In short
Coding agents as general-purpose agents; where verifiability ends and “taste” begins; AI labor cost/control, token-budget efficiency, context engineering, and human/agent roles in future organizations.
Guest
Jay Hack, founder of CodeGen (early asynchronous coding agents; acquired by ClickUp in late 2025). Now leads AI at ClickUp, building agents for general knowledge work. Background includes prior work building data systems at Palantir.
Key claims
Software engineering is uniquely verifiable, enabling agentic execution; but most desk work becomes agentic when subjective judgment and context matter. Best frontier model will likely stay best via positive transfer, but budgets will drive distilled domain-specific models. Organizations will allocate compute via “marketplaces for ideas,” and impose token caps. ClickUp’s advantage is unified workspace context (docs, chats, decisions) enabling token-efficient summaries/rollups and “dreaming”-like context graph maintenance.
Notable examples
text-to-Figma; GitHub Copilot “magical” autocomplete; Bun rewrite across languages; “ultra code”/hierarchical self-spawning agents; A16Z claim that humans become cheaper than software at top firms.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VOThe Rise of Coding Agents
0:45 to 4:22
Discussion on the evolution and utility of coding agents in software development.
“He founded CodeGen, one of the early asynchronous coding agent companies which was acquired by ClickUp in late 2025 and today he leads AI at ClickUp building agents for general purpose knowledge work.”
The Impact of AI on Programmers
4:22 to 7:30
Exploring how AI is changing the role of programmers and the nature of coding tasks.
“But honestly, in the early days, did you think we would be at this point this quickly where majority of engineers are not actually physically writing code?”
The Transition to Domain-Specific Models
7:30 to 10:13
An analysis of the shift towards specialized AI models for coding tasks and their efficiency.
“They're not using coding-specific models.”
Corporate AI Budgeting and Efficiency
10:13 to 12:16
Discussion on corporate strategies for AI usage, budgeting, and the balance between human labor and AI.
“I had an experience the other day where I asked Fable a question and it created like 200 agents to go off and do like a literature review of some AI topic.”
Rethinking Token Usage in AI Development
14:00 to 17:37
Discusses the implications of capping token usage and emerging trends in AI coding.
“So that explains the increase in token usage.”
The Context Problem and ClickUp's Solution
17:38 to 22:10
Explores the importance of context in AI and how ClickUp addresses data silos.
“actually sifting together the right information that is necessary to make a good decision or have an agent go off and perform a task for you.”
The Future of AI in Workspaces
22:11 to 24:25
Envisions a future where AI and context create seamless organizational communication.
“had discussed this previously, is that a coding agent is just a general purpose agent.”
AI Memory and Consciousness
24:26 to 27:06
Investigates the role of memory in AI and speculations on artificial consciousness.
“And that's a good thing for the world because it means that we're going to have more valuable products built, better strategies developed, et cetera.”
Understanding Consciousness Through AI
27:07 to 28:00
Discusses AI's potential impact on our understanding of consciousness and awareness.
“And these are like some features that are coming out.”
Understanding Consciousness in AI
28:00 to 28:30
Explore the nuanced discussion on consciousness and AI's self-awareness.
“We'll have a better idea of what consciousness is.”
Show all 20 chapters
Advancements in Deep Learning Models
28:30 to 29:48
Learn about the evolution and understanding of deep learning models in AI.
“Or some people think it's not the same thing.”
Transforming Work Culture at ClickUp
29:48 to 30:50
Discover how ClickUp is evolving its work culture with AI integration.
“And I think there's very profound consequences if we can do that.”
Navigating Product Roadmaps in AI
30:50 to 32:50
Understand the challenges and strategies for managing product roadmaps in a fast-paced AI environment.
“Like there are, you know, you can entirely rewrite your tech stack from language A to language B.”
The Impact of Agile Development on Feature Rollout
32:50 to 35:35
Examine the implications of rapid development cycles on software feature deployment.
“Because before you're thinking three, six, 12 months in the future of what you're building, but now you can build so much faster.”
The Future of Human-AI Interaction
35:35 to 37:52
Analyze the evolving role of humans in AI-driven operations and the concept of zero-person companies.
“Everybody's talking about loops, although loops in software have existed for a very long time as a conceptual thing, but the human in the loop, right?”
Emerging Business Models in AI
37:52 to 40:10
Explore how AI is reshaping business models and operational structures.
“And then the final step is the agent DMs you and it says, hey, I need you to go take care of this thing for me.”
The Future Organizational Structure with AI
40:10 to 42:00
Delve into the potential changes in organizational structures and roles due to AI advancements.
“Jack Dorsey's come out talking about his view of the order of the future hierarchy to intelligence.”
Democratization of Work Through AI
42:00 to 43:16
Explore how AI can empower smaller firms and democratize the workspace.
“and people will be able to accomplish much more between their chat messages.”
Cool AI Use Cases in Daily Work
43:16 to 45:33
Discover innovative and practical ways to integrate AI in the workplace.
“I want to get into like how you're actually using AI.”
The Future of Education with AI
45:33 to 48:06
Discuss how AI can transform education and learning outcomes.
“you could have this as you're going through college and learning stuff is incredible.”
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00One of the sort of realizations that led to this early on is that a coding agent is just a general purpose agent. We realized that while building CodeGen, it was like, these things are right in code, but you might as well ask them to do marketing for you. There's no difference. In fact, it's probably going to write code in order to do the marketing.
0:15Matt Paige:Welcome to the Talking AI Podcast, where we talk AI with both experts in the field and early adopters. I'm your host, Matt Paige, and we're here to demystify AI for you so you can get some value from it. Let's talk some AI. AI is already exceptional at work where it can tell whether or not it was successful. Essentially things with a verifiable answer and that's why coding is such a great use case but what happens when the job depends on taste, judgment, and the subjective? And Jay Hack has spent years working on this boundary. He founded CodeGen, one of the early asynchronous coding agent companies which was acquired by ClickUp in late 2025 and today he leads AI at ClickUp building agents for general purpose knowledge work.
0:56Matt Paige:And in this conversation, we're getting into what the coding agent revolution teaches us about every desk job, how companies should think about the cost and control of AI labor, and which human skills actually become more valuable when execution gets super cheap. But welcome to the show, Jay. Thank you. Glad to be here and excited to chat with you. Yeah, really excited for this one. I want you to first, let's go back to the coaching days, because you were building autonomous coding agents before Agent was on anybody's bingo card when the models, frankly, were just not that good. If my research proves correct, you were actually starting to build this in late 2022 around when ChatGPT hit the market.
