Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nothing by Alex Karp is aligned with any users. This guy is a mercenary, and he seems to be in this job for the love of killing.
I thought tweaking was his highest calling
Polymeth
Codex starts encrypting sub-agent prompts
211–220 of 272 posts
Re: Codex starts encrypting sub-agent prompts
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Sure, Claude might be 90% correct and Kimi only 70% correct but does that matter when 90% isn't enough to make it work autonomously? Huuh, what does this mean? GPT models frequently do 100% of what I tell them to do, anything less and I'd see no point in using agents for work at all. Do you tell them stuff then 30% of the cases Kimi goes off and does other things, or what do you mean? The time the agent does someth…
> Huuh, what does this mean? GPT models frequently do 100% of what I tell them to do, anything less and I'd see no point in using agents for work at all. I never managed to have this experience even with SOTA models, they routinely make architectural mistakes, wrong assumptions and take shortcuts they should not take. Less for sure but they still do it often. I didn't try Fable yet though so can't comment on it. So b…
> I never managed to have this experience even with SOTA models, they routinely make architectural mistakes, wrong assumptions and take shortcuts they should not take. Less for sure but they still do it often. I didn't try Fable yet though so can't comment on it.
Ah, you let them make architectural decisions? :P That might explain it. Agents for me are more like pair-programming or just "what types the code", all the design and decisions are made by me, so if those are wrong, it's my fault. The agents are just used to implement what I've decided to have implemented, and I can't remember the last time codex did a mistake without correcting itself, or made a wrong assumption or taken shortcuts, unless I explicitly told it something that lead to those things.
> So based on that, since I have to watch everything they do anyways, why would I pay extra?
Personally I pay more to have to fix less later, and for a piece of mind that if I ask it to do X, it doesn't go off and do Y.
Re: Codex starts encrypting sub-agent prompts
#213I was wondering why my local tool to inspect coding agent sessions stopped working in some cases. This is a really interesting engineering decision, I wonder how many people will want an encrypted external piece of instructions running on their machine.
if you're running in YOLO mode you already don't care, what matters are the tool calls and these can't be encrypted
Re: Codex starts encrypting sub-agent prompts
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ok, so help me get this right: I ask the LLM for something, it generates prompts for sub-agents and sends them back to my client for it to call the sub-agents. Now, those sub-agent prompts are encrypted messages that the sub-agents will decrypt (by hitting a backend) to do their work. Might as well just stuff the prompts in a database and only hand back the primary key to the client to hand off to the sub-agents. Kee…
> sub-agents will decrypt (by hitting a backend) to do their work Your local harness never decrypts the prompt, and only the OpenAI backend does. Your harness still sees tool calls in the transcript so it can act, but you lose (some) visibility as to why the subagent chooses to do so. Imagine seeing this transcript during forensics: [encrypted blob][thinking summary: I need to drop the prod database][shell: psql "dro…
OK, so it's actually:
My Client -> main agent -> sub-agent -> tool
| |
log: log:
enc prompt enc prompt
thoughts thoughts
| |
V V
My Client My Client
Re: Codex starts encrypting sub-agent prompts
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
I thought though the idea is that you cannot learn anything from the ciphertext, how it is processed, or what the final result is? Unless you are a participant of the computation and you have the key, that is.
To actually make it work, you would need to preformat your data very specifically, and the data you want to allow to be processed would need a subkey to unlock the parts you want processed. I don't see a way to make it a open standard. The processing steps would need to be part of the key . Anyway If someone figured it out I would be very interested to be sure they weren't just trying to slap a it's encrypted to meet…
The point is to not have subkeys or any other way to access any part of the plaintex - as the goal is generally to offset the computation and the costs of it to another party. And yes, most likely it will require a very particular format of the data, and in all likelihood will allow only for a limited set of operations.
Re: Codex starts encrypting sub-agent prompts
#216There's no moat to any of this shit, and they have to try to do something about that. Everybody involved is deeply, deeply, in debt. Watching these things work make it easy to figure out what they're doing.
The clock is ticking. People pretending that normal people can't afford to do AI at home, in private, are making the argument that cars are too expensive for normal people to own. Pretty sure right now if you spend $25K, you would be able (if there were no technical hurdles) to set up a private rig that would satisfy your family's need for LLM assistance for the foreseeable future. That's a budget-priced car, and the price is only going to go down (i.e. that rig will become more powerful over time.) If all of those people donated some of their cycles and bandwidth to a networked training grid, the models would stay current.
The "open source" infrastructure for that is lacking, but not for long.
These companies own nothing that couldn't be implemented by a specialist after another specialist explained it to them over a phone call. And due to the nature of LLMs, they can't even use copyrights and patents as weapons. The only options are secrecy and government protection. And secrecy is only a delaying tactic.
Re: Codex starts encrypting sub-agent prompts
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's sort of insane though, you not only have dozens/hundreds of stochastic agents running on your machine, but you cannot even inspect the instructions those agents are working off of? I've gone in to look at Claude subagent/workflows and sometimes been like "no this was a mistake to spin up" ... Codex users just get to token yolo the encrypted telephone operator instructions+shell from orchestrator to subagents?
>but you cannot even inspect the instructions those agents are working off of? It makes more sense when you realize they don't want developers to be doing any coding at all. That's what they seem to be moving towards. From product manager to product via AI.
Last stage is moving everyone to their cloud platforms, they deploy everything for you, you don't even get to see the code, just the deployed end product.
Because letting you look at the code would be too dangerous, you could reverse engineer an exploit to another product! Or distill their internet-distilled model!
But don't worry, at least it will be very convenient.
Re: Codex starts encrypting sub-agent prompts
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
training people to believe that them having impossible to inspect encrypted channels from your machines to theirs is a best practice Oh yeah, I much preferred when my government and whoever controls the infrastructure could snoop on my traffic instead!
idk about you but I'd rather not be murdered regardless of who the perpetrator might be
Better make sure the pizza gets delivered on time, else you’ll have to pull your sword.
Re: Codex starts encrypting sub-agent prompts
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
yeah i get it too, i'm just flabbergasted that this is today's market it reminds me of the pre-vulkan game programming days.. drivers were black boxes, game developpers had to resort to magic tricks to do stuff, until everybody got fed up and wanted some logical ground to operate
Further proof that this tech stack is immature and would have needed to bake for a more years. In an ideal world this would have been public tech like ARPANET or WWW and there would have been 2-3 major iterations (until the equivalent of Claude 7-8) and only then would everyone have tried to build huge businesses on top of it. I mean, sure, it's sort of usable, but the churn is insane. And we're burning the planet (a…
Compared to burgers, it's a rounding error
Re: Codex starts encrypting sub-agent prompts
#220It’s just a short hop to not being able to see it at all. I started using pi.dev recently, the idea that a third party is taking more and more direct control of my software development process sits badly with me.
pi.dev is truly excellent. one of the great things about an openai sub is you still can take your subsidised tokens/usage, and choose your coding harness of choice (not against tos)
pi is great as a quick and hackable TUI, or as a starting point for your own stuff. It's a far cry from Codex + Sol + Ultra though. Same goes for a lot of model+harness combos, the models are trained with data from harness usage, and (many) harnesses are built with specific models in mind, Sol will definitively perform better in Codex than in pi, because the way both parts were built.