The Productivity Rocket Ship

The Real Estate Espresso Podcast

The Productivity Rocket Ship

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The Productivity Rocket Ship

Welcome to the Real Estate Espresso Podcast, your morning shot of what’s new in the world of real estate investing. I’m your host, Victor Menasce.

On today’s show, we’re talking about yet another transformative innovation in the world of artificial intelligence. Now, I realize this is a real estate podcast, not an AI podcast, but any business that builds its business systems around AI will experience transformation. So on today’s show, I’m going to showcase two different innovations that have launched in the past week. And spoiler alert, not all of them are worth embracing.

The first one is a new product called Claude Design. The idea is you should be able to provide a description of what you want to create, and the AI will generate it. You can see the process with examples.

Now, in one test case, I wanted to create a new schematic for a building. The overall floor plan is based on an existing building design that’s made up of two-bedroom apartments. The only thing I wanted to do is change out the two-bedroom apartments with a layout for a one-bedroom apartment, but maintain the overall theme of the building. The one-bedroom apartment has, obviously, less area, so the footprint of the building is going to shrink but otherwise would remain conceptually the same.

It sounds simple enough, but rather than use the drawings I gave it, Claude Design decided to create a completely new design from scratch and largely ignored the templates I’d provided. So I asked, more forcefully, to follow the provided examples. And in this case, it kind of did it, but put the kitchen cabinets on the exterior walls and the living room and bedrooms in the interior.

So I told it that, no, kitchens and bathrooms and closets should be on the interior and that living rooms and bedrooms need to be on the exterior so that they have access to windows. Now, all this time, the schematics are being redrawn from scratch. The new drawings were very unrefined. I would compare the new drawings with the skill level of a kindergarten drawing. They were really bad.

Now, after half a dozen iterations, each one as bad as the one before, I eventually gave up and realized that I would never converge on anything useful anytime soon. When the entry doors to the apartments opened up into the bathtub, I had had enough. So, unfortunately, I have to give Claude Design a failing grade, at least at the moment. I know it’s going to improve, but it’s not close yet.

Now, you’re going to see dozens of YouTube videos talking about how great Claude Design is, and maybe it is, and I didn’t know how to fly it, but it’s not great yet.

Now, I am a huge fan of Claude CoWork. Anthropic, the makers of Claude, have established a dominant lead, in particular for enterprise users. In fact, their revenue in the first quarter actually surpassed the revenue of OpenAI. Even though OpenAI has a lot more users, the Claude emphasis on the enterprise has brought a lot more high-value customers than the consumer emphasis at OpenAI.

This is the OpenAI answer to Claude Code and Claude CoWork. As is so often the case in the tech industry, competitors will often leapfrog each other, and the new Codex release from earlier this week is precisely one of those moments. Codex is now capable of interacting with any application a person would use.

Most other AI applications are looking for a machine-to-machine interface in order to properly create an integrated AI agent workflow. But Codex interacts with any application just by reading the screen, typing input, and moving the mouse. It does it in the background and allows for multiple desktop agents to work in the background while you’re working in the foreground on the computer.

I have been using both Claude and Codex side by side in the past week, and what I can say is that Codex is fast. Claude can also take control over your Chrome browser and use internet-based applications. But when it does, it takes over the graphical user interface entirely, and it is slow. I mean really slow. Either Claude is using your computer or you’re using the computer, but not both. The fact that these agents in Codex can run in the background is a massive game-changer. Codex can interact with any application on your web browser.

So how did OpenAI get so far ahead in what appears to be a short period of time? OpenAI purchased a 12-person company called Sky six months ago, before this release. These folks were previously at Apple and have a tremendous amount of knowledge about the Mac operating system and how to truly take control of the computer and any application. There is also a Windows release coming out, by the way.

The new Codex release comes pre-packaged with connection to over 90 native Mac applications as part of the initial release. I’ve been spending about 30 minutes each morning testing out the new capabilities. The depth and quality of work I’m able to get done in those first few minutes every morning is truly mind-blowing.

I now have three Codex windows open perpetually on my computer and have up to three separate workflows running simultaneously, plus a fourth one in the foreground, which is what I’m doing. You might be thinking, “Victor, you’re a senior partner in a real estate development company. What the heck are you doing with so much computer use? Why do you need three separate agents?”

Well, I can tell you that I’m continually conducting research. I’m conducting research for this podcast. I’m researching various projects that we have underway. That includes due diligence and verification of assumptions. I’m testing whether certain new building products used in these buildings will meet the building code. The use cases are almost too numerous to mention.

So, while you’re out trying new tools, be prepared that they might not be ready for prime time, but equally be prepared to jump on a productivity rocket ship.

As you think about that, have an awesome rest of your day. Go make some great things happen. We’ll talk again tomorrow.

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