Context Window

The Dawn of Codex-native Apps

Plus: Delegation versus collaboration, Dan’s inbox-zero Codex workflow, and the agentic version of Musk’s five rules of automation

Inside Every

Working with AI right now often means making the same judgment call dozens of times a day: Hand this task off to an agent or stay close to the process? “The landscape of working with AI is bifurcating,” is how CEO Dan Shipper put it in Every’s Monday standup. On one side is the agent you delegate to. On the other is the agent that sits beside you while you write, code, triage, revise, and decide.

Watching the Every team work, you can’t unsee it. Dan delegates bug reports for our collaborative document editor, Proof, to his OpenClaw agent, R2-C2. But he stays close to his inbox through a combination of Codex, Every’s AI email assistant Cora, and a document with custom rules (steal his workflow below). Kieran Klaassen hands the middle of his compound engineering workflow to the model but works closely with it to brainstorm at the beginning and polish at the end. I (Katie Parrott) send the model off to do research, but I’d never trust it to execute a full draft without my hands firmly on the wheel.

Which means the allocation economy thesis was only right about half the work. Some of it still wants delegation, but the other half wants you to stay close, pairing on every move with the model in the same window. The two halves demand different skills, and the meta-skill is knowing which is which.

Think of it as the AI version of the serenity prayer: Grant me the serenity to delegate the work I can, the expertise to sit with the model on the work I can’t, and the wisdom to know the difference.

Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up to get it in your inbox.

Stop shipping AI on vibes

A lot of people are using AI blind. They build with LLMs, deploy prompt changes, and hope they improve things. There aren’t any measurement frameworks. Braintrust fixes this. They just launched an Evals Course, which is a hands-on curriculum for moving past guesswork. Learn how to build eval datasets from production logs, manage agent workflows, and analyze failures systematically. Based on real workflows from teams at Notion, Stripe, and Ramp. Try it now.

Start the course

Want to sponsor Every? Click here.

Steal this workflow

Get to inbox zero with Codex

The perfect email workflow is the white whale productivity people have chased for a decade, Dan included. His latest AI-native version puts the agent in the inbox and the human in a shared document, where every draft and decision stays visible. Here’s how he does it...

Become a paid subscriber to Every to unlock this piece and learn about: