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Codex for almost everything

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Re: Codex for almost everything

#431

Post by multjoy »

avaer wrote: post #81
postalcoder wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with the sentiment but I think for normie agents to take off in the way that you expect, you're going to have to grant them with full access. But, by granting agents full access, you immediately turn the computer into an extremely adversarial device insofar as txt files become credible threat vectors. For all the benefits that agents offer, they can be asymmetrically harmful. This is not a solved issue. That…

> for normie agents to take off in the way that you expect, you're going to have to grant them with full access At this point it's a foregone conclusion this is what users will choose. It'll be like (lack of) privacy on the internet caused by the ad industrial complex, but much worse and much more invasive. The threats are real, but it's just a product opportunity to these companies. OpenAI and friends will sell the…

>Anyone trying to stay safe will be on the gradient to a Stallmanesque monastic computing existence.

As a proud neo-luddite, I'm watching the AI hype with grim amusement and I'll tell you hwhat, it doesn't look like a good time. Even putting to one side the planetary scale economic crash that is incoming, all the hypers seem to be on some sort of treadmill that is out of their control and it simply doesn't look like fun.

Re: Codex for almost everything

#432

Post by kristophph »

krackers wrote: post #263
jjk7 wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably accessibility APIs

Which specific ones though allow you to send input to a window without raising it? People have been trying to do "focus follows mouse [without auto raise]" for a long time on mac, and the synthetic event equivalent to command+click is the only discovered method I'm aware of, e.g. used in https://github.com/sbmpost/AutoRaise There is also this old blog post by Yegge [1] which mentions `AXUIElementPostKeyboardEvent` bu…

Maybe they used Claude to come up with a good method to do this. /s

But I was also wondering, how this even works. The AI agent can have its own cursors and none of its actions interrupt my own workflow at all? Maybe I need to try this.

Also, this sounds like it would be very expensive since from my understanding each app frame needs to be analysed as an image first, which is pretty token intensive.

Re: Codex for almost everything

#433

Post by flir »

visarga wrote: post #119
cjbarber wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My view is different. Agent products have access to tools and to write and run code. This makes them much more useful than raw models.

Yes, I think they unlock a whole new level of capability when they have a r/w file system (memory), code execution and the web.

That's not the model, that's the box the model came in.

It's unlikely we've hit the limits on improving agent UX, but there are some fundamental limits on LLMs that seem unlikely to be fixed by better UX.

Re: Codex for almost everything

#434

Post by procaryote »

ryandrake wrote: post #101
intended wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a recent Stanford study which showed that AI enthusiasts and experts and the normies had very different sentiment when it came to AI. I think most people are going to say they dont want it. I mean, why would anyone want a tool that can screw up their bank account? What benefit does it gain them? Theres lots of cases of great highly useful LLM tools, but the moment they scale up you get slammed by the risks…

I agree, in general we are going to find that ultimately most employee end users don't want it. Assuming it actually makes you more productive. I mean, who the hell wants to be 10X more productive without a commensurate 10X compensation increase? You're just giving away that value to your employer. On the other hand, entrepreneurs and managers are going to want it for their employees (and force it on them) for the ab…

It's interesting how differently people can think.

I couldn't imagine thinking "I'm gonna do this 0.1x as fast as I could, wasting my life away with pointless extra work, to spite my employer"

Re: Codex for almost everything

#435

Post by elAhmo »

nonameiguess wrote: post #265
MrsPeaches wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is me! I’m semi-normie (MechEng with a bit of Matlab now working as a ceo). I spend most of my day in Claude code but outputs are word docs, presentations, excel sheets, research etc. I recently got it to plan a social media campaign and produce a ppt with key messaging and content calendar for the next year, then draft posts in Figma for the first 5 weeks of the campaign and then used a social media aggregator…

How does this obviate the need for software? In order for what you asked to be possible, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Figma all still need to exist and you need licenses for them. If you can figure out the next step and say "Claude, go find me buyers and sell shit for me without using any pre-existing software," have at it. It can't be social media, I guess, since social media is software and Claude is supposed to ge…

It doesn't remove the need for software, but it greatly reduces the number of tools needed or doesn't mandate building custom tools that might not be viable due to very specific needs many users have.

OP gave a good example how their workflow was changed, you could argue there are tools that could've done that, but they managed to achieve their goals without them, have something that fits their workflow perfectly, is fine tuned in case of changes, and with a few other tools (Word, Excel, Figma) they can do all sorts of things which would've required a small team or far more (expensive) tools to execute.

