Wondering why your maker-turned-manager suddenly seems distracted in meetings? Maybe they’re addicted to coding agents! In this episode of Lightcone, Calvin French-Owen — a co-founder of Segment and former engineer on OpenAI’s Codex team — joins us to talk about why coding agents suddenly feel so powerful, the differences between Codex, Claude Code, and Cursor, and what the future of work will look like.
0:00 Intro
1:15 Garry can’t stop using Claude Code!
4:00 Contrast with IDE’s, context-splitting
6:23 Distribution models, top down vs bottom up
9:11 Licensing and optimization
12:28 Tips on becoming a top 1% user of coding agents
17:36 When can the agents work 24-48 hour running jobs on their own?
21:34 Can the agent teach things like architecture?
26:27 Will the next generation have even better taste and multitasking ability?
29:58 Maker vs manager schedules
31:36 How would Calvin build Segment now?
35:52 The importance of testing
38:52 The Claude bots are talking (to each other!)
40:10 Examples of complex issues, how will the tools evolve
43:00 Outro
Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply
Work at a startup: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs
