Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Harness engineering: Leveraging Codex in an agent-first world

openai.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 222 posts

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

#21

Post by bombcar »

Aperocky wrote: post #5
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…

> 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…

Even the linux kernel doesn't need millions of lines of code; most of the actual LOC is device drivers, and you don't need all of them, you just need the ones for the devices you have.

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

#22

Post by dawnerd »

faangguyindia wrote: post #20

Codex updates usually appear every few hours (i am not saying this how often it's published) but that's my perception as a user. Often i update codex just to see new update within an hour so. Many times those updates are not properly tested, for example in one update the model selector got completely changed. then next hotfix was pushed which restored original.

Who needs a QA team when you can just test on users and iterate instantly /s

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

#23

Post by zatkin »

I worry most about blindspots with this kind of approach. Let's say that this repository goes on for years, at which point the docs folder is several MB in size. Would Codex be able to think outside of the box? Or would the aggregate of the Markdown content fundamentally cover enough ground to prevent it from thinking of novel new approaches to existing problems?

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

#25

Post by Chu4eeno »

bombcar wrote: post #21
Aperocky wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Even the linux kernel doesn't need millions of lines of code; most of the actual LOC is device drivers, and you don't need all of them, you just need the ones for the devices you have.

And Linux maintainers are actively pushing to radically cut down on the LOC by eliminating drivers etc.

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

#27

Post by andai »

> To drive a PR to completion, we instruct Codex to review its own changes locally, request additional specific agent reviews both locally and in the cloud, respond to any human or agent given feedback, and iterate in a loop until all agent reviewers are satisfied (effectively this is a Ralph Wiggum Loop ).

https://ghuntley.com/loop/

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

#29

Post by esikich »

zatkin wrote: post #23

I worry most about blindspots with this kind of approach. Let's say that this repository goes on for years, at which point the docs folder is several MB in size. Would Codex be able to think outside of the box? Or would the aggregate of the Markdown content fundamentally cover enough ground to prevent it from thinking of novel new approaches to existing problems?

You tell it to update the docs: not append. I've done the same thing with a readme in the root with links to the docs. After every commit, before the push, I have my agent "update all relevant and related docs, add or remove what's needed" or something to that extent. And it works remarkably well. I also have an append only change log it's supposed to add to. Between that, good commit messages, and comprehensive testing, I've built a homebrew OS and updating it is remarkably smooth. Runs a homebrew FTP and HTTP server and can run Wolfenstein. Working on DOOM right now. Close, but sound has been difficult.

https://github.com/ESikich/smallos

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

#30

Post by CleanCoder »

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…

When I got to the 1M LOC I involuntarily paused feeling like this must be satire.
Post reply on HN