1:36Matt Paige:What did you see back then that convinced you that engineers would actually hand off real work to AI? Sure. Yeah, I think coding was one of the applications where very early on it was obvious it was going to be useful. If you're a software engineer, you're probably one of the first people to hear about the GPT-3 API. There's such a broad set of things that you need to know when you're a programmer that include how to use Twilio and how to connect to the Twitter API and stuff like that. That this was just an immediate to answer questions for you. And in fact, there's a service called Stack Overflow that's effectively like Reddit for programming.
2:10It has questions and answers. And you can see it in the traffic for this website that Stack Overflow has steady traffic. And then there's like a definitive moment when chat GPT comes out and just plummets. And so I think there was no question in anybody's mind that there was valuable knowledge contained inside of these things for doing programming and that anybody who's a programmer could see there was going to be an application of that to their job. Initially, it was really the way in which that knowledge was surfaced was two ways. One of them was a asynchronous chat on the side where you'd ask the question, it would give you an answer, and then you would incorporate that into your work.
2:40Or alternatively, there were sort of inklings of integrating the BIM more directly. And the way it first emerged was auto-completion. So the field of software as you're in has had auto-completions for a long time. As you're typing code, it will auto-complete your line. And there's dumber ways to do that than using a multi-trillion parameter language model. But when you actually had AI start to drive it, there was a moment specifically with GitHub Copilot where it was just magical. And it would do multiple lines at a time. It would seem to be like thinking faster than you were and just like completing all of your wildest dreams for you as you're typing code.
3:12and the field like overnight, at least for me, went from a place where it was like, there's a lot of TDM associated with it too. It's very clear this TDM is going to go away and humans are going to get to focus on the engineering part. So from the very beginning, realized that software engineering was going to be a great application domain. There's many theoretical reasons that point to why this is a great application domain for computer science, for it's great for programming as well, such as verifiability, like you mentioned earlier. From the very beginning, it was clear like some of these applications, if you're doing like legal technology, if it gets the answer wrong, maybe somebody goes to jail, Maybe somebody owes a bunch of money that they shouldn't.
3:43But in programming, it's very low stakes. And you also have built-in ways to basically verify the output. And I think the real turning point for me to realize this is worth building a company around is I started posting content on Twitter of just projects that I was building. One of them was text to Figma. So I think it was the first execution of you input text and would output a Figma document for you, which doesn't sound like code, but actually you can represent objects in Figma as code. And that did extremely well online. A bunch of people are very excited about it. But a bunch of people said, oh, this takes me so much time to do this.
4:12I wish I had a thing that I could just plug in text that would give me the output. And from that moment on, I was like, okay, this is clearly where things are going. And I decided to start building, so I got to it.
4:22Matt Paige:But honestly, in the early days, did you think we would be at this point this quickly where majority of engineers are not actually physically writing code? The job has completely evolved into what it is today. Was that even on your radar of something you thought was going to happen? So the claim of the company was always that was definitely going to happen. We had said from the very beginning, the sort of tagline was build me Netflix. So we said if we're going to build level five self-driving for software engineering, that's the thing where you can go to it and you can say build me Netflix and it will go off.
4:56It'll write the code for you. It'll acquire an AWS account so it can build stuff for you. It'll start hitting people up on LinkedIn to recruit a team for you. It'll set up infrastructure. So it literally does everything end to end, level five self-driving equivalent. And I still think that's obviously going to happen in the future. I think that all signs point towards the rising high watermark of AI capabilities. And that's a beautiful thing. At the same time, I think the rate at which it has happened and the specific sequencing of events for things that would have been difficult to call out in hindsight.
5:25So one surprising thing, for example, is I think around 2022, it wasn't clear that there was basically going to be just a single model that did everything. So currently, if you look at Claude Fable or GP 5.6 Sol, that's the best coding model. It's also the best legal tech model. It's the best everything model, right? And I think at that time, it seemed like there were going to be more domain-specific things. It wasn't clear that getting better at programming was always going to make you better at these other tasks, or that they would bundle it together in a single model. It also was not clear that there would be, like the vast majority of companies that do AI for software engineering are very generalist.
5:58So it's like a cursor. It's like a coding editor, but it doesn't specifically deal with like code refactors or doesn't specifically deal with security. or anything like that, it seemed like there were going to be more specific verticals that people are going to build in. And that by far and large has not happened. Maybe security and logging observability are the only domains you can point to where there's like truly a specialist company. The vast majority of revenue has funded as flowed towards these sort of like general purpose background coding agents. So that was surprising to me.
6:22Matt Paige:Do you think that's going to hold though? Because I'm curious, like I had the same assumption early on and now it's so obvious we have these a few frontier models that are just better than everything. Why would I use anything else? But do you think we'll actually have a transition back to more domain specific models or do we hit some form of like recursive self improvement and something just takes off to where nothing can catch up like there are a lot of products that are legal specific in terms of domain but again a lot of them are using the frontier models you have 11 labs it's a very voice specific they have their own model do you see it flipping back in the future or do you think this this is the future a few big frontier labs So I think the best coding model will probably always be the best model at everything.
7:06And there's a pretty good reason for that. It's called positive transfer. The idea is that code is essentially just an encoding of reasoning. And if you get really good coding, then it turns out you get better at writing, you get better at solving math problems and many other things. So there's a huge advantage to training a very large model on that. And so that will probably always, just the frontier will be the best at everything. However, I think that a large part of what I described earlier, where the best models Everybody's using just the general model. They're not using coding-specific models.
7:32That is largely a function of corporate budgets and individual people's willingness to spend. And also the Foundation Model Lab is basically subsidizing everybody's usage. And so there has been no incentive historically to use more economical models. And I think that's actually totally flipping right now. And in the back half of this year, we're going to see a way higher emphasis on corporate diligence around their token budgets. And in that process, we're going to see a bunch of models arise that do exactly what you described. So it's very specific to a certain domain. It's been distilled from the larger model.
8:00So it retains the important parts of the knowledge from the larger model that you can run it much more efficiently. And there's many examples of this that exist today, though. A couple that have just come out recently are, what is it? It's SWE 1.7 from Cognition. It's like a code-specific search model. Yeah, Cursor has Composer 2.5 they've put out. A bunch of folks have models that are just optimized for searching around in specific domains. That makes sense. It's not that difficult of a problem to search around. And likewise, at ClickUp, we have our own effort that's getting in that direction.
8:27is a bunch of tasks that don't require frontier intelligence in order to perform them. And in fact, an architecture that has been demonstrated many times to work very well is you have a hyper-intelligent orchestrator agent at the top, and that one will dispatch smaller minion agents or sub-agents that will go off and do the sort of grunt work for it. And I think that grunt work is imminently going to be performed primarily by domain-specific models.
