Codex for almost everything • Hacker News Board

Re: Codex for almost everything

#551

Post by magicalhippo » Fri, Apr 17, 2026, 5:40 PM UTC

jorl17 wrote: post #545

magicalhippo wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Everyday people can now do much more than they could, because they can build programs. Indeed. Just spoke to a buddy, he's got some electronics knowledge, he's been code-curious but never gotten past very simple bash scripts and Excel sheets (vlookup etc to drive calculations). He got himself a Claude subscription and has now implemented a non-trivial Arduino project, involving multiple CAN-bus modules and an inter…

Exactly the kind of thing I've been seeing too. And often with people who know even less. You spoke of an Arduino, and I have a friend with zero coding knowledge who built a fun project with an ESP32 and a tiny camera to detect when they are "not looking at the computer". But, sure, people keep saying we're delusional when we say that this is where the world is headed: people building things, so often without even kn…

Not a musician so perhaps not accurate but I feel it's a bit like synths and DAWs. You might not be good at playing an instrument, something which requires a certain dexterity, finesse and lots of training. But with some virtual synths and a DAW you can make music that people enjoy.

Re: Codex for almost everything

#552

Post by rommelsLegacy » Fri, Apr 17, 2026, 5:54 PM UTC

yoyohello13 wrote: post #402

rommelsLegacy wrote: post #353

I am quite worried that people are continuing to use OpenAIs offerings just because it works. Everyone here seem to gloss over the fact that this is a project funded by Peter Thiel. Thousands of morslity posts, complaints about ICE, Tump etcand yet you all choose to use a tool created and funded by the same person enabling this dictatorial machine. I am speechless everytime I see posts like this and the comments foll…

If you’re expecting morality from the HN crowd they will disappoint you every time. Most of the people here wish they could be as ruthless and successful as someone like Sam Altman.

Thank you for your comment, it's comforting to show I'm not the only one getting offended/disappointed by the behavior of people within our industry.

Truly I don't expect morality, and I'm not even making the moral argument to not use it tbh, as I consider morality to be a double edged sword.

Yet I wish that at least there's some base sensibility, and some common sense or at least to the very least some self accountability on the actions we take as persons in tech, as they transform and influence the world around us.

Re: Codex for almost everything

#553

Post by adamsmark » Fri, Apr 17, 2026, 5:54 PM UTC

frank_nitti wrote: post #253

someotherperson wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Competition is bad? Who cares - let the big players subsidize and compete between each other. That's what we want. We want strong models at a low price, and we'll hype up whoever is doing it. Simultaneously, we also hype up the open models that are catching up. That are significantly more discounted, that also put pressure on the big players and keep them in check. People aren't falling for PR; people are encouraging…

Interesting to see your observation where I have observed the opposite: posts that share big news about open-weight local models have many upvoted comments arguing local models shouldn’t be taken seriously and promoting the SOTA commercial models as the only viable options for serious developers. Here and on AI tech subreddits (ones that aren’t specifically about local or FOSS) seem to have this dynamic, to the degre…

Local isn't viable yet on an economic basis, API costs are so low that you're better off taking advantage of the bonanza. As local models become more performant, so too will the ability of providers via Openrouter be able to offer them cheaper than your likely payoff period for a $4K Mac Studio 128GB. e.g Gemma 4 31B is impressive, but it costs practically nothing via Openrouter. Given that there are a ton of providers for open models, I doubt there's any subsidy going on because the providers are faceless and interchangeable.

At least, that's my theory.

The big advantages of local on a business level are:

- Freezing your model's exact settings once you've locked in some kind of workflow that works just fine. - Guarding against insane token usage from LLMs who have been told to never stop until they figure out the solution OR setting up an LLM run incorrectly. (The last one happened to me with Gemini 3.1 Pro) - PII or some need for on-premise only LLMs.

Re: Codex for almost everything

#554

Post by Bombthecat » Fri, Apr 17, 2026, 6:17 PM UTC

hvb2 wrote: post #424

ryandrake wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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,…

Yep, all those artists, musicians, designers and coders will finally do something productive!

Re: Codex for almost everything

#555

Post by krackers » Fri, Apr 17, 2026, 6:19 PM UTC

saagarjha wrote: post #514

krackers wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You don't actually need to send CGEvents to UI elements to make them do things ;)

Could you elaborate on what you mean? My understanding of the Cocoa event loop was that ultimately everything is received as an NSEvent at the application layer (maybe that's wrong though).

Do you mean that you can just AXUIElementPerformAction once you have a reference to it and the OS will internally synthesize the right type of event, even if it's not in the foreground?

Re: Codex for almost everything

#556

Post by Bombthecat » Fri, Apr 17, 2026, 6:20 PM UTC

MrsPeaches wrote: post #126

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…

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…

And the value of those marketing campaigns is going to zero, since everyone is doing it. Even self employed people.

Pay for ads or you get lost in the mass of posts

Re: Codex for almost everything

#557

Post by sharts » Fri, Apr 17, 2026, 6:20 PM UTC

Can we get up from our desk and leave our codex session (or claude for that matter) and then continue using it with our iphone while having lunch or commuting on a train?

Without 3rd party tools/plugins.

Re: Codex for almost everything

#558

Post by fifafu » Fri, Apr 17, 2026, 6:43 PM UTC

krackers wrote: post #555

saagarjha wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't actually need to send CGEvents to UI elements to make them do things ;)

Could you elaborate on what you mean? My understanding of the Cocoa event loop was that ultimately everything is received as an NSEvent at the application layer (maybe that's wrong though). Do you mean that you can just AXUIElementPerformAction once you have a reference to it and the OS will internally synthesize the right type of event, even if it's not in the foreground?

yes you can do a lot background UI interaction using the AX APIs. Displaying a second cursor is also simple, just a borderless, transparent window that moves around.

For the few things you cannot achieve with the Accessibility API's there are ways to post events directly to an app - even though CGEventPostToPid is mostly broken when used on its own. These require a combination of CGEventPostToPid and CGEventTapCreateForPid. (I have done a lot of this stuff in my BetterTouchTool app)

Re: Codex for almost everything

#559

Post by Bridgexapi » Fri, Apr 17, 2026, 7:08 PM UTC

hootz wrote: post #508

ang_cire wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what world would I prefer to give someone access to me via a messaging app rather than a fully-async text SMS message? I don't even love that people can see if you've read their texts now. Fully agree about phone calls though.

I believe that in all of South America people exclusively use WhatsApp to communicate via text because SMS is only used for spam and bad 2FA. Companies are even using WhatsApp for 2FA now instead of SMS and the fact that americans use SMS is viewed as a joke.

[dead]

Re: Codex for almost everything

#560

Post by canarias_mate » Fri, Apr 17, 2026, 7:08 PM UTC

dear_prudence wrote: post #448

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.…

I personally have been finding good results "hiding the code" behind the harnesses. I do have to rely on verification and testing a lot, which I also get the AI to do, but for most of the cases it works out well enough. A good verification and testing setup with automated, strict reviewing goes a long way.

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