Where can I read OpenAI's promise that it won't use the repos I upload for training?
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A Research Preview of Codex
21–30 of 487 posts
Re: A Research Preview of Codex
#22Is anyone using any of these tools to write non boilerplate code? I'm very interested. In my experience ChatGPT and Gemini are absolutely terrible at these types of things. They are constantly wrong. I know I'm not saying anything new, but I'm waiting to personally experience an LLM that does something useful with any of the code I give it. These tools aren't useless. They're great as search engines and pointing me i…
>What am I missing?
That you are trying to use LLMs to create giant sprawling codebase feature packed software packages that define the modern software landscape. What's being missed is that any one user might only utilize 5% of the code base on any given day. Software is written to accommodate every need every user could have in one package. Then the users just use the small slice that accommodates their specific needs.
I have now created 5 hyper narrow programs that are used daily by my company to do work. I am not a programmer and my company is not a tech company located in a tech bubble. We are a tiny company that does old school manufacturing.
To give a quick general example, Betty uses Excel to manage payroll. A list of employees, a list of wages, a list of hours worked (which she copys from the time clock software .csv that she imports to excel).
Excel is a few million LOC program and costs ~$10/mo. Betty needs maybe 2k LOC to do what she uses excel for. Something an LLM can do easily, a python GUI wrapper on an SQLite DB. And she would be blown away at how fast it is, and how it is written for her use specifically.
How software is written and how it is used will change to accommodate LLMs. We didn't design cars to drive on horse paths, we put down pavement.
Re: A Research Preview of Codex
#23[deleted]
Re: A Research Preview of Codex
#24Is anyone using any of these tools to write non boilerplate code? I'm very interested. In my experience ChatGPT and Gemini are absolutely terrible at these types of things. They are constantly wrong. I know I'm not saying anything new, but I'm waiting to personally experience an LLM that does something useful with any of the code I give it. These tools aren't useless. They're great as search engines and pointing me i…
Occasionally. I find that there is a certain category of task that I can hand over to an LLM and get a result that takes me significantly less time to clean up than it would have taken me to write from scratch.
A recent example from a C# project I was working in. The project used builder classes that were constructed according to specified rules, but all of these builders were written by hand. I wanted to automatically generate these builders, and not using AI, just good old meta-programming.
Now I knew enough to know that I needed a C# source generator, but I had absolutely no experience with writing them. Could I have figured this out in an hour or two? Probably. Did I write a prompt in less than five minutes and get a source generator that worked correctly in the first shot? Also yes. I then spent some time cleaning up that code and understanding the API it uses to hook into everything and was done in half an hour and still learnt something from it.
You can make the argument that this source generator is in itself "boilerplate", because it doesn't contain any special sauce, but I still saved significant time in this instance.
Re: A Research Preview of Codex
#25Is anyone using any of these tools to write non boilerplate code? I'm very interested. In my experience ChatGPT and Gemini are absolutely terrible at these types of things. They are constantly wrong. I know I'm not saying anything new, but I'm waiting to personally experience an LLM that does something useful with any of the code I give it. These tools aren't useless. They're great as search engines and pointing me i…
I feel things get even worse when you use a more niche language. I get extremely disappointed any time I try to get it do anything useful in Clojure. Even as a search engine, especially when asking it about libraries, these tools completely fail expectation.
I can't even fathom how frustrating such tools would be with poorly written confusing Clojure code using some niche dependency.
That being said, I can imagine a whole class of problems where this could succeed very well at and provide value. Then again, the type of problems that I feel these systems could get right 99% of the time are problems that a skilled developer could fix in minutes.
Re: A Research Preview of Codex
#26Is it surprising? Hmm perhaps nope. But is it better than cursor etc? Hmm perhaps it’s a wrong question. Feels like codex is for product managers to fix bugs without touching any developer resources. Then it’s insanely surprising!
It sounds nice, but are product managers able to spot regressions or other potential issues (performance, data protection, legal, etc) in the codex result?
Re: A Research Preview of Codex
#27As someone who works on his own open source agent framework/UI (https://github.com/runvnc/mindroot), it's kind of interesting how announcements from vendors tend to mirror features that I am working on.
For example, in the last month or so, I added a job queue plugin. The ability to run multiple tasks that they demoed today is quite similar. The issue I ran into with users is that without Enterprise plans, complex tasks run into rate limits when trying to run concurrently.
So I am adding an ability to have multiple queues, with each possibly using different models and/or providers, to get around rate limits.
By the way, my system has features that are somewhat similar not only to this tool they are showing but also things like Manus. It is quite rough around the edges though because I am doing 100% of it myself.
But it is MIT Licensed and it would be great if any developer on the planet wanted to contribute anything.
Re: A Research Preview of Codex
#28Is there an open source version of this? that essentially uses microvms to git clone my repo and essentially run codex-cli or equivalent and sends me a PR.
I made one for github action but it's not as realtime and is 2 years old now: https://github.com/asadm/chota
Re: A Research Preview of Codex
#29I wonder if tools like these are best for semi structured refactors like upgrade to python3, migrate to postgres etc
Re: A Research Preview of Codex
#30Is it surprising? Hmm perhaps nope. But is it better than cursor etc? Hmm perhaps it’s a wrong question. Feels like codex is for product managers to fix bugs without touching any developer resources. Then it’s insanely surprising!
It sounds nice, but are product managers able to spot regressions or other potential issues (performance, data protection, legal, etc) in the codex result?
If codex can analyze the whole code base, I can’t see why not? I can even imagine one can set up a CI task that any committed code must pass all sort of legal/data protection requirements too