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Harness engineering: Leveraging Codex in an agent-first world

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Re: Harness engineering: Leveraging Codex in an agent-first world

#51

Post by nostrademons »

NoraCodes wrote: post #50
linsomniac wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>GitHub, Spotify, Google maps (just to name a few), have gotten noticeably shittier in recent times. What if AI lets you create new versions of those tools, but without the enshitification? I say that being in the "soaking" stage of using AI to rebuild a shitty software project in 70KLOC over about 2 weeks of spare time, so this may not be as theoretical as you might think.

> What if AI lets you create new versions of those tools, but without the enshitification? I'm not sure I fully understand what you're saying here. Isn't the value of these tools almost entirely independent of their actual software? That is, we have many good open source, self-hostable forges (Forgejo, sr.ht, etc.), lots of great music player software (Jellyfin, Symphonium, etc.), and decent maps software (OsmAnd and…

AI coders are great for making scrapers, possibly because AI companies use their own tools to make an awful lot of scrapers.

Re: Harness engineering: Leveraging Codex in an agent-first world

#52

Post by charintstr »

I am at a major company that is essentially vibe coding. I’ve shipped about 100k LoC this entire half and am toward top 10% of my team. I find it likely that either

A. The code is absolute garbage and is speed for speed sake B. They’re using an internal model that is a generation beyond GPT 5.5

I say this because we’ve attempted to do something similar using the latest gen Claude models and a significantly larger team. The code is probably along the lines of millions LoC but is an absolute mess because of vibing. There’s a price you pay for speed

Re: Harness engineering: Leveraging Codex in an agent-first world

#53

Post by techblueberry »

bko wrote: post #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 throug…

I’ve been vibe coding a lot over the past year or so, and I think I’m going to stop. In fact, I sort of want to challenge myself to see, can I go back to a sort of the fork in the road with the old copilot autocomplete workflow and really maximize that. Be in the drivers seat for most of the code being written, but find ways to use AI to really enhance the flow state / remove blockers. Tools only minimal actual code generation.

Re: Harness engineering: Leveraging Codex in an agent-first world

#54

Post by aleqs »

linsomniac wrote: post #35
aleqs wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> should expect maybe 5x faster cycle in major software apps To what end and what would that even look like though? Enshittifying everything at maximum speed? The apps/platforms I use regularly - GitHub, Spotify, Google maps (just to name a few), have gotten noticeably shittier in recent times.

>GitHub, Spotify, Google maps (just to name a few), have gotten noticeably shittier in recent times. What if AI lets you create new versions of those tools, but without the enshitification? I say that being in the "soaking" stage of using AI to rebuild a shitty software project in 70KLOC over about 2 weeks of spare time, so this may not be as theoretical as you might think.

Oh I definitely agree that AI can and will help create great software.

It's just that creating great software isn't really the SV/VC/big tech business model or main goal.

Re: Harness engineering: Leveraging Codex in an agent-first world

#55

Post by briHass »

apical_dendrite wrote: post #31

I wonder why we as engineers aren't protesting AI in the same way that artists and people in film and television are. This post should instill the same terror that visual artists feel. If you're a more senior person in tech, this post is effectively saying that a large portion of your skillset is about to become completely worthless. This goes beyond the skills involved in writing the code. Everything that you've lea…

It's the other way around, unfortunately. The senior engineers will still be useful for architecture and infrastructure considerations, as well as guiding the agents. It's the junior engineers that get nailed, because there's little incentive to hire one when a LLM does a better job immediately and costs less.

Re: Harness engineering: Leveraging Codex in an agent-first world

#56

Post by linsomniac »

NoraCodes wrote: post #50
linsomniac wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>GitHub, Spotify, Google maps (just to name a few), have gotten noticeably shittier in recent times. What if AI lets you create new versions of those tools, but without the enshitification? I say that being in the "soaking" stage of using AI to rebuild a shitty software project in 70KLOC over about 2 weeks of spare time, so this may not be as theoretical as you might think.

