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A Research Preview of Codex

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Re: A Research Preview of Codex

#261

Post by wilg »

lurking_swe wrote: post #158
piskov wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What the video: there is an explicit switch at one of the steps about (not) allowing to train on your repo.

That’s nice. And we trust that it does what it says because…? The AI company (openai, anthropic, etc) pinky promised? Have we seen their source code? How do you know they don’t train? Facebook has been caught in recent DOJ hearings breaking the law with how they run their business, just as one example. They claimed under oath, previously, to not be doing X, and then years later there was proof they did exactly that.…

If you don't trust the company your opt-out strategy is much easier, you simply do not authorize them to access your code.

Re: A Research Preview of Codex

#262

Post by al_borland »

_bin_ wrote: post #186
al_borland wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds like a dangerous bet.

As I see it, it's actually the only safe bet. Case 1: you keep training engineers. Case 1.1: AGI soon, you don't need juniors or seniors besides a very few. You cost yourself a ton of money that competitors can reinvest into R&D, use to undercut your prices, or return to keep their investors happy. Case 1.2: No AGI. Wages rise, a lot. You must remain in line with that to avoid losing those engineers you trained. Case…

You’re looking at it from the point of view of an individual company. I’m seeing it as a risk for the entire industry.

Senior engineers are already very well paid. Wages rising a lot from where they already are, while companies compete for a few people, and those who can’t afford it need to lean on AI or wait 10+ years for someone to develop with equivalent expertise… all of this sounds bad for the industry. It’s only good for the few senior engineers that are about to retire, and the few who went out of their way to not use AI and acquire actual skills.

Re: A Research Preview of Codex

#263

Post by FilosofumRex »

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…

> If you aren't hiring junior engineers..., where do you think the senior engineers you need in the future will come from?

This problem might be new to CS, but has happened to other engineers, notably to MechE in the 90's, ChemE in 80's, Aerospace in 70's, etc... due to rapid pace of automation and product commoditization.

The senior jobs will disappear too, or offshored to a developing country: Exxon (India 152 - 78 US) https://jobs.exxonmobil.com/ Chevron (India 159 - 4 US) https://careers.chevron.com/search-jobs

Re: A Research Preview of Codex

#264

Post by harrison_clarke »

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 think there's an opportunity here

a lot of junior eng tasks don't really help you become a senior engineer. someone needs to make a form and a backend API for it to talk to, because it's a business need. but doing 50 of those doesn't really impart a lot of wisdom

same with writing tests. you'll probably get faster at writing tests, but that's about it. knowing that you need the tests, and what kinds of things might go wrong, is the senior engineer skill

with the LLMs current ability to help people research a topic, and their growing ability to write functioning code, my hunch is that people with the time to spare can learn senior engineer skills while bypassing being a junior engineer

convincing management of that is another story, though. if you can't afford to do unpaid self-directed study, it's probably going to be a bumpy road until industry figures out how to not eat the seed corn

Re: A Research Preview of Codex

#265

Post by ozgrakkurt »

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…

Graduating as a junior is just not enough in a more competitive market like there is now. I don’t think it is related to anything else. If you can hire a developer that is spending 10x time coding or a developer that has studied and graduated, this is not much of a choice. If you don’t have the option than you might go with a junior

Re: A Research Preview of Codex

#266

Post by fullstackchris »

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…

[flagged]

Re: A Research Preview of Codex

#267

Post by sudohalt »

hansonw wrote: post #168
sudohalt wrote: post #120

When it runs the code I assume it does so via a docker container, does anyone know how it is configured? Assuming the user hasn't specified an AGENTS.md file or a Dockerfile in the repo. Does it generate it via LLM based on the repo, and what it thinks is needed? Does it use static analysis (package.json, requirements txt, etc)? Do they just have a super generic Dockerfile that can handle most envs? Combination of di…

More about that here! https://platform.openai.com/docs/codex#advanced-configuratio...

It seems LLMs are doing a lot of the heavy lifting figuring out the exact test, build, lint commands to run (even if the AGENTS.md file gives it direction and hints). I wonder if there are any plans to support user defined build, test, and pre commit commands to avoid unnecessary cost and keep it deterministic. Also wonder how monolith repos (or distinct but related repos) are supported, does it run everything in one container or loop through the envs that are edited?

I assume one easy next step is to just run GitHub Actions in the container since everything is defined there (assuming the user set it up)

Re: A Research Preview of Codex

#268

Post by mhitza »

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…

> It seems that, relatively speaking, there's a lot of postings for senior engineers and very little for new grads.

That's been the case for most of the last 15 years in my experience. You have to follow local job markets, get in through an internship, or walk in at local companies and ask. Applying en mass can also help, and so does having some code on GitHub to show off.

Re: A Research Preview of Codex

#269

Post by manquer »

odie5533 wrote: post #238
kleiba wrote: post #33

Just curious: is your company happy sharing their code-base with an AI provider? Or are you using a local installation?

For 99% of companies, their code is worthless to anyone but them.

For copying the product / service yes it is not worth much .

However for people trying to compromise your system access to your code can be a valuable asset .The worth of that could be well beyond just enterprise value of the organization , it could people’s lives or bring down critical infrastructure.

You don’t just have access to code you created and have complete control to. Organizations have vendors providing code(drivers , libraries…) with narrow licenses that prohibit sharing or leaking in anyway. So this type of leak can open you to a lot of liability.

Re: A Research Preview of Codex

#270

Post by philomath_mn »

layer8 wrote: post #198
nmca wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a cost benefit trade off, as with all things. Benefits look pretty good.

The cost of sharing your code is unknown, though.

Under what circumstances would that cost be high? Is OpenAI going to rip off your app? Why would they waste a second on that when there are better models to be built?
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