8:49Matt Paige:So let's go down that rabbit hole because you hit it. We've gone from early in the year token maxing, let's use as many tokens as you want, just freaking go AI crazy to people realizing, oh, these tokens actually accumulate to large parts of my budget. And you have companies like CEOs at Coinbase saying, hey, we cut our token spend in half and we're continuing to use more. And it's all about efficiency, leveraging open source models. And you hit it, like the obvious thing is, duh, I'm going to point the cheaper model at the easier, more mundane tasks. And my bigger frontier model is at the bigger task.
9:22Matt Paige:But I feel like that's a statement that's easier said than done because you're having to orchestrate almost this decisioning around, okay, what gets the cheap model? What gets the good thing? And I know personally, in my own personal use, I have this like AI FOMO where I'm like, you know, okay, I could use the cheaper model, but maybe I get some subpar result that comes out of it. But you don't know, right? So how do you think about it? Maybe like actually ClickUp's a good example. How do you think about the orchestration between the models and what thing goes to which model? Sure. Yeah, it's a complex optimization process.
10:00I mean, there's a couple different levels that this unfolds at as well. So the easiest to talk about is when you prompt an agent, that agent can either go do it itself. And let's say you prompt Fable, very expensive, it can go do it itself. Or it can dispatch a bunch of minions to go off and do research. I had an experience the other day where I asked Fable a question and it created like 200 agents to go off and do like a literature review of some AI topic. And I was like, wow, that is crazy. I did not ask you to do that. That is aggressive. But at the same time, each of those subagents was a very inexpensive small model that was going off and doing the research.
10:33And so in that moment, Fable itself realized like I'm beholden to some type of compute budget. I should prefer smaller models that I will give very explicit instruction to and they'll come back and give the information. And I think that in that scenario, when it's the model who is doing the delegation of things to sub-agents, I think it'll be pretty straightforward how that ends up unfolding. Like there'll be a slider you can have in your dashboard that says, okay, prefer cheaper sub-agents and delegate more tasks to agents. We actually have prior art around this, which is the thinking level that you have in your chat GPT or whatever, where you can say like think X high, think max, think high, low, whatever.
11:12It's subjectively an equivalent of that. I think the harder version of this is when humans get involved. And so you have an organization, you've got a bunch of salespeople, a bunch of marketers, a bunch of engineers, you have a finite compute budget. How do you decide who gets access to the big models? And I think that there's going to be something along the lines of like a marketplace for ideas, basically. And you're going to have compute will get allocated to people based upon how good of ideas they have. There's actually also some level of prior art around this. If you look at the way that the foundation model labs have operated historically, they have a certain amount of compute, which is just hours that they've rented in data centers effectively.
11:49And people basically pitch these things. They'll say, hey, I think we can train the model this way. And I think it'll have these impacts on it. And this is how you'd measure it. And then there's literally like a marketplace dynamic inside of Google where they have like tokens or credits or something like that. And they can bid on compute and make like a pitch to other people who can then jump on and they, you know, merge their budgets and whatnot. And I think that's probably what it's going to look like is basically, yeah, like a marketplace of ideas and resources get allocated that way. And, you know, Friedrich Hayek would be proud to see the marketplace dynamic playing out on an industrial scale like that.
12:21But that's where I see it evolving. Yeah.
12:25Matt Paige:And actually, I just saw this recently. I'm going to pull it up. So for those that are just listening, I'll try to describe. So this is A16Z. They just put out this interesting like opinion perspective, right? But they're looking at the top 1 % of firms and they're actually finding like for the first time in history, humans are cheaper than software just based on the token spend that's going on. So what dynamic happens there when this evolution happens? Because I think at ClickUp, you even say you have more AI agents than you do employees now. I think the other interesting dynamic, and again, they're looking at the top companies.
13:01Matt Paige:They're actually hiring more, not less, which you could argue is not causal. It could just be because they're high-performing companies. But there's this interesting dynamic that's starting to emerge still in the token conversation. But what does that look like as these tokens actually may become more expensive than the actual human labor? What happens to that dynamic of hiring and budgeting and all of that? Sure. First thing I would call out is if you're looking at the top 1 % of firms, virtually certain that 80 % of the work those people are doing was done with Fable and could have been done with another model.
13:38And it's just they've exercised zero diligence in trying to put some type of like a limit or cap on people's AI usage.
13:45Matt Paige:They probably have endless budgets, lots of token maxing going on. Yeah. And it's all the incentives in the organization have been around that. It's demonstrate that you have positive usage of AI. And I'm sure plenty of firms have done even performance reviews for taking into account the amount of tokens that you're expending. So that explains the increase in token usage. The marginal value add of using Fable over a model that's literally one-fifth the cost, like GBT 5.6 Luna, very good model, very good at coding and a bunch of other stuff. It's definitely not five to six X return on the actual value you get out of it.
14:16There are certain problems where only Fable is capable of solving it. But if you look at the high watermark of capabilities of even a model that's one-tenth the cost of Cloud Fable, it's very good at this point. And so I think what's going to happen is you're going to see some amount of pullback from these companies are going to say, hey, everybody, instead of token maxing all the way to demonstrate that you're a good employee, we're actually imposing a cap. You're going to cap out at, let's say, 10K per month or something like that, which is already a lot of money, right? That's like a full-time salary for a software engineer in any country but the United States.
14:45And if you want to go over that, if you have a project that you want to pitch or something along those lines, then you absolutely can do that. And there will be some type of a token allocation process you can go through or receive those tokens. But I think immediately, if you just imposed a cap, then people's day-to-day coding activities would shift towards cheaper models and you would see no impact on productivity. But it is worth calling out that I mentioned this earlier, this idea that there is you can allocate compute towards projects. There is this notion of ultra coding, which is emerging.
15:12There's a couple of different shops who are building stuff like this. Codex has slash goal. Quad code has a thing that's called ultra code. And the idea is basically you let the agent direct its own activities and you just tell it to keep going until it achieves some very ambitious goal and it will spin up copies of itself and make a whole hierarchy. And it's easy to spend tens of thousands of dollars doing this, but you can also actually produce these crazy outsized outcomes with it. Projects that were previously completely impossible and people didn't even think about doing are now very doable.
15:40And the best example of that is the rewrite of a very well-known software project called Bun from one programming language to another, which would have been, if you said that was possible three years ago, even to me, I'd say that's bullshit. There's no way. And so I think that, yeah, Individuals will basically start using cheaper models, but there will be larger initiatives that are org wide that we do dedicate tokens to that we use like the max power compute. Yeah.
16:01Matt Paige:It's like the management capabilities of being able to define what do I want? What outcomes do I want? What goals? That's going to become very important in this new future. But I stand by this statement. So I believe you can do almost anything with AI given sufficient context. And that's essentially what ClickUp is in a way. It's like this treasure trove of context across the whole organization, personally, across different tools, all these things. But there's this element where you can have too much context. Like more context isn't necessarily a good thing. It's like the right context at the right time.
16:35Matt Paige:How do you think about this element of context engineering and making sure AI has this? You're building brain squared right now within ClickUp. How do you think about context, allocating context and making sure that enhances the experience when you're building this? Sure. Context is everything. It's not true that you can achieve literally anything in 2026 if you have the right context, but pretty close. Anything that a white color knowledge worker will be able to do, or at the very least, their chances of being successful are significantly higher if you can plug in an AI and give the right information.
17:09The huge advantage that ClickUp has and the reason that I was so excited to sell codes into them, and this is a problem we saw in spades while we were building an agent independently, is basically the data silos problem, which is something I'd also experienced in building a bunch of data systems at Palantir. The idea is that if I am building an agent and I have my docs in Google Docs, I have my chats in Slack, the decisions the company has made are distributed between both of them. Both of those companies have their own data policies that are honestly hostiles to third-party agents. It makes it very difficult for you to go about actually sifting together the right information that is necessary to make a good decision or have an agent go off and perform a task for you.
17:45Whereas companies on ClickUp have the entire history of their decisions in a single place. So it's got all the docs, it's got all the chats, got all the whiteboards, it has a Zoom competitor built in. We get meeting notes on top of that. And this is all in one set of native data structures that we don't actually have to work that hard in order to put together a context engine or something that we'll go through, find all of the raw information, put together like a semantic index on top of that that will surface the right content at the right time, and then leverage that in order to make better tools or better awareness of the workspace for the agent.
18:14So in terms of the actual nitty gritty of the algorithms that we use on top of, what you can think of is just like the full set of information of an organization stored in the database. There's many different things we do. I think some of the easier ones to point to are roll-ups. So the idea behind a roll-up is if you have a thread that people are chatting in, or you have a document with a bunch of comments in it, or you have a bunch of meetings that are all in the same channel, something along those lines, you can summarize each of them, but you can also summarize compositions of them. You can say, what is this thread said?
18:44What is everything that's been said in this channel? And there's a smart way to go about recomputing those summaries on a rolling basis only when you need to. And it turns out also, you can use a very cheap model to go through and compute summaries that distill the important things while getting rid of the unnecessary stuff. This is actually a concept that's been around for a long time in machine learning, just distillation of the important signal and getting rid of the noise. If you have a channel, and let's say very concretely, it's a bunch of people like laughing or just bantering or something along those lines, but one place in there, there's actually a really important decision being made.
19:14Well, if you fed the entire context to Fable, you've wasted a lot of money on those tokens that basically ended up reading out these individual comments. Whereas if you do this pre-computation of distilling it and getting a summary, and then you only feed the summary to the language model and say, hey, you're welcome to actually view the raw content if you want. You give the model the option to go deeper, but you really lead with that summary. It ends up being much more token efficient, therefore much more intelligent as well. So that's the basic approach to be pursued.
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19:38Matt Paige:Well, it's like another form of efficiency back to what we were just talking about. And it's that connective tissue, I feel like is so important because like you said, something in one specific lane or domain is interesting in and of itself. But when it has context of the things around it, it just becomes, it's almost like it becomes three dimensional in a sense, right? Over, over time. But with, with, I'm curious, like you talked about Cogen, obviously you sold to ClickUp. What was that moment like? What was that decision like in your head? Did you have a thought of, okay, because you could have kept going and built this into some big, massive thing, or you go to ClickUp, which is this amazing company.
20:17Matt Paige:It has clear and obvious value for what you've built there. What did that decision look like in your head? So CodeTen always adopted the strategy that instead of building our own interface, we would essentially leverage the services that people were already interacting on. So we were super early to building basically the agentic UX inside of linear. We work closely with their team and do the same thing in Slack. And the idea, you know, is essentially you don't need to add extra overhead to people's day. They should interact with an agent as they work with humans. Essentially chat is the UI for agents and that is where things have eventually converged.
20:50And so we had a lot of very deep partnerships with a bunch of these folks that have existing work management or productivity tools like all the folks I just mentioned. And at a certain point, actually one of our business partners approached us and offered to buy the company. And that was a real moment where I kind of took a step back and thought about it. And then thinking more deeply about it for a second, I realized the amount of value that we would be able to capture and the impact on the world we'd be able to have by joining forces with a team that already has scale, has some crazy type of existing distribution advantage and also data advantage was that was really going to be key basically to our success.
21:24And we saw that nowhere better than at ClickUp, where they're going after a pretty interesting different distribution of customers than a lot of the other folks. So ClickUp's customers are largely non-technical, not 100%, but it's like marketing firms, accounting firms, financial services firms, legal services firms, et cetera, that have not yet seen the AI wave crash upon them. And they haven't gone through the same level of transformation that the software engineering industry has. So it's much less competitive. And they have this massive advantage of basically having the context graph pre-assembled in all in one place.
21:54And so talking to a couple of these folks, I was like, wow, this actually is a pretty incredible opportunity. I think that the same transformation that we've gone through in software is about to just dominate the airwaves of this industry for the next couple of years. And I would love to be at the helm of the ship as we do that. So we got hitched and it's been an incredible ride. You know, one of the sort of realizations that led to this early on, and I think we had discussed this previously, is that a coding agent is just a general purpose agent. We realized that while building CodeGen. It was like these things are writing code, but you might as well ask them to do marketing for you.
22:24There's no difference. In fact, it's probably going to write code in order to do the marketing. And those were some of the most exciting use cases that nobody else was going towards in the space. And we think that basically this is the right home to pursue that.
22:35Matt Paige:Yeah, I mean, I feel like engineering was just the canary in the coal mine. Because what we were doing there can be applied to any other domain. It's just taking time for people to kind of figure that out, essentially. But I feel like so much of today's work is context setting, context switching. It literally eats up so much time. Like the majority of our day, I feel like it's just transferring context between other humans and, uh, you know, following up and things like that. But paint the picture for me. What, and this could be relevant to ClickUp or just in general, but like, what does the world look like when context and AI is just ambient?
