The Codex team prioritizes Day 7 retention over power-user edge cases
Alexander Embirikos · Inside OpenAI: 2026 is the year of agents, AI’s biggest bottleneck, and why compute isn’t the issue · Dec 14, 2025 · at 55:51
Alexander Embirikos, product lead for OpenAI Codex, explains how his team avoids over-engineering for advanced users by regularly testing the onboarding experience from scratch.
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“One of the things that I'm constantly reminding myself of is that a tool like Codex sort of naturally is a tool that you would, you know, become a power user of. And so we can accidentally spend a lot of our time thinking about features that are like very deep in the user adoption journey. And so we can kind of end up over solving for that. And so I think it's like just critically important to like go look at like your like D seven retention. Just go try the product, like sign up from scratch again.”
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