To me that is a great example of non-developers using tools to enhance their workflows and with initiatives like from this topic, I can only see that increasing.

Re: Codex for almost everything

#436

Post by holoduke »

ok_dad wrote: post #188
cultofmetatron wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There seems a fair enthusiasm in the UI of these to hide code from coders. Like the prompt interaction is the true source and the actual code is some sort of annoying intermediate runtime inconvenience to cover up. I've finally started getting into AI with a coding harness but I've take the opposite approach. usually I have the structure of my code in my mind already and talk to the prompt like I'm pairing with it.…

This is the way to do it if you're a serious developer, you use the AI coding agent as a tool, guiding it with your experience. Telling a coding agent "build me an app" is great, but you get garbage. Telling an agent "I've stubbed out the data model and flow in the provided files, fill in the TODOs for me" allows you the control over structure that AI lacks. The code in the functions can usually be tweaked yourself t…

Ai is even good in turbo pascal if you instruct it right

Re: Codex for almost everything

#437

Post by cuzitschat »

paulteehan wrote: post #288
com2kid wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMHO no one is really pioneering. A lot more is possible than what is being done. I wrote a blog post about useful agents in a business setting ( https://www.generativestorytelling.ai/blog/posts/useful-corp... ) that highlights AI being proactive. I mean table stakes stuff, why isn't an agent going through all my slack channels and giving me a morning summary of what I should be paying attention to? Why aren't all th…

THANK YOU. I keep thinking this as well. I'm rolling my own skills to actually make my job easier, which is all about gathering, surfacing, and synthesizing information so I can make quick informed decisions. I feel like nobody is thinking this way and it's bizarre.

I am completely convinced this is because of a gap in the intersection of knowledge. Somehow the people making the best agents are focused on extending the capabilities of the models, meanwhile the people who could best make an application layer because just think of LLM's as a chat prompt.

We need a product person, maybe with a turtle neck sweater and an horrid work-life attitude, to fix this up, instead of a weirdly philosophic basilisk fearing idealist.

Re: Codex for almost everything

#438

Post by procaryote »

baq wrote: post #117
tsimionescu wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your prompt was more complex than "do my taxes", then this is irrelevant.

it was many hours of working with codex, guidance and comparing to known-good outputs from previous years, but a sufficiently smart model would be able to just do it without any steering; it'd still take hours, but my input wouldn't be necessary. a harness for getting this done probably exists today, gastown perhaps or something that the frontier labs are sitting on.

If you can assume "a sufficiently smart piece of technology" that doesn't exist now, a lot of problems become trivial

Re: Codex for almost everything

#439

Post by piokoch »

cjbarber wrote: post #14

My current expectation is that the Cowork/Codex set of "professional agents" for non-technical users will be one of the most important and fastest growing product categories of all time, so far. i.e. agents for knowledge workers who are not software engineers A few thoughts and questions: 1. I expect that this set of products will be extremely disruptive to many software businesses. It's like when a new VP joins a co…

Maybe. The point is that in case of software it is fairly easy to verify if that what LLM produced is correct or not. Compiler checks syntax, we can write tests, there is whole infrastructure for checking if something works as expected. In addition, LLM are just text generating algorithms and software is all about text, so if LLM see 1 000 000 a CRUD example in Python, it can generate it easily, as we have a lot of code examples out there thanks to open source.

That's why LLMs shine in coding tasks. If you move to other parts of engineering, like architecture, construction or stuff like investment (there is no AI boom there, why?) where there is no so much source text available, tasks are not so repeatable like in software, or verification is much more complicated, then LLM-s are no longer that useful.

In software also I believe we will see soon that a competitive advantage have not those who adopted LLM, but those who did not. If you ask LLM what framework/language/approach use for a given task, contrary to what people think, LLM is not "thinking", it just generates text answer on the base of what it was trained on, so you will get again and again same most popular frameworks/langs/approaches suggested, even if there is something better, yet not that popular to get into model weights in a significant way.

Interesting times, anyway.

Re: Codex for almost everything

#440

Post by ttanveer »

mrtksn wrote: post #26

Codex is my favorite UX for anything as it edits the files and I can use the proper tooling to adjust and test stuff, so in my experience it was already able to do everything. However lately the limits seem to have got extremely tight, I keep spending out the daily limits way too quickly. The weekly limits are also often spent out early so I switch to Claude or Gemini or something.

I imagine the generous limit we felt were just from the 2x codex was offerring. I also felt the regression, and only recently remembered they had this.
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