Learn how the smartest people in the world are using AI to think, create, and relate. Each week I interview founders, filmmakers, writers, investors, and others about how they use AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Midjourney in their work and in their lives. We screen-share through their historical chats and then experiment with AI live on the show. Join us to discover how AI is changing how we think about our world—and ourselves.
For more essays, interviews, and experiments at the forefront of AI: https://every.to/chain-of-thought?sort=newest.
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Most AI design tools give you a text box. Matt Colyer thinks that’s the wrong interface for design. Colyer, director of product management for developers at Figma, argues that great design requires a diamond-shaped process: First you diverge, generating as many ideas as possible, then you converge around the best ones. Chat is linear, which makes it good for iterating on one design but not good at generating lots of options. Figma’s new on-canvas agent is a first attempt at fixing that. Dan Ship...
Dan Shipper runs one of the most AI-native companies today. Every has agents embedded in nearly every workflow—“if you swing a stick in our Slack, you're as likely to hit a human as an agent,” he says. And yet the company has grown from four people to 30 since GPT-3 came out, and is still hiring. Why does Dan believe there's more human work to do than ever? In a format flip for AI & I, Every's COO Brandon Gell turns the tables and interviews Dan about his latest essay, “After Automation”—an ...
If your MCP server has dozens of tools, it's probably built wrong. You need tools that are specific and clear for each use case—but you also can't have too many. This creates an almost impossible tradeoff that most companies don't know how to solve. That's why we interviewed Alex Rattray, the founder and CEO of Stainless. Stainless builds APIs, SDKs, and MCP servers for companies like OpenAI and Anthropic. Alex has spent years mastering how to make software talk to software, and he came on the s...
From time to time, we will republish episodes that you might have missed. This episode originally aired in September 2025. Noah Brier uses Claude Code as his second brain—it’s the coolest notetaking setup we’ve ever seen. He has Claude running on a server in his basement hooked up to a VPN. It stores, reads, and writes to thousands of notes in his Obsidian vault. He does it all from his phone. We had him on the show to tell us exactly how he’s pulling this off. Dan and Noah get into: The nuts an...
Angela Jiang and Katelyn Lesse from Anthropic delve into the progression of AI platforms, highlighting how Claude Managed Agents simplify the development and deployment of robust, scalable AI solutions. They discuss the shift towards tightly integrating harnesses and models, the critical role of robust infrastructure in moving agents to production, and practical internal use cases like legal document review. The conversation also touches on advanced multi-agent orchestration strategies and the future of outcome- and budget-driven autonomous agents.
In January, Dan Shipper wrote that whoever wins vibe coding wins how you work on your computer—and OpenAI had some serious catching up to do. Three months and the release of GPT-5.5 later, Codex has more than caught up. Austin Tedesco, Every's head of growth, now spends about 80 percent of his working time inside the Codex desktop app, doing everything from drafting go-to-market plans from a stack of meeting transcripts to rebuilding the company's KPI dashboard. On this episode of AI & I, Da...
Emily Glassberg Sands leads data and AI at Stripe, which processes roughly 2% of global GDP, giving her a bird’s-eye view into how AI is upending the internet economy. Dan Shipper talked with Glassberg Sands for Every's AI & I about what the data on Stripe's network actually shows: AI companies are scaling three times faster than the top SaaS cohort of 2018, fraud has moved from the checkout to the full funnel, and agents have started buying things, although mostly low-stakes commodities lik...
Most frameworks for working with AI agents assume humans should stay in the loop at every phase. That’s the wrong approach, says Cora general manager Kieran Klaassen . Kieran is the creator of Every's AI-native engineering methodology, compound engineering. His four-step framework—plan, work, review, compound—rebuilds how engineers work with agents. The insight, worked out with collaborator Trevin Chow, is about when to be in the loop and when to step away and let the model handle it. "LLMs are ...
This episode features Eve Bodnia, founder and CEO of Logical Intelligence, discussing the limitations of large language models (LLMs) for mission-critical applications due to their black-box nature and propensity for hallucination. She introduces energy-based models (EBMs) as a superior, verifiable alternative rooted in physics, capable of truly understanding data and generating formally verified code. Bodnia argues that LLM progress is plateauing, opening the door for EBMs to serve industries requiring deterministic and constrained AI solutions, filling a crucial gap in the current AI landscape.
This episode explores Every's journey in integrating personal AI agents for all employees, from COO Brandon Gell's initial use of "Zosha" for household tasks to company-wide adoption for work automation. It delves into how agents develop unique personalities reflecting their owners, enabling specialization and public collaboration within a trusted community. The discussion also addresses challenges like AI memory gaps, group chat etiquette, and the cultural shifts required for effective human-AI interaction.
Founded in 2019, Linear is the rare company started pre-ChatGPT to have successfully reinvented itself as an agent-native business. On this episode of AI & I, Dan Shipper sat down with Karri Saarinen, cofounder and CEO of the product management tool, to discuss building a platform where humans and agents develop software together—and why the "SaaSpocalypse" isn’t coming for all SaaS companies. If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share! To hear more fro...
Mike Krieger built one of the most consequential consumer apps of the last two decades as cofounder of Instagram. He is now at the frontier of determining what makes a breakout AI-native product as co-lead of Anthropic Labs. Dan Shipper talked with Krieger for Every’s AI & I about how his experience creating Instagram shapes how he thinks about building with AI, including what can be sped up and what remains stubbornly time-intensive. If you found this episode interesting, please like, subsc...
Kate Lee has spent her career working with words—first as a literary agent, then in roles at Medium, WeWork, and Stripe. As Every’s editor in chief, she’s been the quiet force behind the newsletter for more than three years. Lately, something has shifted in Kate’s work. After years of watching her colleague Dan Shipper evangelize AI from the front lines, Katie has started rewiring how she works and is integrating more and more AI tools in her work. We had Kate on to talk about her career path fr...
Every has unveiled a new product, built by CEO Dan Shipper . It's called Proof , a free, open-source, live collaborative document editor built for humans and AI agents to work in together. Proof started as a Mac app designed to show the provenance of AI-written text—purple for AI, green for human. But when Shipper rebuilt it as a web app with real-time collaboration, something clicked. Suddenly, everyone at Every was using it for everything from planning docs, to creative writing and even daily ...
Silicon Valley loves billion-dollar moonshots and AI darlings. Sam Gerstenzang and Dan Friedman are doing something different—they're starting medical spas and funeral homes. On this episode of AI & I, Dan Shipper sat down with Gerstenzang and Friedman, partners at Boulton and Watt, which they call the "world's slowest startup incubator." Their model: Come up with an idea, achieve five or 10 million dollars in revenue themselves, then hand it off to a CEO who can take it to the next stage. T...
Depending on whom you ask, AI is either the best or worst thing that can happen to the next generation. The arguments come from educators , venture capitalists , op-ed writers , and anxious parents —but rarely from the young people in question. On this episode of AI & I , Dan Shipper sat down with one: Alex Mathew , a 17-year-old high-school senior at Alpha High School in Austin, Texas. Alpha School, a rapidly expanding network of kindergarten through grade 12 private schools, is not without...
OpenAI’s hottest app isn’t ChatGPT—it’s Codex. In the last few weeks alone, the Codex team shipped a desktop app, GPT-5.3 Codex (a new flagship model), and Spark, the fastest coding model I’ve ever used. Usage has grown fivefold since January, and over a million people now use Codex weekly. Codex was also the app that OpenAI chose to run an ad for in the Super Bowl. Dan Shipper talked to Thibault Sottiaux, head of Codex, and Andrew Ambrosino, a member of technical staff who built the Codex app, ...
The AI labs fighting for attention during the Super Bowl call to mind another iconic Super Bowl moment: Apple’s 1984 ad for the Macintosh , which promised that the personal computer would be a source of unbound wonder, freedom, and delight. They were right, but over time, the personal computer has also become cluttered with errands. These “computer errands”—downloading a W-2 when tax season rolls around, hunting for the right coupon code before checkout, or navigating the unholy labyrinth of the...
A few weeks ago, Natalia Quintero wouldn’t have called herself technical. But since the beginning of January, she has woken up at 6 a.m. to vibe code with Claude. The AI project manager she built saved her 14 hours a week. Getting there meant scrapping the system three times and starting over. But the result handles everything from onboarding new clients to generating weekly updates across all projects. Natalia is the head of AI consulting at Every. As part of the role, she's spoken with over 10...
