My biggest takeaways from
@danshipper:
1. The future of work will happen inside Codex or Claude Code. Instead of putting AI into your SaaS tool, youâll use your SaaS tools inside your favorite AI agents' in-app browser. Dan spends all his time in Codex nowâwriting documents, managing email, doing research, everything. He's using Google Docs, PostHog, and everything he needs within the agent's in-app browser. The agent can see what heâs doing, and has all of his context, so he and his agent collaborate quickly and super effectively.
2. Automation is a lieâevery automation needs a human. Dan's company doubled in size this year despite being incredibly AI-forward. Why? Because in order to make automation work well, you need humans making sure everything keeps working. This is why benchmarks are misleadingâthey measure AI on problems weâve already framed and can score, but thereâs always a higher frame.
3. PMs will win the AI era. Marcus, a former PM who previously ran Axiosâs writing product, joined Every after getting super AI-pilled. Now he runs their product Spiral, and ships faster than anyone on the team. He pairs technical knowledge with spiky product sense, deep user empathy, and an eye for what matters. Dan thinks any PM who gets really AI-native will be incredibly dangerous because the building is done for youâwhat matters is figuring out what to build and if itâs great.
4. Full-stack designers are becoming superheroes. Designers used to make beautiful interactions that engineers didnât want to build or couldnât execute properly. Now designers donât need to hand things off; they can build it themselves. Designers are naturally creative people, and AI is the perfect tool for them because it lets them bring their vision to life without the traditional bottlenecks.
5. SaaS is not dead. In fact, Dan is bullish on SaaS stocks. When users bring their own AI (via Codex or Claude Code) to use SaaS products, the userânot the SaaS companyâpays for tokens. This saves SaaS companyâs margins. Since the agents need their own seats, Dan predicts that agents will create massive new demand for SaaS because there will be tons of agents using these products at high volume.
6. Every company will have one âsuper-agentâ inside their Slack that every employee will use. Dan initially thought every employee would have their personal work agent, like a shadow AI org chart, but heâs completely flipped his view. He realized agents need humans who care about them. When someone gets tired of maintaining their personal agent, it becomes useless. The winning model is one forward-deployed engineer or AI-savvy person who maintains a company-wide agent (like Shopifyâs River or Viktor), and then it trickles down to more specialized team agents as models improve and become less fiddly.
7. The AI job apocalypse is not happening, but you do need to evolve to stay relevant. Models make yesterdayâs human competence cheap. But because everyone uses the same models, it all looks the same if you use it the default way; it becomes commoditized slop. Humans then take that frozen competence and use it to make something new and interesting for their specific situation. The key: âride the modelsââuse them for everything you do, try new models when they drop, keep turning over rocks.
8. We will read way more AI-generated writing, and we will like it. Human writing is incredibly important for things that matter, but for internal docs, planning, and email, AI-generated is often better because most people are bad at writing strategy documents.
9. Build software for humans and agents to use together. The current model is building a CLI that an agent uses independently. Instead, you and your agent should be using the app together. This creates new design challengesâagents can make a billion requests in three seconds, so you need approval flows, inboxes that summarize what happened, logs, and easy rollback.
10. Forward-deployed engineers are the new most essential role. The big model companies have teams of people managing their internal agents, and those teams arenât going away. Itâs different from traditional software building, and certain engineers love it. As models get better, this role will evolveâyouâll be managing more agents doing more things.