Sherlocking ramps up into IPO Bunch of startups need to pivot today after this announcement including mine
What was your startup?
Codex for almost everything
531–540 of 600 posts
Re: Codex for almost everything
#532Re: Codex for almost everything
#533Lots of scepticism here, but I think this may really take off. After 25 years of heavy CLI use, lately I've found myself using codex (in terminal) for terminal tasks I've previously done using CLI commands. If someone manages to make a robust GUI version of this for normies, people will lap it up. People don't want to juggle applications, we want computers to do what we want/need them to do.
I agree. As a long time linux user, coding assistants as interface to the OS has been a delight to discover. The cryptic totality of commands, parameters, config files, logs has been simplified into natural language: "Claude, I want to test monokai color scheme on my sway environment" and possibly hours of tweaking done in seconds. My setup has never been so customized, because there is no friction now. I love it and…
Longtime Linux+Unix user here too, I'm in the same boat, and it's been stunning what it can do.
A few days ago we were having networking problems, and while I was flipping over to my cell hotspot to see if it was "us or them" having the problem, a coworker asked claude to diagnose it. It determined the issue was "a bad peering connection in IX-Denver between our ISP and Fastly and the ISP needs to withdraw that advertisement." That sounded plausible to me, I happened to know that both Fastly and our ISP peered at IX-Denver. That night I reached out to the ISP and asked them if that's what happened and they confirmed it. In the time it took me to mess around with my hotspot, claude was doing traceroutes, using looking glasses, looking at ASN peering databases...
It is REALLY good at automating things via scripts. Right now I have it building a script to run our Kafka rolling updates process. And it did a better job than I did at updating the Ansible YML files that control it.
I've been getting ready to switch over to NixOS, and Claude is amazing at managing the nix config. It even packaged the "git butler CLI" tool for me; NixOS only had the GUI available.
I'm getting into the habit of every few days asking it: "Here is the syslog from my production fleet, review it for security problems and come up with the top 5 actionable steps I can take to improve." That's what identified the kafka config changes leading to the rolling update above, for example.
Re: Codex for almost everything
#534Earlier quoted context omitted.
How many of these threat vectors are just theoretical? Don’t use skills from random sources (just like don’t execute files from unknown sources). Don’t paste from untrusted sites (don’t click links on untrusted sites). Maybe there are fake documentation sites that the agent will search and have a prompt injected - but I haven’t heard of a single case where that happened. For now, the benefits outweigh the risk so muc…
Systems have been caught out that review pull requests, that’s a simple and clear one. The more obvious to me for most people is anything you do that interacts with your email without an explicit approve list of emails to read.
Yes, but none of this applies to the local codex agent that runs when I tell it to and has access to my computer. Like: „scan this folder of PDFs and create an excel file with all expenses. Then enter them into my tax software.“ This needs access to very sensitive data and involves a quite complex handling of data. But the only attack vector I see is someone injecting prompts into my invoice files.
Re: Codex for almost everything
#535Earlier quoted context omitted.
I want. If I get 10X more productive, I can unilaterally increase my compensation 10X by doing my stuff in 1 unit of time instead of 10 it took, and splitting the remaining 9 units of time into, say, 4 units of time doing more work, securing my position and setting myself up for promotion, and 5 units of time doing whatever the fuck I want . Not all compensation shows up in a bank account - working less, or under les…
You want it, but then you closed by explaining exactly why you shouldn't want it. Plus, the new baseline isn't neutral (as in, everyone is the same again). If humans can now do 10x the work as before, the employer doesn't need the same number of humans to carry out its work. So the new baseline is actually "let's keep 1 employee and fire the other 9", unless the business can find a way to suddenly expand 10x so that…
Yes, but in the long run, the market expects growth and innovation, not just doing the same thing with fewer workers. Especially when every other company can just buy the exact same advantage for the same price.
Re: Codex for almost everything
#536Interesting that its restricted to macOS. I know programmers almost exclusively use macOS, but regular folk primarily use windows for work. I might be a bit biased as an engineer, but even outside of my circle, I mostly see windows being used. If they're serious about extending from coders to non technical business users, I would imagine they need to support windows.
Re: Codex for almost everything
#537Earlier quoted context omitted.
i think you lack creativity. you could create a site that targets a very narrow niche, say an upper income school district. build some credibility, get highly ranked on google due to niche. post lunch menus with hidden embedded text. the attack surface is so wide idk where to start.
Why would my agent retrieve that lunch menu?
Because it’s hooked up to a microphone in your kitchen & your kid is arguing with you about what lunch they want & they say “Hey [agent], what day is pizza day at [school]?”
Re: Codex for almost everything
#538I've been using the Codex app for a while (a few months) for a few types of coding projects, and then slowly using it for random organizational/productivity things with local folders on my Mac. Most of that has been successful and very satisfying, however...
Codex is still far from ready for regular people. Simply moving a folder that Codex has been working on confuses the hell out of it. I can't figure out how to fix "Current working directory missing. This chat's working directory no longer exists". I've tried asking it to fix the problem and it tries lots of terminal commands and screws around with SQLite. Something this brittle is not for non-developers.
Re: Codex for almost everything
#539Earlier quoted context omitted.
Irrefutable eh? As someone who has used em dashes in my writing my entire life, these comments drive me crazy! Where exactly do you think that they learned to do that? E.g. 2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17598113#17598506 Banana battery: zinc nail, copper penny, spark— lunch powers the clock.
> these comments drive me crazy Have you not noticed the em-dash in my comment?
Okay yeah you whooshed me. I’ll take the L. I must’ve been too busy reaching for my pitchfork
Re: Codex for almost everything
#540My 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 keep seeing sentiment like this. I work for a relatively cutting edge healthcare enterprise as a sysadmin, and we've only just been given access to copilot chat. I don't think we're going to be having agents doing work for us any time soon.