Kevin Weil

I would love to make it over time less of a thing.

And I think over time it is.

If you go back a year or two, everybody was talking about prompt engineering and it was going to be the skill that everybody had to master in order to do anything with AI.

You don't hear it talked about quite as much like that.

And I think that's a good thing.

Ideally, it matters less and less that for any particular user, if they have a question, they want an AI to do something for them.

You shouldn't need to get into like arcana around, did I use the exact right word?

And did I give my exam?

You know, it should just work.

I think that's part of increasing intelligence is the model can understand what you're looking to do and do a good job of it without you having to work super hard at it.

That said, prompts still do matter and the models are very controllable with prompts.

And so, you know, we still find we'll launch something and we'll find that it's not behaving in certain ways the way we want it to.

And we can adjust it with a prompt a lot of times.

You don't need to go back and like retrain the model.

So it's both that I want to make it less necessary over time and that it is still a powerful vector.

What does an agent mean to you?

We think of an agent as something that can do independent work.

So it's not just a quick, you know, you ask a question, you get an answer, but it's actually off doing tasks for you in the real world.

So another, I think deep research is a great one where it's off doing, you know, hundreds of searches and putting together a complex report for you that might have taken you a week.

I think another is Codex, which is our software engineering agent that we just launched.