How engineers at Nextdoor use Codex to build without limits

A product like Nextdoor, which serves over 110 million users across 11 countries, puts many demands on a platform team. For Cory Dolphin, Head of Engineering at, Codex represents an essential shift: “away from iteratively prompting an agent, and towards outcome engineering, where engineers start to think about the result they want to see and work with an agent to engineer that result.”

This means that individual engineers move up the stack—no longer locked up as specialists in a certain system or framework, they’re able to own the product experience more or less end-to-end, even across multiple platforms. Productivity has accelerated so much that the bottleneck is no longer engineering, but rather the hard strategic questions about what to build next.

“Codex has fundamentally changed how we think about engineering, to the point that we can’t even imagine engineering without it.”

—Cory Dolphin, Head of Engineering, Nextdoor

Product engineers can focus on the product

With Codex, “engineers get to spend a lot less time thinking about exactly how they build, and more time thinking about the outcome,” Dolphin explains. That outcome might take the form of screenshots or video that the agent can build towards, a certain performance or test result, or a brand new feature idea.

Nextdoor recently released Opportunity Alerts, which let people find service providers near them; with Codex, engineers are driving the product experience and roadmap. As an example, one engineer working on the alerts realized it would be helpful to show service providers on a map. Historically, that kind of feature would have required collaboration between three teams—mobile, frontend, and backend engineering—and might have never made it out of the backlog.

“As engineers start to shift up the stack, they get to be more responsible for the product that they’re building. You really see individual engineers start to drive products.”

—Cory Dolphin, Head of Engineering, Nextdoor