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Codex for almost everything

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Re: Codex for almost everything

#232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand the "just prompt better" perspective, but this is the kind of thing my undergraduate students wouldn't do, why is the PhD expert-level coder that's supposed to replace all developers doing it? Having to explicitly tell it not to do certain boneheaded things, leave me wondering: what else is it going to do that's boneheaded which I haven't explicit about?

Because it's not "PhD-expert level" at all, lol. Even the biggest models (Mythos, GPT-Pro, Gemini DeepThink) are nowhere near the level of effort that would be expected in a PhD dissertation, even in their absolute best domains. Telling it to work out a plan first is exactly how you would supervise an eager but not-too-smart junior coder. That's what AI is like, even at its very best.

I understand that but 1) expert-level performance is how they are being sold; but moreover 2) the level of hand-holding is kind of ridiculous. I'll give another example, Codex decided to write two identical functions linearize_token_output and token_output_linearize. Prompting it not to do things like that feels like plugging holes in a dyke. And through prompting, can you even guarantee it won't write duplicate code?

I'll give a third example: I gave Codex some tests and told it to implement the code that would make the tests pass. Codex wrote the tests into the testing file, but then marked them as "shouldn't test", and confirmed all tests pass. Going back I told it something to the effect "you didn't implement the code that would make the tests work, implement it". But after several rounds of this, seemingly no amount of prompting would cause it to actually write code -- instead each time it came back that it had fixed everything and all tests pass, despite only modifying the tests file.

In each example, I keep coming back to the perspective that the code is not abstracted, it's an important artifact and it needs/deserves inspection.

Re: Codex for almost everything

#233

Codex is HN's darling now because Anthropic lowered rate limits for individuals due to compute constraints. OAI has so few enterprise users they can afford to subsidize compute for this group a lot more than Anthropic. Eventually once they have more users they'll do the same thing as Anthropic, of course. It's all a transparent PR play and it's kind of absurd to see the X/HN crowd fall for it hook, line, and sinker.

Not only that, but anthropic is now forcing users to give their biometric information to palantir

They're doing a slow rollout

Re: Codex for almost everything

#235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Why are all your comments praising OpenAI and its models or attacking the competition?

sam altman realized the molotov cocktail incident was not enough of a story to get sympathy, so now he's just drumming up his bots for good oai PR.

Re: Codex for almost everything

#236
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very much agree. Everyday people can now do much more than they could, because they can build programs. The idea that code is something sacred and only devs can somehow do it is dying, and I personally love it, as I am watching it enable so many of my friends and family who have no idea how to code. Today, when we think of someone "using the computer" we gravitate towards people using apps, installing them, writing d…

> The idea that code is something sacred and only devs can somehow do it is dying, and I personally love it, as I am watching it enable so many of my friends and family who have no idea how to code. People on HN are seriously delusional. AI removed the need to know the syntax. Your grandma does not know JS but can one shot a React app. Great! Software engineering is not and has never been about the syntax or one shot…

[dead]

Re: Codex for almost everything

#237
Has anyone figured out how to stop the Codex app from draining my M5 Pro's battery in like 2 hours? I can literally just have it open and my lap turns into a heater. I've tried adjusting all sorts of settings and haven't been able to make a dent. I'm assuming its the garbage renderer.

Re: Codex for almost everything

#238

Just reading the comments here it's amazing how many people seemingly don't know that Claude Desktop and Cowork basically already does all of this. Codex isn't pioneering these features, it's mostly just catching up.

I don't think Claude has this part yet: > With background computer use, Codex can now use all of the apps on your computer by seeing, clicking, and typing with its own cursor. Multiple agents can work on your Mac in parallel, without interfering with your own work in other apps.

>background computer use

How does that even work technically? macOS doesn't support multiple cursors. On native Cocoa apps you can pass input to a window without raising via command+click so possibly they synthesized those events, but fewer and fewer apps support that these days. And AppleScript is basically dead, so they can't be using that either.

I also read they acquired the Sky team (who I think were former Apple employees). No wonder they were able to pull of something so slick.

Re: Codex for almost everything

#239

Codex is HN's darling now because Anthropic lowered rate limits for individuals due to compute constraints. OAI has so few enterprise users they can afford to subsidize compute for this group a lot more than Anthropic. Eventually once they have more users they'll do the same thing as Anthropic, of course. It's all a transparent PR play and it's kind of absurd to see the X/HN crowd fall for it hook, line, and sinker.

There's a systematic marketing campaign from oai on reddit and HN - there's a huge uptick of "codex is better than claude code" comments and posts this last week which is perfectly timed with the claude code increased limits
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