Everyone is a builder: Microsoft and OpenAI are ushering in a new era of AI-powered personal software
Vijaye Raji wanted to figure out how to keep up with the firehose of Slack messages. After a few prompts, he had a solution.
Raji, OpenAI’s CTO for applications, wrote his own vibe tool using Codex, OpenAI’s coding agent. It runs on his laptop and summarizes his messages, emails, and notifications every 15 minutes.
His story shows how software in the age of AI agents is becoming something that anyone can create on the fly – which can have a huge impact on how “apps” are designed, built and used.
“Everybody is going to be an architect,” Raji said, speaking at GeekWire’s Agents of Transformation event in Seattle on Tuesday. “You’re going to lower the limit of what a building is.”
Raji said that when he has a new idea now, the first thing he thinks about is not putting it in the group and asking someone to write it. Instead, you start prototyping it using the Codex.
That practice has become the norm across OpenAI, he said.
“People come to meetings, just before they start the meeting they send a report, keep the laptop open, when the meeting is over you go back to see what was done,” said Raji.
In a pre-fire interview, Charles Lamanna, Microsoft’s senior vice president of Business Applications & Agents, said he’s starting to see agents change the way his teams share information internally — from static documents to lightweight, “small web applications.”
In one recent example, a discussion about investment changes and group structure would normally produce a spreadsheet and a PowerPoint deck. Instead, his team developed a user-friendly web application that pulls live data from Microsoft’s employee directory and funding systems, allowing leaders to tap into various scenarios in real time.
He described a similar change in preparing for a customer meeting, where a set of internal agents automatically integrates product telemetry, CRM data, and account notes — a task that often takes hours of manual effort.
The broad impact is powerful beyond any single tool. And the underlying technology continues to develop at a rapid pace. Raji described the current era as “overcapacity” – the idea that models can do more than people want from them.
“People need to start adapting and learning,” he said. “What else could they do with these models? What else could they do with these agents? People who can do that and go to that level are many, many times more productive and many times able to accomplish greater tasks than those who haven’t.”