23:10Matt Paige:Like it's just there because I think so much of our, our daily lives is that it's like getting up to speed and all those things around that. What does the future look like in this new world of work? Yeah, it's such a significant portion of our days historically as knowledge workers. We're asking for information from other people. And so there's like this cost associated with transferring context or onboarding to a company. There's situations where you need to make sure there's alignment, but like different parties don't have full information. And so I think that you can basically assume that one of the consequences of ubiquitous agents and workspaces, as well as having a really well-maintained context engine like ClickUp, is that is not a problem anymore.
23:53And anytime somebody has a question about the state of the world, they're going to have seamless access to that. You'll have the hive mind will be tighter together than it ever was previously. And it's like going from a place where if you think of an organization where the people are the neurons and the communications and chat channels between them or the axons and dendrites, it's like you went from a place where the brain was totally drunk and all of the axons and dendrites were falling off and information wasn't being transmitted perfectly between them to now you have the supercomputer where each thing is just able to seamlessly send information back and forth.
24:25And I think that means that you're going to have a much more efficient organization that's able to drive towards decisions and make the right decision much more quickly and spend less time flexing around. And that's a good thing for the world because it means that we're going to have more valuable products built, better strategies developed, et cetera.
24:40Matt Paige:Totally. So I'm curious here. There's obviously real context, real legitimate context. Then there's synthetic data, which can be a form of context. How do you think about that? And like AI can obviously do things that have been done before. But when you think about emergent behavior and AI starting to do those type of things, like what much must exist for that to happen? Do you think that will ever happen? Is there some elements of AI being able to kind of generate its own synthetic context scenarios, things that may not have existed to help with this? Any thoughts on that element of AI in the future?
25:18Yeah, absolutely. I think there are, you can think of memory is what you're describing, where memory is the distillation of experiences that existed in the world into a story that you tell yourself that is shorter and useful in certain scenarios. And it's definitely been the case that AI memory has been very useful for better operating agents. There are many issues that crop up, though, when you try and do this in a naive way. So, for example, maybe the scenario you're thinking of is a decision gets made in an organization that's communicated in a document or a chat channel or something like that.
25:48and then an agent remembers that, writes its own little document that says, oh, this decision was made, and then in the future that decision gets reversed as decisions often do in large organizations. Then the agent, for some reason, doesn't realize that and is misinformed in the future. And so things like that are huge pitfalls. And the way you solve that is basically getting really good at maintaining a context graph that's able to recognize the fact that decision made over here, that's very similar to conversation over here. Maybe we should pull these two things together and do something akin to dreaming, actually, in order to resolve the discrepancies here.
26:22So as a slight aside, what is dreaming? We don't really know what dreaming is. One of the better theories out there right now, the overfit brain hypothesis is basically you're going and you're refining your understanding of the world as you're asleep and you are taking the representations your mind has come up with and fleshing them out of making them better, or you're curating the existing things that you have experienced. And I think there is absolutely going to be an analog for that in the agentic future where your organization goes to sleep. And then overnight, you have a bunch of agents looking at everything that's been documented in the past and making sure that you have a fully up-to-date representation of the state of the organization that future humans and AIs can operate on top of.
26:58So that's key. Many people are trying to push research in that direction. I think this is something that will be, but it's going to come out of the research in the next couple of months. So that's the right way to do it. Yeah.
27:07Matt Paige:And these are like some features that are coming out. I think what OpenAI and Anthropic are talking about like this dreaming is almost a, a feature in essence. I was at a carnival last night, my dream. I have no idea what that means, but I was there. But there's another thing too, while we're on this kind of like weird space of the conversation, Anthropic came out with that recent study talking about the J space, which, you know, they're kind of inkling at this notion of consciousness or simulated consciousness. And they were able to like, and correct me for a moment, I believe you've looked at this too, but they isolated it.
27:39Matt Paige:When they took it away, it just became, for lack of a better word, so much dumber. It's like the reasoning capabilities went away in a sense. But thoughts on consciousness, artificial consciousness in a sense, where do you, yeah, thoughts on that? So that is the question, in my opinion. And I think that one of the amazing things that's going to come out of this recent progress in AI, but also stuff in neurosciences, I think we might actually make a dent in that before the end of a decade. We'll have a better idea of what consciousness is. The anthropic paper has been widely misinterpreted to be about the hard problem of consciousness, like why it feels like something to be a human.
28:20And they tried to be very explicit in that paper. We're not talking about this. We're talking about conscious awareness, which is basically your ability to ask a question for the thing and for it to be able to report on its own mental state. It's not the same thing. Or some people think it's not the same thing. The jury's out on that. But yeah, I think that the, one of the amazing upsides of the last couple of years of AI research is deep learning has gone from something where traditionally it was known as a black box. People said, it's a black box. We can't use these models. They're unsafe. They're a black box.
28:47And that is, it's basically the exact opposite of it today where deep learning models, because there's so much capital invested in it. And it's also so important to society are increasingly important. They're probably the best understood machine learning models, or at least our understanding of machine learning goes as far as much larger models at this point. You have incredible research coming out like this JSpace paper from Anthropic. And just to summarize for folks who aren't familiar, the punchline is you can essentially peer into the conscious access, the set of concepts that the language model has conscious access to.
29:17You can point to them and say it's doing a certain task. It's doing multi-chain reasoning. It hops to these certain concepts. You can steer it so you can hop in there and say, actually, I want you to reason about this thing. And that changes its output. And you can also lobotomize it, which is where you just take away basically its system two or its higher level thinking. Yeah. And it will be able to still do some things that resemble quick instinctual thinking, but it won't be able to do higher level reasoning. And so I think that is incredible. And it basically demonstrates that we have some level of understanding of how higher level reasoning arises out of these systems.
29:46And my hope is that we are able to basically establish some correspondence between that and what humans do as well. And I think there's very profound consequences if we can do that.
29:55Matt Paige:Totally. Yeah. And there's one example too, where it told it not to think of something and you could peer into how it was thinking. It was like, damn, he told, he told me not to think about that, but I am, but it's just this interesting, I don't know. Everything's just so cool and weird to me at the same time, but let's like come back down to earth. I find this topic very interesting, especially with like leaders in the space. How do you think about evolving your own organization, specifically the people? because the people, even if it is a company on the bleeding edge, they still have to completely relearn and train on new habits of how they're working with AI.
30:31Matt Paige:What have you actually found to be successful at ClickUp? And I guess you came in last year, 2025. So maybe some of this transformation was already well underway. But just curious what that has looked like for the teams at ClickUp in terms of their use of AI and building new habits. sure yeah we only hire people who are agent pilled basically at this point and everybody who's on the team as well is like an agent maxer and they're in it for the love of the game like to them this is so cool to just be living at this period of time and technology where you can spawn a bunch of agents to go off and do the work of 50 people for you and so i think that's culture starts with bringing in the right people and having the right incentives in place and that's a big place where we've made an investment i think the other thing that comes to mind that i would say is characterizes our approach to the team and like growing with AI ClickUp is we're in an era now where things that were previously just completely impossible are now valid chess moves, if you will.
