Harness engineering: Leveraging Codex in an agent-first world
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Re: Harness engineering: Leveraging Codex in an agent-first world
#2> We had weeks to ship what ended up being a million lines of code... Five months later, the repository contains on the order of a million lines of code across application logic, infrastructure, tooling, documentation, and internal developer utilities. Over that period, roughly 1,500 pull requests have been opened and merged with a small team of just three engineers driving Codex. This translates to an average throughput of 3.5 PRs per engineer per day, and surprisingly the throughput has increased as the team has grown to now seven engineers. Importantly, this wasn’t output for output’s sake: the product has been used by hundreds of users internally, including daily internal power users.
That's an insane level of throughput. What's a good baseline? Prior to agentic coding, whats the typical number of PRs engineers were expected to push? Maybe a 2-10?
Do people feel the software has gotten better in the last 6 months? The number of engs is prob the same so we should expect maybe 5x faster cycle in major software apps, but I don't see it. The AI apps do change very fast but given its a very new field, I'd expect as much. But outside of that, I don't see it.
Re: Harness engineering: Leveraging Codex in an agent-first world
#3> We had weeks to ship what ended up being a million lines of code... Five months later, the repository contains on the order of a million lines of code across application logic, infrastructure, tooling, documentation, and internal developer utilities. Over that period, roughly 1,500 pull requests have been opened and merged with a small team of just three engineers driving Codex. This translates to an average throug…
They never specified what exactly the product was, without which it's impossible to judge the post.
For some reason most of the uses of "agents" are to build yet other AI products, it's turtles all the way down. Maybe that says more about the field of harnesses than it does about the power of "agents".
Re: Harness engineering: Leveraging Codex in an agent-first world
#4I would never dare put that in production
Re: Harness engineering: Leveraging Codex in an agent-first world
#5> We had weeks to ship what ended up being a million lines of code... Five months later, the repository contains on the order of a million lines of code across application logic, infrastructure, tooling, documentation, and internal developer utilities. Over that period, roughly 1,500 pull requests have been opened and merged with a small team of just three engineers driving Codex. This translates to an average throug…
> ended up being a million lines of code
This almost reeks of "I've never cleaned up our code base because there is too much code, and didn't even bother having agents/LLM cleaning them up".
You almost never need a million lines of code - this includes your software, infra, testing and operational tools. You didn't ship the linux kernel in 3 weeks and you know it. The code is already speghetti and it achieve the basic functions OK but it will harder and harder to simplify and untangle and maintain.
Re: Harness engineering: Leveraging Codex in an agent-first world
#6[flagged]
Re: Harness engineering: Leveraging Codex in an agent-first world
#7Codex pushed an update that made my old threads inaccessible. This takes a million of lines to put out a half baked crud app?
Re: Harness engineering: Leveraging Codex in an agent-first world
#8> We had weeks to ship what ended up being a million lines of code... Five months later, the repository contains on the order of a million lines of code across application logic, infrastructure, tooling, documentation, and internal developer utilities. Over that period, roughly 1,500 pull requests have been opened and merged with a small team of just three engineers driving Codex. This translates to an average throug…
> ended up being a million lines of code This almost reeks of "I've never cleaned up our code base because there is too much code, and didn't even bother having agents/LLM cleaning them up". You almost never need a million lines of code - this includes your software, infra, testing and operational tools. You didn't ship the linux kernel in 3 weeks and you know it. The code is already speghetti and it achieve the basi…
Yeah I cannot see how "we shipped 1 million lines of code in three weeks" is... something to be proud of haha
Re: Harness engineering: Leveraging Codex in an agent-first world
#9I understand that the’ve written zero lines of code for this application, but would it kill them to write a few lines of the blog post by hand?
Forcing readers to wade through an unceasing string of LLM clichés demonstrates the opposite of the point you’re trying to make—that the consumers of your work are worse off because you exercised no human judgment in creating it.
Re: Harness engineering: Leveraging Codex in an agent-first world
#10Everyone is criticizing the number of lines of code and the lack of attention that must certainly have been applied to generate that code and push it into production. What is being ignored is this awesome prompt that is almost certainly better than having no agents.md or plans.md or whatever you've come up with, to add validation steps for committed changes. You're still free to look at your code, the changes, and ask the agent to clean up. Try it. It's really nice.