Nathaniel Whittemore

Overall, they say three frictions define the daily cost of knowledge work.

The first is the cost of finding relevant inputs across, as they put it, sprawling, untransparent systems.

Second is information coordination costs.

And third are approvals and verifications.

In fact, they argue that these frictions are what accounts for the delays between a new technology being introduced and it actually showing up in the productivity statistics.

Knowledge work, they write, is still waiting for its factory redesign.

Previous generations of workplace software lowered the cost of producing intermediate artifacts, but did not reduce the attention required to consume them.

Email made correspondence cheap, then multiplied correspondence.

Docs made drafting cheap, then multiplied drafts and review cycles.

The result is an excess of documents and tools and even scarcer time and attention.

And you might be seeing where they're going with this.

Codex, they write, is that factory redesign.

So what are they seeing in how people are actually using Codex?

First of all, everyone is producing artifacts.

72% of knowledge workers using Codex are producing some sort of artifact, be it a PDF or a spreadsheet or something else, on a weekly basis.

Outside of coding and software engineering related tasks, they're also doing research, 41%, data analysis, 27%, as well as implementing what they call business function workflows at 15%.

Importantly though, people are doing a lot of these at the same time.

The most consequential shift in behavior, they write,

is towards parallel tasks.

Roughly 50% of users now have more than one codex task running simultaneously at some point during the day, up from less than one-third in mid-April.