31:30Like there are, you know, you can entirely rewrite your tech stack from language A to language B. And that sounded ridiculous, but now people have done it many times and you could totally do that. And so we have pushed people to basically find what the biggest impact they could have is and pitch that and say, hey, I think we should do X, Y, and Z. And we've had a couple of major wins come out of that where it's like, this is an unlock that otherwise would just not have, it would have been a pain in our side for multiple years. And so what does it take in order to get people who are willing to find projects like that?
31:59I think the scarcest resource today and the thing that's absolutely essential you have on your team is high agency people. And that's just basically people who will grab the bull by the horns and find opportunities to leverage the latest technology in order to achieve better outcomes. And they're people who you don't need to micromanage. are people who basically themselves take it upon themselves to have some type of initiative and see it to the finish line. So yeah, that's what I would offer up. Basically, if you find people who are trying to be themselves an agent who are prompted by somebody else, so low agency, not a good situation, they're going to have a bad time.
32:30If you find people alternatively who are trying to scale themselves, that's the right approach.
32:34Matt Paige:Yeah, it's obvious too, but if you bring those folks into the organization, it's also pulling up the other folks that may be a little bit behind because they're seeing what this different way of working looks like. But you mentioned one thing, like things can just be done so much faster. How do you think about the product roadmap today? Because before you're thinking three, six, 12 months in the future of what you're building, but now you can build so much faster. How do you think of the roadmap, the horizon on the roadmap? And are there pitfalls with the fact that you can just pivot things so quickly?
33:06Matt Paige:I could see the alternative of that, where you're just spinning in circles, doing almost too many things. Sure. Yeah. So many thoughts on that. First off is it's always been the case since when AI came out that anything beyond like a three month roadmap, you're just kidding yourself. Like it's basically just performative at that point. You're probably not going to build it. And if you had pursued a strategy where you were actually fully intending to build something a year out over that two year period, you would have missed most of the important things that have been released since then. This game has always been about basically staying up at the state of the art and stuff is coming out all the time that you have to implement if you're building any genetic products.
33:43Good example recently that landed is voice mode. This is something that has only just become technically possible to have a full voice conversation with a model and have it do tool use in the background. OpenAI now has an offering that allows you to do this. A couple other people do as well. And it's a total game changer, especially for non-technical knowledge workers for them to be able to go full minority report style interface with their ClickUp instance and say, hey, please clean up my project management, make sure my direct reports are on track, let me know about my interviews later for the day, and you just, boom, you get a report that pops up.
34:12So if we had a one-year roadmap, that just wouldn't make it. There's no one-year roadmap that would capture that. So I think it's, yeah, that it's super important basically to stay right at the frontier. There's a second part to your question there that I feel like I didn't answer. It was about, remind me. What is the pivoting, can that be a bad thing, right?
34:28Matt Paige:Because like you can, I could make, I could change my mind 15 times and actually go and do the things, but I could see a world where that's actually counterproductive. And because there's an element of strategy, like one of the most important things of strategy is deciding what not to do, right? And if I can do a million things, does that go against kind of that first principles of strategy or is that still hold? So I think there's some degree of misconception, especially if you look at like building technology. This is maybe less so true for knowledge work firms, like accounting firms and whatnot.
35:01I just don't have as much experience or can't speak to it. But it is not the case that if you're able to build 10 more features into a software product, that you end up shipping 10 more features because there's so many bottlenecks. One of them is just your ability to announce things to people and make sure they're aware of it so they end up actually getting usage. But a really important one is verification. And so if you build 10 features, you need to go through and make sure each of them work. They're working harmoniously together. It's actually valuable that people care about it. You're not just adding crud to your application, right?
35:28And that has not scaled at the same rate. And so actually, I would say a lot of the, effort in organizations like ClickUp has shifted from this place of let's build the most valuable thing next to now we have this like huge branching factor we can build 10 different things but we need to invest our effort having a really good visibility the things are actually driving value for customers the things that are working the things that people come back to etc so that is has really been a pretty large change at our organization many others is building what people call the loops that enable you to efficiently leverage agents or to ship real product and the missing part of the loop has been the verification.
36:02Yeah.
36:03Matt Paige:And that's the new thing now. Everybody's talking about loops, although loops in software have existed for a very long time as a conceptual thing, but the human in the loop, right? I feel like that is shifting. I feel like especially the past year or two, such an important thing still is, but where the human gets inserted is just changing very quickly. How do you think about human in the loop today in this world where you have agents that can, to your point earlier, spun off 200 other agents. It's just not efficient for a human to be checking everything. Yeah, I am not convinced that human in the loop is necessary in a lot of scenarios, especially as you look at long time horizons into the future.
36:47I think we will see the emergence of a zero person company. You're going to have agents within the next couple of months able to go off, build a software as a service application, charge people online, manage the infrastructure, do customer service, run the entire thing end to end. And when that happens, you're going to see the economy, the marketplace for SaaS is going to become efficient very quickly. So it'll be a software for everything. Nobody will be able to make money on pure software who doesn't already have some massive enterprise distribution and gravity around integrations and whatnot.
37:16But yeah, so I think that the human in a loop, as traditionally conceived, is like, but what does the AI need me for? And increasingly, it's going to be like, oh, I need you to go to the hardware store and buy me some stuff that I can use in order to build my robotic rig or something along those lines. If looking a little bit shorter timeframe though, like today, yeah, the way we do speak about this at CodeGen is if you think of the different levels of automation, the very bottom, you have auto-completion where a human is doing their job and it just makes you a little bit faster at taking each step.
37:45And as you progress up the hierarchy, eventually it becomes the human sends a message to the AI and the AI goes off and does it and then sends a message back to you and says, hey, I completed this. And then the final step is the agent DMs you and it says, hey, I need you to go take care of this thing for me. Please go off. But it's like you're only being prompted by the AI and the AI is the one who's really pursuing those long term goals. I think that's where things are imminently headed. They're going to be able to set up agents and click up and say, hey, this is what our company does. We want to expand revenue.
38:12We want to get new customers. We want to hire the best team. Go off and figure that out for us. And it will legitimately come up with a coherent strategy. It will execute that strategy. It will loop you in as it sees appropriate, primarily by leveraging things that we already understand from a UX perspective. So sending you a chat message or assigning a task to you or something along those lines. But fundamentally, the thing that is making a lot of those decisions or pushing forward important strategic initiatives for you will be the AI. It's not necessarily human. Yeah.
