Building OpenAI's Atlas Browser with AI Assistance

I use @OpenAI’s browser Atlas every day, and this week, I got to talk to the team building it. Ben Goodger (@bengoodger), Atlas’s head of engineering, and Darin Fisher (@darinwf), member of technical staff, are legends of the browser world. They’ve worked together on Netscape, Firefox, Chrome—and now Atlas. I had them on @every’s AI & I to talk about agentic browsers, the future of the web, and what it’s like to build a browser with Codex. We get into: - If agents can browse for you, do traditional websites become obsolete? Ben and Darin don’t think so. Yes, we’ll hand off tedious tasks—but there’s still plenty we’ll want to do ourselves, like travel planning or window shopping. Darin used a metaphor: He loves taking Waymos, but he also loves driving stick; sometimes you want to be chauffeured, other times you want the satisfaction of being in control. - A browser that knows when to step in. Browsers have always been like a taxi, ferrying you to a destination, but agentic ones are more like tour guides, helping you decide where to go in the first place. Ben says that Atlas is built to balance both: The interface stays minimal and familiar, but ChatGPT sits at the heart, ready when you need it. - How the Atlas team uses Codex to move faster. After coding browsers by hand for decades, Ben and Darin say that building with AI feels fundamentally different. More than half of Atlas's code was written by Codex. They've found it especially useful for navigating the complex Chromium codebase, prototyping quickly, and learning new techniques, like how to set up a particular animation or nail a UI effect. - The craft of coding with AI. AI coding tools can feel like a loss to veteran engineers: The work gets faster, but less personal. Darin acknowledges that tension, describing coding as therapeutic—almost like art—but sees Codex as a way to offload the monotony while preserving the satisfying craft. Ben agrees, arguing that a human’s role is the context behind a decision that is likely not in the code itself. This is a must-watch for anyone curious about the future of the web and how we will interface with it. Watch below! Timestamps: Introduction: 00:01:57 Designing an AI browser that’s intuitive to use: 00:11:51 How the web changes if agents do most of the browsing: 00:15:24 Why traditional websites will not become obsolete: 00:25:06 A browser that stays out of the way versus one that shows you around:00:29:00 How the team uses Codex to build Atlas: 00:39:51 The craft of coding with AI tools:00:44:47 Why Ben and Darin care so much about browsers: 00:52:33