A Research Preview of Codex

Post by lherron » Fri, May 16, 2025, 6:49 PM UTC

ramoz wrote: post #64

skovati wrote: post #40

I'm curious how many ICs are truly excited about these advancements in coding agents. It seems to me the general trend is we become more like PMs managing agents and reviewing PRs, all for the sake of productivity gains. I imagine many engineers are like myself in that they got into programming because they liked tinkering and hacking and implementation details, all of which are likely to be abstracted over in this n…

I see it differently. Like a kid with legos. We had to tinker piece by piece to build a miniature castle. Over many hours. Now I can tinker concept by concept, and build much larger castles, much faster. Like waving a wand, seeing my thoughts come to fruition in near real time. No vanity lost in my opinion. Possibly more to be gained.

Post by [deleted] » Fri, May 16, 2025, 6:54 PM UTC

criddell wrote: post #112

johnjwang wrote: post #80

Some engineers on my team at Assembled and I have been a part of the alpha test of Codex, and I'll say it's been quite impressive. We’ve long used local agents like Cursor and Claude Code, so we didn’t expect too much. But Codex shines in a few areas: Parallel task execution: You can batch dozens of small edits (refactors, tests, boilerplate) and run them concurrently without context juggling. It's super nice to run…

If you aren't hiring junior engineers to do these kinds of things, where do you think the senior engineers you need in the future will come from? My kid recently graduated from a very good school with a degree in computer science and what she's told me about the job market is scary. It seems that, relatively speaking, there's a lot of postings for senior engineers and very little for new grads. My employer has hired…

Post by [deleted] » Fri, May 16, 2025, 7:02 PM UTC

criddell wrote: post #112

johnjwang wrote: post #80

Some engineers on my team at Assembled and I have been a part of the alpha test of Codex, and I'll say it's been quite impressive. We’ve long used local agents like Cursor and Claude Code, so we didn’t expect too much. But Codex shines in a few areas: Parallel task execution: You can batch dozens of small edits (refactors, tests, boilerplate) and run them concurrently without context juggling. It's super nice to run…

If you aren't hiring junior engineers to do these kinds of things, where do you think the senior engineers you need in the future will come from? My kid recently graduated from a very good school with a degree in computer science and what she's told me about the job market is scary. It seems that, relatively speaking, there's a lot of postings for senior engineers and very little for new grads. My employer has hired…

Post by nopinsight » Fri, May 16, 2025, 7:06 PM UTC

_bin_ wrote: post #156

criddell wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you aren't hiring junior engineers to do these kinds of things, where do you think the senior engineers you need in the future will come from? My kid recently graduated from a very good school with a degree in computer science and what she's told me about the job market is scary. It seems that, relatively speaking, there's a lot of postings for senior engineers and very little for new grads. My employer has hired…

This is a bit of a game theory problem. "Training senior engineers" is an expensive and thankless task: you bear essentially all the cost, and most of the total benefit accrues to others as a positive externality. Griping at companies that they should undertake to provide this positive externality isn't really a constructive solution. I think some people are betting on the fact that AI can replace junior devs in 2-5…

Post by voidspark » Fri, May 16, 2025, 7:09 PM UTC

echelon wrote: post #113

criddell wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you aren't hiring junior engineers to do these kinds of things, where do you think the senior engineers you need in the future will come from? My kid recently graduated from a very good school with a degree in computer science and what she's told me about the job market is scary. It seems that, relatively speaking, there's a lot of postings for senior engineers and very little for new grads. My employer has hired…

The never ending march of progress. It's probably over for these folks. There will likely(?, hopefully?) be new adjacent gradients for people to climb. In any case, I would worry more about your own job prospects. It's coming for everyone.