages even um it it may give up under those conditions. That's something that the team has been working on um as improvements to that. But you're also right that Google Docs is a um it's a fairly complex web app. It's not something that um it's a bit different to a lot of web content. I talked before about declarative web where there's just a you know a tag that you can read through and see everything. Whereas Google Docs is much more like a traditional app. It uses a canvas. It it it just of renders text directly when you scroll. It is the one drawing, not not the web runtime. And that makes it a bit more um challenging to get all of the context out. Uh, and so yeah, I think that the agent is maybe the right way to do complex things there, but the the sort of laziness fixes will will should eventually help with that kind of thing. There's issues when the agent has to know if it should scroll, you know, and things of this sort, which can be critical for a a web app that's that's not just straight up HTML. Um, but I have seen it excel in some cases like this elsewhere. I've been impressed watching it uh tediously close like ads in order to reveal the content below in order to then complete my task. So I can sort of see on the horizon where it's going to you know these these but those are those are definitely cases of complexity that you know where it has to interact. \>\> Ad based businesses are quaking in their boots hearing hearing about uh chatbt at Alice agent clicking like X on ads to get to the actual content that you want. Well, \[laughter\] again, it's doing what I would have done. \>\> I agree. I agree. I'm I'm here for it. Uh we only have a couple minutes left. Um I I think the one big thing that's left on my mind is um uh you you guys have been been doing this together for many years and been working on browsers for many many years. Like why do you care so much about this problem? \>\> Oh god. \[laughter\] It's the most interesting app in the world. Like I said, it's like a mini operating system and there's all of this amazing content. Like when I was so I I got on into the web when I was a teenager. I lived in New Zealand which is like the other side of the world and I felt very disconnected from the world of tech like at least at that point. I think New Zealand has grown a lot in terms of its its uh technological prowess over the years. Um and uh the web was amazing because it was it felt egalitarian uh and that anyone anywhere could get involved in it and they could like publish a website and then eventually you know when when I got involved with Mozilla that you know you could actually go and help shape the thing um and like open source and all of that. It's all kind of tied together. Uh and I just love it. I wouldn't I wouldn't work on anything else. \>\> Yeah. I think for me I have somewhat of a a different but similar origin story of getting involved in all this stuff. Found myself in college using Linux and feeling like man this system would work a lot better if the browser worked better. So I took a job at Netscape to try to make that browser better you know and but it was so liberating I remember that when I did things through web it meant that it didn't matter what computer I had I could still do those things. I think it's sort of a fantastic idea and it's sort of a fantastic that we've we've had this thing and and it and it can be better. It's kind of like this this thing where um web and browsers, they've they've been good and powerful and we depend on them, but they you can all point to crafty aspects to them and things that could be better. And so it sort of feels like it's not done yet. It's felt that way for a long time. And so, you know, that kind of keeps me going because there's more stuff to do. There's more more to make better. \>\> Ben, Darren, this is awesome. Thank you so much for joining. Um really appreciate all the work that you've done through the years and and thanks for making Alice. It's great. \>\> Awesome. Thank you. \>\> Thanks for having us. \>\> Oh my gosh, folks, you absolutely positively have to smash that like button and subscribe to AI and I. Why? Because this show is the epitome of awesomeness. It's like finding a treasure chest in your backyard, but instead of gold, it's filled with pure unadulterated knowledge bombs about Chat GPT. Every episode is a roller coaster of emotions, insights, and laughter that will leave you on the edge of your seat, craving for more. It's not just a show, it's a journey into the future with Dan Shipper as the captain of the spaceship. So, do yourself a favor, hit like, smash subscribe, and strap in for the ride of your life. And now, without any further ado, let me just say, Dan, I'm absolutely hopelessly in love with you.