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Codex for almost everything

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Re: Codex for almost everything

#301

Post by peyton »

chaos_emergent wrote: post #299
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.

Thinking in counterfactuals, how would the hype around Codex would be different if it was organic and because they had built a genuinely good product? Asking as someone who genuinely loves Codex and has been in the OpenAI camp for months after buying a Claude Max plan from November to February.

I haven’t noticed much hype around Codex. I have both and use Claude for broad work off my phone and Codex on my computer to clean up the mess. Crank reasoning to the highest setting for each. Claude is extremely unreliable for me, and Codex feels like more of a real tool. I’d say Codex has a bit of a learning curve. Nothing much has changed for me in the past month or two (whenever GPT 5.4 came out).

Re: Codex for almost everything

#302

Post by jimbean78 »

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.

I think your making assumptions without reading the entire thread and processing the general theme. This isn't about catching up or whos better. It really comes down two things. One, how far does your money go, and secondly which political narrative you subscribe too. Up until they started their beef with the u.s. government I was a subscriber. Between that and how fast my tokens depleted I switched to Codex. Best decision of my life and now I never run out of tokens.

It was the perfect storm and I would have never switched since the first AI I started with was Claude.

Re: Codex for almost everything

#303

Post by gobdovan »

jerf wrote: post #124
avaer wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hot take: we (not I, but I reluctantly) will keep calling it code long after there's no code to be seen. Like we did with phones that nobody phones with.

Code isn't going anywhere. Code is multiple orders of magnitude cheaper and faster than an LLM for the same task, and that gap is likely to widen rather than contract because the bigger the AI gets the sillier it gets to use it to do something code could have done. Compare the actual operations done for code to add 10 8-digit numbers to an LLM on the same task. Heck, I'll even say, forget the possibility the LLM may…

I think grandparent comments were talking about how Codex designers try to push LLMs to displace the interface to code, not necessarily code itself. In that view, code could stay as the execution substrate, but the default human interaction layer moves upward, the way higher-level languages displaced direct interaction with lower-level ones. From a HCI perspective, raw computational efficiency is not the main question; the bottleneck is often the human, so the interface only has to be fast and reliable enough at human timescales.

Re: Codex for almost everything

#304

Post by xienze »

jorl17 wrote: post #84
avaer wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hot take: we (not I, but I reluctantly) will keep calling it code long after there's no code to be seen. Like we did with phones that nobody phones with.

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…

> I am watching it enable so many of my friends and family who have no idea how to code.

Be careful what you wish for, this is going to be a double edged sword like YouTube is. YouTube allowed regular people without money and industry connections to make all sorts of quality, niche content. But for every bit of great content, there’s 1000 times as much garbage and outright misleading shit.

Giving people without any clue how computing works the ability to create software that interfaces with the outside world is likewise going to create some great stuff and 1000 times as much buggy and dangerous stuff. And allow untold numbers of scammers with no technical skill the ability to scam the wider world.

Re: Codex for almost everything

#305

Post by TeMPOraL »

zozbot234 wrote: post #203
ModernMech wrote: post #182

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.

That's not the best framing, IMO. More important is, even a PhD expert human wouldn't one-shot complex programs out of short, vague requests. There's a process to this. Even a thesis isn't written in one, long, amphetamine-fueled evening. It's a process whose every steps involves thinking, referencing sources, talking with oneself and other people, exploring possibilities, going two steps forward and one step back, and making decisions at every point.

Those decisions are, by large, what humans still need to do. If the problem is complex, and you desperately avoid needing to decide, then what AI produces will surprise you, but in a bad way.

Re: Codex for almost everything

#306

Post by KronisLV »

the__alchemist wrote: post #298
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.

Call it fall for it, but here are my two experiences, with both applications open. ($20/month plan for both) - Claude: Good for ~20 minutes of work once every 4 hours - Codex: Good for however long I want to use it. Claude nerfed their product so that it's not usable, so I use something else.

I'm on the 100 USD plan with Anthropic, I hit the 5 hour limits about 75% of the time during working hours, but almost never the weekly ones - by the time they're reset I've usually used up between 50% - 75% of the quota. There are periods of more intense usage ofc, but this is the approx. situation I'm in (also it doesn't work on tasks while I'm asleep, because I occasionally like having a look at WIP stuff and intervene if needed).

The Anthropic 20 USD plan would more or less be a non-starter for agentic development, at least for the projects that I work on, even while only working on a single codebase or task at a time (I usually do 1-3 at a time).

I would be absolutely bankrupt if I had to pay per-token. That said, I do mostly just throw Opus at everything (though it sometimes picks Sonnet/Haiku for sub-agents for specific tasks, which is okay), so probably not a 100% optional approach, but I've wasted too much time and effort in the past on sub-optimal (non-SOTA) models anyways. I wonder which is closer to the actual cost and how much subsidizing there is going on.

Re: Codex for almost everything

#307

Post by CrazyStat »

the__alchemist wrote: post #298
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.

Call it fall for it, but here are my two experiences, with both applications open. ($20/month plan for both) - Claude: Good for ~20 minutes of work once every 4 hours - Codex: Good for however long I want to use it. Claude nerfed their product so that it's not usable, so I use something else.

Since we’re sharing anecdata: I also have the $20 month plan for codex, and I hit the five hour limit after about an hour of work every single time I open it. I use it for personal side projects primarily in the evening after kids are in bed, so my strategy is to launch it about 4pm and send a simple prompt to prime the 5 hour window to end at 9pm, start working about 8pm, and then I can use up the existing 5 hour window and the next one by about 10pm.

Re: Codex for almost everything

#308

Post by dingnuts »

the__alchemist wrote: post #298
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.

Call it fall for it, but here are my two experiences, with both applications open. ($20/month plan for both) - Claude: Good for ~20 minutes of work once every 4 hours - Codex: Good for however long I want to use it. Claude nerfed their product so that it's not usable, so I use something else.

[dead]

Re: Codex for almost everything

#309

Post by TeMPOraL »

LtWorf wrote: post #156
jorl17 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally this. People who don't see this seem to think we're in some sort of "bubble" or that we don't "ship proper code" or whatever else they believe in, but this change is happening. Maybe it'll be slower than I feel, but it will definitely happen. Of course I'm in a personal bubble, but I've got very clear signs that this trend is also happening outside of it. Here's an example from just yesterday. An acquaintance…

So they invented microsoft access?

No, they got their hands on a little person on a chip that knows how to program computers.

Re: Codex for almost everything

#310

Post by [deleted] »

chaos_emergent wrote: post #299
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.

Thinking in counterfactuals, how would the hype around Codex would be different if it was organic and because they had built a genuinely good product? Asking as someone who genuinely loves Codex and has been in the OpenAI camp for months after buying a Claude Max plan from November to February.

[deleted]
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