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Codex for almost everything

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Re: Codex for almost everything

#51

Post by bob1029 »

cjbarber wrote: post #14

My current expectation is that the Cowork/Codex set of "professional agents" for non-technical users will be one of the most important and fastest growing product categories of all time, so far. i.e. agents for knowledge workers who are not software engineers A few thoughts and questions: 1. I expect that this set of products will be extremely disruptive to many software businesses. It's like when a new VP joins a co…

> My current expectation is that the Cowork/Codex set of "professional agents" for non-technical users will be one of the most important and fastest growing product categories of all time, so far.

I agree this is going to be big. I threw a prototype of a domain-specific agent into the proverbial hornets' nest recently and it has altered the narrative about what might be possible.

The part that makes this powerful is that the LLM is the ultimate UI/UX. You don't need to spend much time developing user interfaces and testing them against customers. Everyone understands the affordances around something that looks like iMessage or WhatsApp. UI/UX development is often the most expensive part of software engineering. Figuring out how to intercept, normalize and expose the domain data is where all of the magic happens. This part is usually trivial by comparison. If most of the business lives in SQL databases, your job is basically done for you. A tool to list the databases and another tool to execute queries against them. That's basically it.

I think there is an emerging B2B/SaaS market here. There are businesses that want bespoke AI tools and don't have the discipline to deploy them in-house. I don't know if it is ever possible for OAI & friends to develop a "hyper" agent that can produce good outcomes here automatically. There are often people problems that make connecting the data sources tricky. Having a human consultant come in and make a case for why they need access to everything is probably more persuasive and likely to succeed.

Re: Codex for almost everything

#53

Post by [deleted] »

postalcoder wrote: post #33

I wish Codex App was open source. I like it, but there are always a bunch of little paper cuts that, if you were using codex cli, you could have easily diagnosed and filed an issue. Now, the issues in the codex repo is slowly becoming claude codish – ie a drawer for people's feelings with nothing concrete to point to.

[deleted]

Re: Codex for almost everything

#54

Post by troupo »

cjbarber wrote: post #45
troupo wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My current expectation is that the Cowork/Codex set of "professional agents" for non-technical users will be one of the most important and fastest growing product categories of all time, so far. They won't. Non-technical users expect a CEO's secretary from TV/movies: you do a vague request, the secretary does everything for you. LLMs cannot give you that by their own nature. > And eventually will the UI/interface b…

> Non-technical users expect a CEO's secretary from TV/movies: you do a vague request, the secretary does everything for you. LLMs cannot give you that by their own nature. What are you using today? In my experience LLMs are already pretty good at this. > Please for the love of god actually go outside and talk to people outside of the tech bubble. In the past week I've taught a few non-technical friends, who are well…

> What are you using today? In my experience LLMs are already pretty good at this.

LLMS are good at "find me a two week vacation two months from now"?

Or at "do my taxes"?

> how to use Cowork.

Yes, and I taught my mom how to use Apple Books, and have to re-teach her every time Apple breaks the interface.

Ask your non-tech friends what they do with and how they feel about Cowork in a few weeks.

> I think where our view differs is I expect that models will be able to get good at making custom interfaces, and then help the user personalize it to their tasks.

How many users you see personalizing anything to their task? Why would they want every app to be personalized? There's insane value in consistency across apps and interfaces. How will apps personalize their UIs to every user? By collecting even more copious amounts of user data?

Re: Codex for almost everything

#55

Post by jorblumesea »

cjbarber wrote: post #14

My current expectation is that the Cowork/Codex set of "professional agents" for non-technical users will be one of the most important and fastest growing product categories of all time, so far. i.e. agents for knowledge workers who are not software engineers A few thoughts and questions: 1. I expect that this set of products will be extremely disruptive to many software businesses. It's like when a new VP joins a co…

really struggling to understand where this is coming from, agents haven't really improved much over using the existing models. anything an agent can do, is mostly the model itself. maybe the technology itself isn't mature yet.

Re: Codex for almost everything

#56

Post by louiereederson »

cjbarber wrote: post #14

My current expectation is that the Cowork/Codex set of "professional agents" for non-technical users will be one of the most important and fastest growing product categories of all time, so far. i.e. agents for knowledge workers who are not software engineers A few thoughts and questions: 1. I expect that this set of products will be extremely disruptive to many software businesses. It's like when a new VP joins a co…

Maybe but the product category is not necessarily a monolith in the same way that Claude Code is. These general purpose tools will have to action across a heterogeneous set of enterprise systems/tools. A runtime environment must be developed to do that but where that of the agent ends and that of the enterprise systems begins is a totally open question.

Re: Codex for almost everything

#58

Post by postalcoder »

cjbarber wrote: post #14

My current expectation is that the Cowork/Codex set of "professional agents" for non-technical users will be one of the most important and fastest growing product categories of all time, so far. i.e. agents for knowledge workers who are not software engineers A few thoughts and questions: 1. I expect that this set of products will be extremely disruptive to many software businesses. It's like when a new VP joins a co…

I agree with the sentiment but I think for normie agents to take off in the way that you expect, you're going to have to grant them with full access. But, by granting agents full access, you immediately turn the computer into an extremely adversarial device insofar as txt files become credible threat vectors.

For all the benefits that agents offer, they can be asymmetrically harmful. This is not a solved issue. That hurts growth. I don't disagree with your general points, though.

Re: Codex for almost everything

#59

Post by baq »

troupo wrote: post #54
cjbarber wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Non-technical users expect a CEO's secretary from TV/movies: you do a vague request, the secretary does everything for you. LLMs cannot give you that by their own nature. What are you using today? In my experience LLMs are already pretty good at this. > Please for the love of god actually go outside and talk to people outside of the tech bubble. In the past week I've taught a few non-technical friends, who are well…

> What are you using today? In my experience LLMs are already pretty good at this. LLMS are good at "find me a two week vacation two months from now"? Or at "do my taxes"? > how to use Cowork. Yes, and I taught my mom how to use Apple Books, and have to re-teach her every time Apple breaks the interface. Ask your non-tech friends what they do with and how they feel about Cowork in a few weeks. > I think where our vie…

> Or at "do my taxes"?

codex did my taxes this year (well it actually implemented a normalization pipeline and a tax computing engine which then did the taxes, but close enough)

Re: Codex for almost everything

#60

Post by cjbarber »

bob1029 wrote: post #51
cjbarber wrote: post #14

My current expectation is that the Cowork/Codex set of "professional agents" for non-technical users will be one of the most important and fastest growing product categories of all time, so far. i.e. agents for knowledge workers who are not software engineers A few thoughts and questions: 1. I expect that this set of products will be extremely disruptive to many software businesses. It's like when a new VP joins a co…

> My current expectation is that the Cowork/Codex set of "professional agents" for non-technical users will be one of the most important and fastest growing product categories of all time, so far. I agree this is going to be big. I threw a prototype of a domain-specific agent into the proverbial hornets' nest recently and it has altered the narrative about what might be possible. The part that makes this powerful is…

> There are businesses that want bespoke AI tools and don't have the discipline to deploy them in-house. I don't know if it is ever possible for OAI & friends to develop a "hyper" agent that can produce good outcomes here automatically. There are often people problems that make connecting the data sources tricky. Having a human consultant come in and make a case for why they need access to everything is probably more persuasive and likely to succeed.

Sort of agreed, though I wonder if ai-deployed software eats most use cases, and human consultants for integration/deployment are more for the more niche or hard to reach ones.

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