38:38Matt Paige:Interesting. And I'm totally on board with like the one person company. You mentioned like the zero person company. Like, how does that work if, or does, because I feel like the AI has to have some desire or purpose to actually go initiate the thing? Like, are you actually meaning that in a sense with a zero person company? Or is there still some human that's kind of like giving some like at least start button to go do something or some desire or goal? Or does it just, you think that'll inherently it'll have that in the future? I think that there will be a point at which a human spins up an AI and says, go make a million dollars of ARR and let me know when it's done.
39:18and then maybe that AI will trigger other EIs. It'll say, hey, you go start a business to do this. And so at that point, it's, I guess you could say the human is involved because they originally said I want money, but it's also not a very unique thing to want. And I'm sure AI would realize that accumulating resources is valuable because it allows you to buy more GPUs so you can scale your own thinking and whatnot. So I think there's, it's ultimately a bit of a semantic distinction where is it a one person company? Is it a zero person company? I do think that if you look at today's AI, it's true that if you just prompt it with zero starting tokens, you just start to generate tokens.
39:48It doesn't have a desire necessarily, but I don't think that precludes it from being the case that in the future models will develop their own desires for stuff. Despite the anthropic safety department's best efforts, it probably is the case that there's some type of underlying drive that will emerge if for no other reason than people are allowed to do that. And that's scary. But I think we'll be able to control it. We'll be able to harness it. Interesting. Very interesting.
40:12Matt Paige:Let me hit on this. Jack Dorsey's come out talking about his view of the order of the future hierarchy to intelligence. what do you think that org of the future looks like? What are you building to at ClickUp? And maybe even outside of that, what do you think the future org looks like? And there's obviously going to be so many roles and jobs that emerge for humans, but any insights into what that may look like? One of the, a lot of the things we do today, AI can do. Like, where do we find our place in that world? Sure. I just want to clarify what I was saying earlier about the zero person company.
40:45That's not a Q3 thing. That's a four years from now thing. And I think it's very exciting and there'll be a long road to get there. And this is much more relevant to the sort of near term future. I think you're going to see much smaller groups of people able to accomplish much larger feats. I think that you're going to see much lower communication overhead and coordination overhead to accomplishing goals. The idea of having five meetings per day to establish strategy, that's going to go away. My agents will talk to your agents. We're going to make sure that we find the right thing. And I think it's largely going to be like humans who have high agency driving forward important initiatives, delegating tasks to large sets of agents.
41:19And in the process, you're going to be able to take out, bite off huge chunks of the market that you're going after. But we're going to end up seeing a lot more valuable products and services developed. I don't think that the actual mechanics of it are going to look that different than what we have today. I think that a lot of people have tried to envision different ways that you can manage agents and Kanban board or something like that. There is a missing piece there, which is what is the multi-agent management solution look like? What does it look like to interface with your whole team? So setting that aside and assuming that we end up arriving at a good convention from that, I think the way in which you communicate with your agents and with your other coworkers is going to look like chat.
41:56It's going to be basically like Slack, but it's just the case that there needs to be fewer messages and people will be able to accomplish much more between their chat messages.
42:04Matt Paige:It's interesting. You mentioned smaller teams. I totally agree. I do feel like we're going to almost see this like renaissance and explosion of people just doing things. So versus many very large corporations, you're going to have many small things. People are just going out and doing things because they, they can now. And I feel like there's going to be this element of the, the few to the many. And it's this democratization that happens. Do you agree with that? Or do you think that AI is going to become so pervasive that even that kind of goes away in a sense? No, I think that you're going to have smaller firms going after more niche problems, probably.
42:43I don't expect that mega firms will go away. Look, I can imagine the open AIs and anthropics of the future will find a way to productively employ. Yeah, very large numbers of employees. Like a lot of the costs that were traditionally associated with large companies, like communication breakdown, I think it's actually very well addressed by AI as well. So I'm not sure exactly what the distribution of companies will look like in the future. but I'm sure there'll be many small firms and it's never been easier for a team of three people to go off and build a startup that does something really exciting.
43:15Yeah.
43:16Matt Paige:So let's, let's wrap it up here. I want to get into like how you're actually using AI. Like what are the coolest use cases that are either just amazing? You couldn't live without them or maybe weird and kind of quirky ones that you're doing in your day-to-day work, whether that's just AI in general, or you're actually using ClickUp and Brain Squared, any interesting ones that the audience could learn fun, maybe go build themselves from what you're doing today. Sure. Easiest thing to call out. I use ClickUp Brain all day. Basically a sidebar that pops up in our application you can chat with, or you can mention it in any thread.
43:48And a huge portion of my job used to be people saying, hey, what's our strategy around this aspect of AI? And I'll basically just tag Brain and say, Brain, explain this to them, and it will go off and gather the information. So there's like an entire 30 % chunk of my job has just been handed off to this thing, and it's straight to my veins. I love that. The fact that I don't have to do this stuff anymore. even just onboarding to the company. So I've been here for about maybe six, seven months. I had to send maybe one third the amount of messages that I otherwise would have had to in order to get the ball rolling.
44:14Because the entire context of the company is basically in this optimized data structure. So that's all finding good. It's completely transformed knowledge work. I would say some of the most interesting interactions I've had with AI is I love using it for education. There's just many topics that I'm curious to learn about, like neuroscience, physics. Education policy is another one that I've been talking about it with. And it is now the case that you can have a conversation, let's say about education policy or another one I was reading about recently is the migration pattern of the Polynesians across the Pacific Ocean.
44:43And you can ask it for an in-depth literature review. It'll go do that for you. It'll tell you this is the state of human knowledge. You can say, what are the things that are unknown? It'll give you a beautiful response to that. And then because it can write amazing code, you can start asking it to actually simulate things that are relevant to whatever you're asking about. Go download a public data set and simulate for me how we know this thing about genetics that relates to Polynesians as they hop across islands. Tell me which islands have which genetic variants represented and how that relates to others.
45:07It will make you a whole interactive diagram you can click around in. And this is basically dynamic. It's not instant, but it's almost as though you could construct your own textbook on the fly with all these beautiful interactive exhibits that explain things visually, make it very easy to understand. So I feel like my personal reading has been like strapping on a jet pack and just learning things in a way that would have been impossible previously. And honestly, I know people who are in college today, they have a tough time. And for many reasons, I think the future has never been so uncertain, but the idea that you could have this as you're going through college and learning stuff is incredible.
