A Research Preview of Codex • Hacker News Board

Re: A Research Preview of Codex

#171

Post by sam0x17 » Fri, May 16, 2025, 7:14 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…

Hiring of juniors is basically dead these days and it has been like this for about 10 years and I hate it. I remember when I was a junior in 2014 there were actually startups who would hire cohorts of juniors (like 10 at a time, fresh out of CS degree sort of folks with almost no applied coding experience) and then train them up to senior for a few years, and then a small number will stay and the rest will go elsewhere and the company will hire their next batch of juniors. Now no one does this, everyone wants a senior no matter how simple the task. This has caused everyone in the industry to stuff their resume, so you end up in a situation where companies are looking for 10 years of experience in ecosystems that are only 5 years old.

That said, back in the early 00s there was much more of a culture of everyone is expected to be self-taught and doing real web dev probably before they even get to college, so by the time they graduate they are in reality quite senior. This was true for me and a lot of my friends, but I feel like these days there are many CS grads who haven't done a lot of applied stuff. But at the same time, to be fair, this was a way easier task in the early 00s because if you knew JS/HTML/CSS/SQL, C++ and maybe some .NET language that was pretty much it you could do everything (there were virtually no frameworks), now there are thousands of frameworks and languages and ecosystems and you could spend 5+ years learning any one of them. It is no longer possible for one person to learn all of tech, people are much more specialized these days.

But I agree that eventually someone is going to have to start hiring juniors again or there will be no seniors.

Re: A Research Preview of Codex

#172

Post by al_borland » Fri, May 16, 2025, 7:16 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…

That sounds like a dangerous bet.

Re: A Research Preview of Codex

#173

Post by oytis » Fri, May 16, 2025, 7:16 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…

I guess the industry leaders think we'll not need senior engineers either as capabilities evolve.

But also, I think this underestimates significantly what junior engineers do. Junior engineers are people who have spent 4 to 6 years receiving a specialised education in a university - and they normally need to be already good at school math. All they lack is experience applying this education on a job - but they are professionals - educated, proactive and mostly smart.

The market is tough indeed, and as much it is tough for a senior engineer like myself, I don't envy the current cohort of fresh grads. It being tough is only tangentially related to the AI though. Main factor is the general economic slowdown, with AI contributing by distracting already scarce investment from non-AI companies and producing a lot of uncertainty in how many and what employees companies will need in the future. Their current capabilities are nowhere near to having a real economic impact.

Wish your kid and you a lot of patience, grit and luck.

Re: A Research Preview of Codex

#174

Post by losvedir » Fri, May 16, 2025, 7:18 PM UTC

aorobin wrote: post #134

strangescript wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it feels like openai are at a ceiling with their models, codex1 seems to be another RLHF derivative from the same base model. You can see this in their own self reported o3-high comparison where at 8 tries they converge at the same accuracy. It also seems very telling they have not mentioned o4-high benchmarks at all. o4-mini exists, so logically there is an o4 full model right?

Seems likely that they are waiting to release o4 full results until the gpt-5 release later this year, presumably because gpt-5 is bundled with a roughly o4 level reasoning capability, and they want gpt-5 to feel like a significant release.

Do you still think there will be a gpt-5? I thought the consensus was GPT-5 never really panned out and was released with little fanfare as 4.1.

Re: A Research Preview of Codex

#175

Post by oytis » Fri, May 16, 2025, 7:23 PM UTC

kypro wrote: post #117

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…

> 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? They'll probably just need to learn for longer and if companies ever get so desperate for senior engineers then just take the most able/experienced junior/mid level dev. But I'd argue before they do that if companies can't find skilled labour domestically they should cons…

So basically all education facilities should go abroad too if no one needs Western fresh grads. Will provide a lot of shareholder value, but there are some externalities too.

Re: A Research Preview of Codex

#176

Post by voidspark » Fri, May 16, 2025, 7:30 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…

This is exactly the problem. The top level executives are setting up to retire with billions in the bank, while the workers develop their own replacements before they retire with millions in the bank. Senior developers will be mostly obsolete too.

I have mentored junior developers and found it to be a rewarding part of the job. My colleagues mostly ignore juniors, provide no real guidance, couldn't care less. I see this attitude from others in the comments here, relieved they don't have to face that human interaction anymore. There are too many antisocial weirdos in this industry.

Without a strong moral and cultural foundation the AGI paradigm will be a dystopia. Humans obsolete across all industries.

Re: A Research Preview of Codex

#177

Post by SketchySeaBeast » Fri, May 16, 2025, 7:31 PM UTC

al_borland wrote: post #172

_bin_ wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That sounds like a dangerous bet.

Sounds like a bet a later CEO will need to check.

Re: A Research Preview of Codex

#178

Post by RhysabOweyn » Fri, May 16, 2025, 7:33 PM UTC

I believe that code from one of these things will eventually cause a disaster affecting the capital owners. Then all of a sudden you will need a PE license, ABET degree, 5 years working experience, etc. to call yourself a software engineer. It would not even be historically unique. Charlatans are the reason that lawyers, medical doctors, and civil engineers have to go through lots of education, exams, and vocational training to get into their profession. AI will probably force software engineering as a profession into that category as well.

On the other hand, if your job was writing code at certain companies whose profits were based on shoving ads in front of people then I would agree that no one will care if it is written by a machine or not. The days of those jobs making >$200k a year are numbered.

Re: A Research Preview of Codex

#179

Post by hintymad » Fri, May 16, 2025, 7:38 PM UTC

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…

It looks we are in this interesting cycle: millions of engineers contribute to open-source on github. The best of our minds use the code to develop powerful models to replace exactly these engineers. In fact, the more code a group contributes to github, the easier it is for the companies to replace this group. Case in point, frontend engineers are impacted most so far.

Does this mean people will be less incentivized to contribute to open source as time goes by?

P.S., I think the current trend is a wakeup call to us software engineers. We thought we were doing highly creative work, but in reality we spend a lot of time doing the basic job of knowledge workers: retrieving knowledge and interpolating some basic and highly predictable variations. Unfortunately, the current AI is really good at replacing this type of work.

My optimistic view is that in long term we will have invent or expand into more interesting work, but I'm not sure how long we will have to wait. The current generation of software engineers may suffer high supply but low demand of our profession for years to come.

Re: A Research Preview of Codex

#180

Post by SketchySeaBeast » Fri, May 16, 2025, 7:40 PM UTC

HappMacDonald wrote: post #150

bmcahren wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counter-point A: AI coding assistance tools are rapidly advancing at a clip that is inarguably faster than humans. Counter-point B: AI does not get tired, does not need space, does not need catering to their experience. AI is fine being interrupted and redirected. AI is fine spending two days on something that gets overwritten and thrown away (no morale loss).

Counter-counter-point A: If I work with a human Junior and they make an error or I familiarize them with any quirk of our workflow, and I correct them, they will recall that correction moving forward. An AI assistant either will not remember 5 minutes later (in a different prompt on a related project) and repeat the mistake, or I'll have to take the extra time to code some reminder into the system prompt for every pr…

I find myself thinking about juniors vs AI as babies vs cats. A cat is more capable sooner, you can trust it when you leave the house for two hours, but it'll never grow past shitting in a box and needing to be fed.