> What if AI lets you create new versions of those tools, but without the enshitification? I'm not sure I fully understand what you're saying here. Isn't the value of these tools almost entirely independent of their actual software? That is, we have many good open source, self-hostable forges (Forgejo, sr.ht, etc.), lots of great music player software (Jellyfin, Symphonium, etc.), and decent maps software (OsmAnd and…

It really depends on the use-case. For example, my most starred github repo is a tool to convert Spotify playlists to YouTube Music (that was done pre-AI). Github depends on what issues you have with it, what your use case is, and whether you can leverage some of the network effects via API from the github source. Maps, same story.

Re: Harness engineering: Leveraging Codex in an agent-first world

#57

Post by dumbdumb125 »

yurimo wrote: post #41

What I still can't understand is why is massive amount of code generated is a flex? I don't feel that software has gotten a lot better in past 3 years, only sloppier. It's surprising to me that people who know about reward hacking choose a simple objective like lines of code generated as a signal for quality. I'd argue you have to optimize for less lines generated as possible while secondary optimization should be re…

It's a huge flex if the alternative is no code at all. Reward hacking aside, LOC resonates with me in the sense that I've seen 10+ projects to fruition that wouldn't have even begun without an agentic harness and an LLM.

It's like the difference between doing stock price predictions with binary "up" or "down" histories and trying to figure out how to normalize actual price histories (basically impossible). The binary work gives a well-defined signal.

Re: Harness engineering: Leveraging Codex in an agent-first world

#58

Post by therealdrag0 »

torben-friis wrote: post #11
bko wrote: post #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 throug…

Here's a fun one: firefox lists its current count at about 2.5M LOC, from roughly 1M commits during the years. You end up with about 3 lines added per commit, which is not ridiculous when you consider that most would be editions rather than full additions. Here, we have 1500 PRs and 1M LOC, which is about 650 added LOC per PR. Remember, not 650 lines total in the PR, but +650 balance after additions-removals. Fun que…

Does the Firefox LOC include ALL forms of text: infrastructure (Firefox doesn’t have), documentation, developer scripts,tests, etc? How is the test coverage of Firefox?

Re: Harness engineering: Leveraging Codex in an agent-first world

#59

Post by crdrost »

yurimo wrote: post #41

What I still can't understand is why is massive amount of code generated is a flex? I don't feel that software has gotten a lot better in past 3 years, only sloppier. It's surprising to me that people who know about reward hacking choose a simple objective like lines of code generated as a signal for quality. I'd argue you have to optimize for less lines generated as possible while secondary optimization should be re…

Yeah so all of personal computing—text editing, SVG antialiasing, etc, fits in 20,000 LOC (VPRI's STEPS project) so a million lines of code is 50 reïnventions of personal computing. BUT: it is unlikely that humans would have solved this problem in 20 kLOC. Sussman said “we really don't know how to compute!” as his talk title and LLMs had to ossify some pre-existing voice as the forever programming habitus and it chose a persona that doesn't know how to program—because we don't —and now we are stuck with it. Claude is our tickets, our implementations, our documentation... And if you tell it “hey the node role should not have those permissions, that should be a service account” it will happily do the right thing, but it has no intrinsic sense of taste and the error message it's trying to clear just says “the node role doesn't have that permission and the system prompt says “keep it short, stupid ” and graybeards might be our last bulwark.

Re: Harness engineering: Leveraging Codex in an agent-first world

#60

Post by prakashn27 »

murat124 wrote: post #17

The other day I came across to a video showing workers in a e-vape factory. They pick up a bunch of e-vapes from the conveyor belt (each has 6 e-vape think), stick in their mouth and vigorously vape all of them for about 5 seconds, then test the next bunch. Humans reviewing hundreds of lines of change in a PR written by AI is not very different.

Very true. If a PR has 1000 lines I would check only a handful full of them and leave the rest for test suit .
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