Episode · Lenny's Podcast · 2025-12-14
Lenny Rachitsky & Alexander Embiricos: books mentioned on Lenny's Podcast
Why humans are AI’s biggest bottleneck (and what’s coming in 2026) | Alexander Embiricos (OpenAI Codex Product Lead)
Alexander Embiricos leads product on Codex, OpenAI’s powerful coding agent, which has grown 20x since August and now serves trillions of tokens weekly. Before joining OpenAI, Alexander spent five years building a pair programming product for engineers.
Alexander Embiricos recommended The Culture by Iain M. Banks and others. Lenny Rachitsky recommended A Fire Upon The Deep by Vernor Vinge.
Books mentioned, in the order they came up
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The Culture
Recommended“I have been reading a lot of science fiction recently. And I'm sure this has been recommended before, but the Culture. I think it's Ian Banks is the name of the author. Part of why I love it is because it's like basically relatively recent writing about a future with AI, but it's an optimistic future with AI.”
Where to get it
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A Fire Upon The Deep
Recommended“If you want another AI-ish sci-fi book, uh have you read Fire Upon the Deep? No, I haven't. Okay. It's uh incredibly good. It's like uh a sci-fi space opera sort of epic tale with uh super intelligence.”
Where to get it
Other mentions in this episode (2) — ad reads, self-promotion and passing references, never counted
Passing The Lord of the Rings
“I know you're reading, you mentioned before we started recording, Lord of the Rings right now.”
Passing Radical Candor
“What's the The book about dare challenge directly but care deeply? Radical candor. Oh yeah, yeah, right. Yeah. Yeah, so it's like another way of thinking about radical candor.”