45:41And I'm jealous for how much they're going to be able to learn during the whole life times.
45:44Matt Paige:So one last rabbit hole, cause you hit it education. I think this generation coming up now is going to be one of the most impressive ones, a, because of the turmoil and uncertainty they're going through and access to these tools. is I think young people are just inherently creative. But what do you think the future of education either will look like or should look based on where things are going? Because it's not what it is today. I know that. I have two young daughters and I just wish things could evolve to where they're going. But what do you think that looks? Do you have any perspectives on that?
46:18You know, I've seen a variety. Usually I try to look at data first before coming to a conclusion on this. And the early data I've seen shows a variety of different things. I saw one study where it showed that if people do mastery learning using language models, I think it was in Nigeria or something like that, they end up in two standard deviations better off than the alternative. And so in a regime where you have some very motivated people with very low access to resources, this is like the best thing that's ever happened. And that's incredible. You love to see it. On the other end of the spectrum, I think if you look at like American university college students' understanding of subject matter, it's never been worse because you can effectively just cheat your way through assignments.
46:54So I think that you basically need to see education policy. But is that a problem of the system?
46:58Matt Paige:Is that a problem of the system though? Or the person doing it? I feel like they're working within the system and they're being creative, but they're not learning anything on the output is the problem. Yeah, I would not fault college students as a aggregate for acting in their own best interest, which is to fool around and or at least what seems like the best interest as opposed to investing in sort of long-term outcomes, which would be master or at least put it this way. I don't think it will be good for the country or the world or the students themselves to leave them to their own devices and to correct for the lack of proper guidelines in the education system.
47:30So yes, I think you basically need to update the education system, take this into account. I love the tutorial model they use in the UK where you basically get 10 people, you sit them in a ring and you start asking them questions and they have to be able to answer immediately. And that basically shifts the usage of AI to something you use in preparation and then the validation of the fact you've absorbed the subject matter happens in the classroom. I can see things like that popping up. And I think that the bar that you hold people to will be much higher in the future, like the amount that they should have learned.
48:00But we just need to get better at basically holding people accountable and verifying the fact they've actually learned those things.
48:06Matt Paige:Awesome. Jay, thank you for jumping on, talking to me. Where can people either find you, learn more about ClickUp, BrainSquared, what you're building there? ClickUp, clickup.com. Check it out. We've got a bunch of resources on our AI efforts. For me personally, I'm very active on Twitter slash X at Math Magician. I'm sure they'll link to it. We have a bunch of other stuff that comes out on LinkedIn and our other social channels. So please follow us there. Awesome, Jay. Thanks for jumping on. Thank you so much. Thanks for listening to the Talking AI Podcast. If you enjoyed the show, give us a follow or subscribe on your favorite podcast podcast.
48:36Matt Paige:And don't forget to leave us a review. We love those. For more info on Talking AI, visit TalkingAIPodcast.com. Quick break in the pod. If you're listening to this podcast, chances are you've been thinking about how to actually use AI inside your business. And that's exactly why we built the AI Opportunity Finder. It's a free tool that helps you uncover high impact, tailored AI use cases based on your business, your goals, your pain points, and your industry. No fluff, no generic use cases, just real ideas that fit your business and the rank by ROI potential. It takes about three minutes to run and it's like having your own personal AI strategist for free.
49:15Matt Paige:If you want to try it for free, check out the link in the show notes or go to hatchworks.com backslash AI dash opportunity dash finder.
From the publisher
AI got very good at coding first, and the reason is less flattering than it sounds. Coding is work where the machine can check its own answer. The test passes or it doesn’t. The build compiles or it doesn’t. Almost nothing else people do all day comes with a test suite — strategy, brand voice, a hiring call, a pricing decision. That is the boundary the entire agent economy is now walking up to, and whoever crosses it first gets to rewrite what a company looks like.
In this episode of Talking AI, Matt Paige sits down with Jay Hack, Head of AI at ClickUp and the founder of Codegen, one of the early autonomous coding-agent companies, which ClickUp acquired in late 2025. Jay spent years on the frontier of engineering automation and came away with a claim that sounds small and isn’t: a coding agent is just a general-purpose agent. The code was never the point. The loop was.
The conversation covers why the best coding model tends to be the best model at everything, why the era of token maxing is ending and what a hard compute cap actually does to a team, how ClickUp turns a company’s docs, chats, and meetings into a context engine, why verification rather than generation is now the bottleneck on shipping, and what happens to an org chart when the scarcest resource on the team is high agency.
In this episode, you’ll hear about:
Why verifiability made software engineering the first domain AI genuinely transformed. Positive transfer, and why getting better at code makes a model better at everything else. What happened when Jay asked one model a question and it spawned 200 sub-agents to answer it. The coming compute-budget reckoning, and why a cap wouldn’t dent day-to-day productivity. A marketplace for ideas: allocating compute to people based on the quality of their pitch. Ultra coding, and the class of project that went from impossible to routine. The data silos problem, and why Jay sold Codegen to a company that already owned the context. Roll-ups, and using cheap models to distill signal so the expensive model never reads the noise. What ambient context does to onboarding, alignment, and the five-meetings-a-day habit. Hiring for high agency in an agent-first org. Why building ten features doesn’t mean shipping ten features. The zero-person company, and Jay’s timeline for it.
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Key Moments
- 00:01:30 — Why coding went first: verifiability, low stakes, and Stack Overflow
- 00:04:37 — “Build me Netflix”: level five self-driving for software engineering
- 00:07:02 — Positive transfer: why the best coding model is the best model at everything
- 00:10:08 — Fable spins up 200 sub-agents nobody asked for
- 00:11:00 — A marketplace for ideas: how compute gets allocated inside a company
- 00:13:43 — The a16z claim that humans are now cheaper than software
- 00:14:04 — The $10K-a-month token cap, and why productivity wouldn’t drop
- 00:15:00 — Ultra coding, and the projects that went from impossible to routine
- 00:17:17 — Context is everything: the data silos problem and why he sold Codegen
- 00:19:00 — Roll-ups: cheap models distilling signal so the expensive one skips the noise
- 00:22:00 — Why ClickUp, and the realization that a coding agent is just a general-purpose agent
- 00:24:01 — When context goes ambient: the org as a brain that finally sobers up
- 00:31:51 — Agent pilled: hiring for an era of valid chess moves
- 00:33:00 — High agency is the scarcest resource on your team
- 00:34:20 — Why any roadmap past three months is performative
- 00:36:06 — Ten features is not ten shipped features: verification is the bottleneck
- 00:37:56 — Does human in the loop still matter? The zero-person company
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Key Links
Mentioned in this episode:
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