Entrepreneur Andrew Wilkinson used to sleep nine hours a night. Now he wakes up at 4 a.m. and goes straight to work—because he can’t wait to keep building with Anthropic’s latest model, Opus 4.5 . Two years ago, Wilkinson was obsessed with vibe coding on AI software development platform Replit . It was thrilling to describe something in plain English and watch an app appear, less thrilling when the apps were always broken in some way, often full of maddening bugs. So he set his app creation ambi...
LLMs have made it absurdly easy to go deep on almost any topic. So why haven’t we all used ChatGPT to earn college degrees we wished we had majored in or pursued a niche interest, like learning how to name the trees in our neighborhood? I know I’m not the only one to feel guilty for well-intentioned attempts at autodidactism that inevitably peter out. Entrepreneur Nir Zicherman has a reason for this disconnect: LLMs can answer most of your questions, but they won’t notice when you’re lost or pul...
Anthropic just dropped Claude Cowork—essentially Claude Code for everyone, not just engineers—and we got to chat about it with a product engineer at Anthropic who helped build it. In this live Vibe Check, Dan Shipper and Kieran Klaassen explore the new interface together, testing what works (and what doesn't) in real time. Anthropic’s Felix Rieseberg joins midway through to explain the philosophy behind Cowork's design: why it separates "Tasks" from "Chats," how the queue system lets you send me...
From cofounding LinkedIn to backing OpenAI early, Reid Hoffman is in the habit of being right about the future, so we wanted to know what he saw coming in 2026. In his third appearance on AI & I , Hoffman lays out his predictions for where AI will go in the 12 months ahead. He talks to Dan Shipper about how agents will break out of coding into other domains and who’s winning the coding agent race. They also get into how Hoffman defines artificial general intelligence , the way he believes en...
Tomorrow is the first day of 2026, and to give our listeners a view of the trends that’ll shape the year ahead, Dan Shipper had Every COO Brandon Gell on AI & I to discuss their predictions for what’s next. They discussed how software will be built, who will build it, and what it will take for truly autonomous AI agents to become a reality. If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share! Want even more? Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prom...
Learn how to use philosophy to run your business more effectively. Reid Hoffman thinks a masters in philosophy will help you run your business better than an MBA. Reid is a founder, investor, podcaster, and author. But before he did any of these things, he studied philosophy—and it changed the way he thinks. Studying philosophy trains you to think deeply about truth, human nature, and the meaning of life. It helps you see the big picture and reason through complex problems—invaluable skills for ...
We had someone guide himself toward Jhana live on our podcast. And he narrated himself from start to finish. Jhanas are meditative bliss states and they traditionally require thousands of hours of practice. But Stephen Zerfas and his team at Jhourney are changing that—creating retreats where most participants hit a Jhana in their first week. Dan Shipper went to one of their retreats earlier this year, and it was by far the best he’s been to. So we had Stephen on AI & I to show us how he gets...
Sarah Rose Siskind is incubating two types of intelligence at once: her unborn child, and FetusGPT—an LLM trained on nothing but what she hears and says throughout the day. This includes Seinfeld episodes, YouTube videos about lemurs, eight hours of snoring per night—and even conversations with me, all condensed into MP3 and text files that are used to train the AI. Since FetusGPT is learning English from such a narrow, idiosyncratic slice of the world, it mostly babbles right now, and if she sw...
The world changed last week—Opus 4.5 is the best coding model Dan has ever used. It can keep coding and coding autonomously without tripping over itself—and it marks a completely new horizon for the craft of programming. The dream is here: You can write English, and make software. We had Paul Ford on AI & I to talk about it. Ford is the co-founder of Aboard and also a prolific writer. He authored one of Dan’s favorite pieces of technology writing What Is Code?—so he’s the perfect person to u...
If you had millions of people using a product you spent years building, would you kill it? That’s exactly what The Browser Company did with Arc. Originally recorded in July before The Browser Company’s acquisition by software giant Atlassian earlier this year, we’re republishing this episode because its lessons are truly timeless. Today, the team continues to operate independently under Atlassian’s umbrella. The internet backlash when the company killed Arc in May 2025 was intense, but cofounder...
If you’re using AI to just write code, you’re missing out. Two engineers at Every shipped six features, five bug fixes, and three infrastructure updates in one week—and they did it by designing workflows with AI agents, where each task makes the next one easier, faster, and more reliable. In this episode of AI & I, Dan Shipper interviewed the pair—Kieran Klaassen, general manager of Cora, our inbox management tool, and Cora engineer Nityesh Agarwal—about how they’re compounding their enginee...
