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Codex for almost everything

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Re: Codex for almost everything

#471

Post by adammarples »

culopatin wrote: post #387
vunderba wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heavily agreed - LLMs are also really good at diagnosing crash logs, and sifting through what would otherwise be inscrutably large core dumps.

Do you think this will continue growing if we stop struggling and posting our findings on forums?

I don't think so, because Anthropic now has your question, the steps it tried, and the solution that finally worked, all in text form, already on their servers thanks to your claude session. Claude usage is itself a goldmine of training data.

Re: Codex for almost everything

#472

Post by shevy-java »

safety1st wrote: post #430
avaer wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Their solution will be to push mandatory and nonconsensual updates to your devices which limit your device and your freedom in the name of security. Like Google is doing to Android in September. You will no longer be able to install "unverified" software on anything. To address prompt injection attacks they're probably working on an approach where your data all has to be in the cloud and subject to security scans. Th…

> I'm so glad I switched to Linux more than a decade ago. At least on the PC there will still be an open source ecosystem for a long time to come, it may have less features but I'm willing to accept that.

Wait until age verification is mandatory everywhere. :)

I can already see that happening, e. g. to access financial transactions or government apps, one needs to verify the id, and that will not work without age verification that can not be tampered with. So Linux will either submit to the same or be excluded.

(That free developers will be able to run Linux fine for much longer will also be true, but I guess they only care about catching the 95%, not the 5% linux users ... and 5% is a high guesstimate).

Edit: To clarify the above, one already had to provide personal data for financial transactions, of course, so a bank knows who is who, but the recent age verification go hand in hand with the attempt to get rid of vpn, and applications now make it a new standard to query the age of users, with the claim to "help protect kids". And some people buy into that rationale too. I don't, but I have seen many non-tech savvy people submit to that justification.

Re: Codex for almost everything

#473

Post by ookblah »

pretty much you have to build for humans as the "source" of truth and then have a robust agentic surface if you want to survive as a company. after using linear (for ex.) u can really see how it all fits together, i can be in cli, co-workers in slack, cowork, whatever and update tasks from anywhere). i refuse to use shit where i have to context switch by going into an app now. posthog is another good example of where it's going. the dirty detail now is that you HAVE to have the actual app so you can still manually look at data and do operations.

Re: Codex for almost everything

#474

Post by [deleted] »

drivebyhooting wrote: post #426
hvb2 wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Those are productivity increases that got our standard of living to where it is. Fewer people doing the same amount of work has, historically speaking, freed people from their current job, allowing them to work on something else. It's that analogy of the horse,…

There was a long and great ravine of suffering between the advent of the Industrial Revolution and our time of bounty.

[deleted]

Re: Codex for almost everything

#476

Post by killerstorm »

daviding wrote: post #10

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 get that productivity can be improved with a lot of this for non developers, just not sure using 'code' as the term is the right one or not.

I think this would work much better if there were constraints in place, a software stack clearly separating different concerns - e.g. you just ask AI to write business logic while you already have data sources, auth, etc, configured.

But that's not how popular, modern software stacks work. They are like "you can do anything, anything at all!".

Consider Visual Basic for Applications - normally your code is together with data in one document, which you can send to colleague. It can be easily shared, there's nothing to set up, etc.

That's not true for JS, Python, Java, etc - you need to install libraries, you need to explicitly provide data, etc. Software industry as a whole embraced complexity because devs are paid to deal with complexity.

Now AI has to use same software stacks as the rest of the industry, making software fragile, requiring continuous maintenance, etc. VBA code which doesn't use any arcane features would require no maintenance and can work for decades.

So my guess is that the bottleneck might be neither models nor harness/wrapper - but overall software flimsiness and poor architectural decisions

Re: Codex for almost everything

#477

Post by soraminazuki »

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…

[dead]

Re: Codex for almost everything

#478

Post by maleldil »

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…

If you use a type checker in strict mode (e.g. pyright with "typeCheckingMode: strict") and a linter with strict rules (e.g. ruff with many rules enabled), the output space is constrained enough that you can get pretty consistent Python code. I'm not saying this is "good Python" overall, but it works pretty well with agents.

Re: Codex for almost everything

#479

Post by vovavili »

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…

>Assuming it actually makes you more productive. I mean, who the hell wants to be 10X more productive without a commensurate 10X compensation increase?

Given sane working arrangements or at minimum presence of remote work, it would be a bit shortsighted not to want to get done with your work in a tenth amount of time. In the very least, you're competing for a promotion against less effective people, all while having more time for yourself. If not, you're building labor market skillset in an efficient way so you can hop to a better employer.

Re: Codex for almost everything

#480

Post by Anvoker »

postalcoder wrote: post #58
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…

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…

What about setting environments for normies that mitigate this problem? I don't know that you can do it on Windows, but Linux offers various tools for isolation where you can give full rights to an LLM and still be safe from certain classes of disaster.

Maybe this kind of isolation neuters the benefit you're thinking of, but I do believe some sort of solution could be reached.

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