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Harness engineering: Leveraging Codex in an agent-first world

openai.com

31–40 of 222 posts

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

#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 learned over years about how to determine whether code is good or bad, and what practices make an engineering team effective is not just obsolete, it's fundamentally counter-productive because it assumes a slow, human-centric process that requires you to actually review and understand the code. Even your ability to mentor junior engineers is now obsolete, because all that experience you've built up is now worthless to them.

If this is the approach the industry takes, particularly when combined with a lack of interest in quality from the business (and let's face it, consumers have shown us that they're happy to pay for cheap crap), it's hard to see much of a future for software engineers. You don't need thousands of people with deep technical expertise, you need a handful of manager-types, who will focus on defining product and business requirements and configuring how the AI gets enough context to implement the requirements.

Maybe, if we're extremely lucky, there's so much demand for software that total employment doesn't fall off a cliff, but the nature of the work will change so much that many older, more expensive engineers will become unemployable. Those who remain will have to accept that the skills they spend decades developing are now worthless, that younger engineers no longer respect or listen to them, that the business no longer sees them as experts worthy of respect, but old fogies who grew up in a different world.

Joe Biden liked to say that a job is more than just a paycheck, it's part of your identity and your sense of self-worth. We're all very used to a certain level of respect (and commensurate remuneration). If you don't think that's true, compare how a software engineer is treated to how a warehouse worker is treated. What happens when we lose that?

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

#32
1 million lines of code aside, I feel like anyone who seriously thought about this would eventually run their own harness.

Just like .vimrc and .zshrc, the harness "code" itself can be easy and personal. Provided that it's built on working and existing construct such as tmux.

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

#33
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…

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

#34
This mirrors exactly what I have been doing.

- Give Claude/Codex a way to verify its own work (browser, smoke tests, e2e tests, high-fidelity local environment)

- Keep all context (issue tracking, docs, ideas, plans, worklogs) in-repo (https://github.com/shepherdjerred/monorepo/tree/main/package...)

- Give Claude/Codex access to observability (Grafana, Prometheus, Tempo, PagerDuty)

- Have Claude/Codex follow good engineering guidelines like fail-fast, type safety, parse at boundaries

I haven't yet been able to achieve full autonomy due to cost and CI load on my homelab.

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

#35
post #16
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…

> 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.

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

#36
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…

It is likely better because AI agents make access to domain knowledge easier. However, I would wager that the problem is people don’t remember the code well. The problems are going to be long-term as the pace of change increases.

If you think about it, successful products rely on designing well-thought-out experiences, customer discovery (see all the Forward-Deployed Enginneer job listings at OpenAI) so the code velocity somewhat becomes irrelevant.

If you’re solving the right problem and you’ve got a good team then competitive advantage comes from somewhere OUTSIDE of code velocity.

The more important question I think is does faster code yield more value long-term? At the moment, it’s like yeah we do 3.5 pull requests per day.

I’m thinking, great, good for you. You could also combine three pull requests into one and then you’re doing 1 per day. This is quantitative data that doesn’t really mean anything tangible.

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

#37
post #28

why do you have “weeks” to ship what would take “months”?

> We intentionally chose this constraint so we would build what was necessary to increase engineering velocity by orders of magnitude.

I guess orders of magnitude ain’t what they used to be.

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

#40

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…

>a large portion of your skillset is about to become completely worthless

I'm not convinced of that.

I watched a video of an architect using AI to create architectural drawings. It became very clear to me that he has a lot of skills and terminology that helped him produce something very specific, in a few minutes. I've been working on some home improvement stuff including a studio/shed and I've struggled to produce even something simple (currently trying to get a conversation packet on the roof trusses to take the the permit department to get started). Even with my high school architecture class.

After watching that I wonder how much of what I'm doing with AI that looks easy is because I hae a deep technical knowledge, plus 3 years of heavy work with AI.

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