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A Research Preview of Codex

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Re: A Research Preview of Codex

#301

Post by lmm »

_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…

> Case 1.2: No AGI. Wages rise, a lot. You must remain in line with that to avoid losing those engineers you trained.

No you don't. Most engineers are shy, conflict-averse, and hate change. You can keep underpaying them and most of them will stay.

Re: A Research Preview of Codex

#302

Post by bmcahren »

So there's this thing called "Setup Scripts" but they don't explicitly say these are equivalent to AWS Metadata and configured inside of Codex web interface - not a setup.sh or a package.json preinstall declaration. I wasted several hours (and lots of compute where Codex was as confused as I was) trying to figure out how to convince codex to pnpm install.

Re: A Research Preview of Codex

#303

Post by ouraf »

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…

Don't shoot the messenger. He's just sharing his experience with the tool and using an anecdotal example.

Re: A Research Preview of Codex

#304

Post by FireBeyond »

echelon wrote: post #122
hintymad wrote: post #116

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? Unfortunately this is not how companies think. I read somewhere more than 20 years ago about outsourcing and manufacturing offshoring. The author basically asked the same: if we move out the so-called low-end jobs, where do we think we will get the senior engineers? Yet c…

It's happening to Hollywood right now. In the past three years, since roughly 2022, the majority of IATSE folks (film crew, grips, etc.) have seen their jobs disappear to Eastern Europe where the labor costs one tenth of what it does here. And there are no rules for maximum number of consecutive hours worked.

How do? Perhaps if you film in Eastern Europe (which I realize does happen a bit), but even if your crew is foreign, if you’re filming in the US they’re still subject to US labor law. Being willing to ignore labor law also happens but is a bit beyond “offshoring”.

Re: A Research Preview of Codex

#305

Post by lispisok »

RhysabOweyn wrote: post #178

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…

I wish but I dont think we could be any futher away from professionalizing like engineering/law/accounting/medicine. There was a deliberate effort to flood the field and lower salaries and developers were so full of hubris and thought there was infinite demand for their labor and went along with it and still are. Maybe some are learning given the job market the last few years.

Despite software being in everything and harm to the public due to bad software has materialized every developer seems vehemently against professionalizing. Do you want a surgeon that went to surgeon bootcamp because "you dont need all those years in medical school to learn how to remove an appendix"? Do you even want an accountant who went to accountant bootcamp to do your taxes?

Re: A Research Preview of Codex

#306

Post by scragz »

woah wrote: post #204
johnjwang wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, it still does take quite a bit of time (minutes) to run a task on these agentic LLMs (especially with the latest reasoning models), and in Cursor / Cline / other code editor versions of AI, it's enough time for you to get distracted, lose context, and start working on another task. So the benefit is really that during this "down" time, you can do multiple useful things in parallel. Previously, our e…

In my experience in Cursor with Claude 3.5 and Gemini 2.5, if an agent has run for more than a minute it has usually lost the plot. Maybe model use in Codex is a new breed?

with cline you can give it a huge action plan and it will grind away until it's done. with all the context shenanigans that cursor and copilot do, it can't handle multiple tasks as well. then they are farming requests from the user so they make you click to continue all the time.

Re: A Research Preview of Codex

#307

Post by scragz »

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…

most of the coding agents now encourage you to make a rule for those times so it does remember.

Re: A Research Preview of Codex

#308

Post by scragz »

NewEntryHN wrote: post #93
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…

The advantage of Cursor is the reduced feedback loop where you watch it live and can intervene at any moment to steer it in the right direction. Is Codex such a superior model that it makes sense to take the direction of a mostly background agent, on which you seemingly have a longer feedback loop?

it sounds like their approach is launch 5 with the same task and hopefully one works it out.

Re: A Research Preview of Codex

#310

Post by margorczynski »

MoonGhost wrote: post #275
FilosofumRex wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> The senior jobs will disappear too Golden age of software development will be over soon? Probably, for humans. How cool is it, the most enthusiastic part will be replaced first.

Probably already is over, I would say since the start of the first post-COVID layoffs. Like compare the current average pay in tech including inflation to what was offered like 5 years ago.

2015-2022 was peak, downhill from there and it doesn't look like it'll recover.

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