Sean Grove

Sean Grove is the founder and CEO of Linzumi, where he builds tools for teams directing AI coding agents. He worked on OpenAI’s Post-training & Alignment team from September 2023 to September 2025. His public argument centers on specifications as durable expressions of intent: documents that help people agree on goals and provide a basis for training and evaluating models.[2][4][3]

In “The New Code: Why Specifications Are Eating Programming”, published June 15, 2025 and based on his AI Engineer World’s Fair talk, Grove argues that software engineering’s central work is structured communication: understanding users, distilling requirements, planning, sharing decisions, and verifying outcomes. He estimates that writing code occupies 10–20% of his own time.[3]

Grove’s criticism of common AI coding workflows is that developers preserve generated code while discarding the prompts that expressed their intentions. He compares this to “shredding your source code and then very carefully version-controlling the binary.” In his account, code is a lossy projection of a specification: requirements, values, and reasons can disappear during implementation. He recommends preserving the specification, defining success criteria, feeding it to the model, and testing whether the result satisfies the stated goals.[3]

He uses OpenAI’s Model Spec to illustrate how a written artifact can coordinate product, legal, safety, research, and policy contributors. Discussing GPT-4o’s sycophancy problem, Grove calls the specification a “trust anchor”: its explicit instruction against sycophancy gave people a shared basis for identifying the deployed behavior as a bug. His account describes OpenAI’s rollback, studies, and fix as a collective response.[3]

Grove also explains how specifications can guide model training and evaluation. His description of deliberative alignment combines a specification with challenging prompts, samples model responses, gives the response, prompt, and policy to a grader model, and reinforces behavior according to the resulting score. As he puts it, “The document becomes both training material and eval material.” His Linzumi founder biography says he helped develop model-spec infrastructure and deliberative-alignment techniques at OpenAI.[3][4]

Grove became Linzumi’s founder and CEO in November 2025. In his launch account, he says using coding agents on personal projects exposed a coordination problem: agents could execute tasks, but people still had to decide what should happen next and check whether completed work matched their intent. He identifies human decisions and verification as the new constraint in software development.[2][4]

Grove describes Linzumi as team chat for starting agent work, reviewing it, and shipping it. The system retains decisions alongside the work—what to build, why it changed, who approved it, and what agents should do next—and uses a decision inbox to surface calls requiring a human. The shared source of truth is intended to generate new work and verify completed work. He frames this as repurposing deliberative alignment from aligning language models to aligning companies.[4]

Before joining OpenAI, Grove worked on API integration and developer tools. He co-founded OneGraph with Daniel Woelfel; his timeline dates his OneGraph role from May 2018 to November 2021. OneGraph used GraphQL to provide a single, introspectable endpoint for API data. Its ambition was to unify access across APIs, reducing the separate integration work developers faced when composing services.[2][5][6]

Netlify acquired OneGraph on November 17, 2021, announcing that Grove and Woelfel would lead API ecosystem strategy. Grove explained that collaboration had revealed parts of their shared vision that were unnecessarily slow to build while OneGraph remained outside Netlify. He advocated an incremental integration, beginning with API Authentication, which let developers generate and manage third-party API tokens through Netlify’s interface. Grove served as Netlify’s principal architect from November 2021 to August 2023.[6][5][2]

During that period, Grove also demonstrated generative interfaces. Latent Space’s April 26, 2023 AI | UX recap credits him with a Generative UI ChatGPT Plugin demonstration at video timestamp 2:02:19, featuring ephemeral interfaces with filterable and sortable tables, ffmpeg, and video controls. The demonstration placed his work in the exploration of AI interactions beyond text-only chat.[1]