Nathan: Traditional software productivity proxies are falling apart in AI era
Akshay Nathan · OpenAI’s Vision for the AI Super App — Akshay Nathan, OpenAI · Jul 28, 2026 · at 1:08:10
Akshay Nathan, Core Product Engineering Lead at OpenAI, discusses why traditional engineering output metrics no longer measure actual productivity effectively with AI.
0:00 / 0:16exact quote · 17.0s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“I think with AI now, those proxies starting to fall apart, like, you know, and the number of tokens you use or the number of pull requests you make are like no longer like maybe as hyper correlated with that. Is your team able to hit the goal or are they on track to hit their goals?”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Akshay Nathan
Nathan: Untapped enterprise agent market is 10x to 100x larger
“So now like we're seeing with agents, like there is Probably a contingent of like early adopters still who, you know, truly get it. We're like, you know, you can do anything. You just have to make sure the right context is there. It's connected to the right to…”
Nathan: OpenAI Finance Team Replaced Slide Decks and Spreadsheets with Sites
“I was actually talking to someone the other day who was on like our corporate finance team and like they're mentioning how like now when they have these reports that they're working on as a team month to month, historically those things were in, in slide decks…”
Nathan: OpenAI sequencing agents from developers to knowledge workers to everyone
“The vision is like bring useful agents to everyone. We started with like developers Historically are like early adopters that are willing to put up with more friction, set things up, et cetera. Like that's where, you know, Codex started. I think the next oppor…”
Akshay Nathan: Software creation bottleneck has shifted to ideas and taste
“I think the bottleneck some becomes like sort of like ideas and taste, I guess. I think because anyone can build now, I think it really is the era of like bottoms up ambition. And because there's so much to be built, like you're always going to be bottlenecked…”
Nathan: Open-ended AI chat interfaces confuse enterprise users without guided use cases
“Using these models and these products, you have this box and you can say anything to it, which is the magic, but it's on the flip side. It also means that, like, you don't know what to do with it, and in enterprise, I think a big part of that is, like, actuall…”