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

ChatGPT Containers can now run bash, pip/npm install packages and download files

simonwillison.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 336 posts

Re: ChatGPT Containers can now run bash, pip/npm install packages and download files

#301

Post by antonvs »

ben_w wrote: post #246
pharrington wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So we should all work to become better programmers! What I'm seeing now is too many people giving up and saying "most code is bad, so I may was well pump out even worse code MUCH faster." People are chasing convenience and getting a far worse quality of life in exchange.

I've seen all four quadrants of [good code, bad code] x [business success, business failure]. The real money we used to get paid was for business success, not directly for code quality; the quality metrics we told ourselves were closer to CV-driven development than anything the people with the money understood let alone cared about, which in turn was why the term "technical debt" was coined as a way to try to get the…

I’ve seen those quadrants too, because I’ve come into several companies to help clean up a mess they’ve gotten into with bad code that they can no longer ignore. It is a compete certainty that we’re going to start seeing a lot more of that.

One ironic thing about LLM-generated bad code is that churning out millions of lines just makes it less likely the LLM is going to be able to manage the results, because token capacity is neither unlimited nor free.

(Note I’m not saying all LLM code is bad; but so far the fully vibecoded stuff seems bad at any nontrivial scale.)

Re: ChatGPT Containers can now run bash, pip/npm install packages and download files

#302

Post by fooker »

antonvs wrote: post #301
ben_w wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen all four quadrants of [good code, bad code] x [business success, business failure]. The real money we used to get paid was for business success, not directly for code quality; the quality metrics we told ourselves were closer to CV-driven development than anything the people with the money understood let alone cared about, which in turn was why the term "technical debt" was coined as a way to try to get the…

I’ve seen those quadrants too, because I’ve come into several companies to help clean up a mess they’ve gotten into with bad code that they can no longer ignore. It is a compete certainty that we’re going to start seeing a lot more of that. One ironic thing about LLM-generated bad code is that churning out millions of lines just makes it less likely the LLM is going to be able to manage the results, because token cap…

> because token capacity is neither unlimited nor free.

This is like dissing software from 2004 because it used 2gb extra memory.

In the last year, token context window increased by about 100x and halved in cost at the same time.

If this is the crux of your argument, technology advancement will render it moot.

Re: ChatGPT Containers can now run bash, pip/npm install packages and download files

#303

Post by antonvs »

simonw wrote: post #296
antonvs wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If average people try vibecoding their dependencies, they’ll fail, simple as that. We’ve already seen how that looks with the “web browsers” that have recently been vibecoded.

There's a new web browser project today that's a heck of a lot more impressive than the previous ones - ~20,000 lines of dependency-free Rust (though it uses system libraries for image and text rendering), does a good job of the Hacker News homepage: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46779522

Thanks for the heads up, that does look much more interesting.

I don't think it really affects the point discussed above for now, because we were discussing average users, and by definition, the first person to code a plausible web browser with an agent isn't an average user - unless of course that can be reliably replicated with any average user.

But on that note, the takeaways on the post you linked are relevant, because the author bucked a few trends to do this, and concluded among other things that "The human who drives the agent might matter more than how the agents work and are set up, the judge is still out on this one."

This will obviously change, but the areas that LLMs need to improve on here are ones they're notoriously weak on, so it could take a while.

Re: ChatGPT Containers can now run bash, pip/npm install packages and download files

#305

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

candiddevmike wrote: post #6

Seems like everyone is trying to get ahead of tool calling moving people "off platform" and creating differentiators around what tools are available "locally" to the models etc. This also takes the wind out of the sandboxing folks, as it probably won't be long before the "local" tool calling can effectively do anything you'd need to do on your local machine. I wonder when they'll start offering virtual, persistent de…

That's what GitHub Codespaces is, and it runs Copilot too (it's just a hosted VSCode Web instance specific to your git repo)

Google has Cloud Shell, and Google's AI Studio (https://aistudio.google.com/) gives you a web-based dev environment with Gemini integration

Re: ChatGPT Containers can now run bash, pip/npm install packages and download files

#307

Post by simonw »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #304

This is basically the same functionality as OpenAI Codex Web has, which, if you've not used it, you absolutely should not. What a garbage piece of software. Anthropic is eating OpenAI's lunch.

It's a bit different from Codex Web in that it can't open PRs against projects and can't be configured with internet access.

It is better than Codex Web in that you can continue to chat with the agent while it's working - Claude Code for web has that too. Codex Web really needs to catch up there!

Re: ChatGPT Containers can now run bash, pip/npm install packages and download files

#308

Post by kridsdale1 »

smeej wrote: post #294

As a person who's worked in support roles in tech companies and has a working familiarity with Python but is not a software developer or engineer at all, it's been fascinating to watch the changes. In the last couple weeks, both Gemini and Claude have asked me, "Can I use the computer?" to answer some particular question. In both cases, my question to each was, "What computer? Mine, or do you have your own?" Here I h…

You’re seeing perspectives of the distributed system from inside the system.

I’m building multi server multi agent products and they do apparently perceive (anthropomorphizing I know) their connected servers as other people.

Re: ChatGPT Containers can now run bash, pip/npm install packages and download files

#309

Post by fassssst »

simonw wrote: post #290
e12e wrote: post #289

Hmm.. what's this? > gmail (read-only) # gmail.search_email_ids → any # > Description: Search Gmail message IDs by query/tags (read-only). Chat GPT App on android disavows having this... In what context does chat GPT get (read) access to Gmail? Desktop app?

I got that from the https://chatgpt.com/ web app - I just tried the same prompt in the ChatGPT iPhone app and got the gmail. and gcal. ones too: https://chatgpt.com/share/6978dc20-8a70-8006-9b42-6c0a8080be... Looks like it's for this feature: https://mashable.com/article/chatgpt-5-openai-gmail-calendar Presumably you have to opt-in to turning this on somewhere.

You can turn those on in the “Apps” settings page. They were previously called Connectors.

Re: ChatGPT Containers can now run bash, pip/npm install packages and download files

#310

Post by e12e »

simonw wrote: post #290
e12e wrote: post #289

Hmm.. what's this? > gmail (read-only) # gmail.search_email_ids → any # > Description: Search Gmail message IDs by query/tags (read-only). Chat GPT App on android disavows having this... In what context does chat GPT get (read) access to Gmail? Desktop app?

I got that from the https://chatgpt.com/ web app - I just tried the same prompt in the ChatGPT iPhone app and got the gmail. and gcal. ones too: https://chatgpt.com/share/6978dc20-8a70-8006-9b42-6c0a8080be... Looks like it's for this feature: https://mashable.com/article/chatgpt-5-openai-gmail-calendar Presumably you have to opt-in to turning this on somewhere.

Strange. When logged in to a free account on Android:

https://chatgpt.com/share/697902ad-3070-800d-b523-0fe312c772...

Post reply on HN