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Codex for almost everything

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Re: Codex for almost everything

#241

Post by siva7 »

Avicebron wrote: post #159
Glemllksdf wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The power to the people is not us the developers and coders. We know how to do a lot of things, how to automate etc. A billion people do not know this and probably benefit initially a lot more. When i did some powerpoint presentation, i browsed around and draged images from the browser to the desktop, than i draged them into powerpoint. My collegue looked at me and was bewildered how fast I did all of that.

I've helped an otherwise very successful and capable guy (architect) set up a shortcut on his desktop to shut down his machine. Navigating to the power down option in the menu was too much of a technical hurdle. The gap in needs between the average HNer and the rest of the world is staggering

Oh boy, the gap between the average it professional and ai pros here is already staggering, let alone the rest of the world. I feel like an alien, no matter where.

Re: Codex for almost everything

#242

Post by yoyohello13 »

solenoid0937 wrote: post #218

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 was brief consternation when OpenAI swooped in to snatch up those DoD contracts but then the next model released and all is forgiven.

Re: Codex for almost everything

#243

Post by com2kid »

woeirua wrote: post #194

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.

IMHO no one is really pioneering. A lot more is possible than what is being done. I wrote a blog post about useful agents in a business setting (https://www.generativestorytelling.ai/blog/posts/useful-corp...) that highlights AI being proactive.

I mean table stakes stuff, why isn't an agent going through all my slack channels and giving me a morning summary of what I should be paying attention to? Why aren't all those meeting transcriptions being joined together into something actually useful? I should be given pre-meeting prep notes about what was discussed last time and who had what to do items assigned. Basic stuff that is already possible but that no one is doing.

I swear none of the AI companies have any sense of human centric design.

> pull relevant context from Slack, Notion, and your codebase, then provide you with a prioritized list of actions.

This is an improvement, but it isn't the central focus. It should be more than just on a single work item basis, more than on just code.

If we are going to be managing swarms of AI agents going forward, attention becomes our most valuable resource. AI should be laser focused on helping us decide where to be focused.

Re: Codex for almost everything

#244

Post by thunky »

William_BB wrote: post #132
jorl17 wrote: 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…

> People on HN are seriously delusional.

Yes you sure are.

Re: Codex for almost everything

#245

Post by troupo »

noelsusman wrote: post #122
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…

Just yesterday my non-technical spouse had to solve a moderately complex scheduling problem at work. She gave the various criteria and constraints to Claude and had a full solution within a few minutes, saving hours of work. It ended up requiring a few hundred lines of Python to implement a scheduling optimization algorithm. She only vaguely knows what Python is, but that didn't matter. She got what she needed. For n…

> Just yesterday my non-technical spouse

> It ended up requiring a few hundred lines of Python

And she knows those a hundred lines of python work correctly and give her correct result because in this instance Claude managed to produce a working result. What if it didn't? Would vague knowledge of Python have helped her?

> It won't be trivial, but I do think there's a big opportunity for whoever can translate the experience we're having with agentic coding to a non-technical audience.

Even though I agree with the sentiment, we've tried non-coding coding how many times now? Once every 5 years? Throwing LLMs into the mix won't help much when in the end you leave the end user hanging, debugging problems and hunting for solutions.

Re: Codex for almost everything

#246

Post by huqedato »

aniviacat wrote: post #199
daviding wrote: post #10

There seems a fair enthusiasm in the UI of these to hide code from coders. Like the prompt interaction is the true source and the actual code is some sort of annoying intermediate runtime inconvenience to cover up. I get that productivity can be improved with a lot of this for non developers, just not sure using 'code' as the term is the right one or not.

The fact that the Codex app is still unavailable on Linux makes me think the target audience isn't people who understand code.

Right. It's rather for vibecoders than for software engineers.

Re: Codex for almost everything

#247

Post by zozbot234 »

ModernMech wrote: post #232
zozbot234 wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> the code is not abstracted, it's an important artifact and it needs inspection.

That's a rather trivial consideration though. The real cost of code is not really writing it out to begin with, it's overwhelmingly the long-term maintenance. You should strive to use AI as a tool to make your code as easy as possible to understand and maintain, not to just write mountains of terrible slop-quality code.

Re: Codex for almost everything

#248

Post by a1j9o94 »

troupo wrote: post #32
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. 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…

This is effectively how I treat my AI agents. A lot of the reason this doesn't work well for people today is due to context/memory/harness management that makes it too complex for someone to set up if they don't want a full time second job or just like to tinker.

If you productize that it will be an experience a lot of people like.

And on the UI piece, I think most people will just interact through text and voice interfaces. Wherever they already spend time like sms, what's app, etc.

Re: Codex for almost everything

#250

Post by zozbot234 »

troupo wrote: post #245
noelsusman wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just yesterday my non-technical spouse had to solve a moderately complex scheduling problem at work. She gave the various criteria and constraints to Claude and had a full solution within a few minutes, saving hours of work. It ended up requiring a few hundred lines of Python to implement a scheduling optimization algorithm. She only vaguely knows what Python is, but that didn't matter. She got what she needed. For n…

> Just yesterday my non-technical spouse > It ended up requiring a few hundred lines of Python And she knows those a hundred lines of python work correctly and give her correct result because in this instance Claude managed to produce a working result. What if it didn't? Would vague knowledge of Python have helped her? > It won't be trivial, but I do think there's a big opportunity for whoever can translate the exper…

Scheduling solutions are easy to verify. For other problems, verification would be harder.
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