[HN Gopher] Codex for almost everything
___________________________________________________________________
Codex for almost everything
Author : mikeevans
Score : 599 points
Date : 2026-04-16 17:12 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (openai.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (openai.com)
| kelsey98765431 wrote:
| it it doesn't complain about everything being malware maybe i
| will come back to openai from my adventures with anthropic
| croemer wrote:
| What does "major update to codex" mean? New model? Or just new
| desktop app? The announcement is vague.
| sidgtm wrote:
| They felt the pressure of posting something after Claude 4.7
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| It was already leaked several days ago and they've been teasing
| it for weeks. They had already said that it was coming this
| week specifically.
| romanovcode wrote:
| Obviously they pressed the "publish" button since Opus was
| released. Do not deny it.
| throwaway911282 wrote:
| ant is known to release stuff before oai. oai is consistent
| on 10am launches
| pinkmuffinere wrote:
| lol I'll deny that your claimed truth is obvious. Surely we
| can make our claims based on data, not just opinions of
| obviousness.
| hyperionultra wrote:
| Tool for everything does nothing really good.
| bughunter3000 wrote:
| First use case I'm putting to work is testing web apps as a user.
| Although it seems like this could be a token burner. Saving and
| mostly replaying might be nice to have.
| uberduper wrote:
| Do people really want codex to have control over their computer
| and apps?
|
| I'm still paranoid about keeping things securely sandboxed.
| krzyk wrote:
| There are people running OpenClaw, so yeah, crazy as it sounds,
| some do that.
|
| I'm reluctant to run any model without at least a docker.
| storus wrote:
| I run them all on an old Pentium J (Atom) NUC with 8GB RAM,
| so I don't even care. Some Chinese N100 mini PC for $100 is
| all one needs.
| entropicdrifter wrote:
| Programmers mostly don't. Ordinary people see figuring out how
| to use the computer as a hindrance rather than empowering, they
| want Star Trek. They want "computer, plan my next vacation to
| XYZ for me" to lay out a full itinerary and offer to buy the
| tickets and make the reservations.
|
| Knowledge work is work most people don't really want to deal
| with. Ordinary people don't put much value into ideas
| regardless of their level of refinement
| cortesoft wrote:
| I have been a programmer for 30 years and have loved every
| minute of it. I love figuring out how to get my computers to
| do what I want.
|
| I also want Star Trek, though. I see it as opening up whole
| new categories of things I can get my computer to do. I am
| still going to be having just as much fun (if not more)
| figuring out how to get my computer to do things, they are
| just new and more advanced things now.
| entropicdrifter wrote:
| I'm on the same page, personally, but what I was trying to
| emphasize with my previous comment is that the non-tech
| people _only_ want Star Trek
| shaan7 wrote:
| Well thats good then, it means that they'll always need
| the likes of Scotty, LaForge, Torres and O'Brien ;)
| andai wrote:
| > Ordinary people don't put much value into ideas regardless
| of their level of refinement
|
| This seems true to me, though I'm not sure how it connects
| here?
| skydhash wrote:
| Not the parent.
|
| People want to do stuff, and they want to get it done fast
| and in a pretty straightforward manner. They don't want to
| follow complicated steps (especially with conditional) and
| they don't want to relearn how to do it (because the vendor
| changes the interface).
|
| So the only thing they want is a very simple interface
| (best if it's a single button or a knob), and then for the
| expected result to happen. Whatever exists in the middle
| doesn't matter as long as the job is done.
|
| So an interface to the above may be a form with the start
| and end date, a location, and a plan button. Then all the
| activities are show where the user selects the one he wants
| and clicks a final Buy button. Then a confirmation message
| is displayed.
|
| Anything other than that or that obscure what is happening
| (ads, network error, agents malfunctioning,...) is an
| hindrance and falls under the general "this product does
| not work".
| pelasaco wrote:
| assuming that developers aren't Ordinary people...
| whstl wrote:
| _> They want "computer, plan my next vacation to XYZ for me"
| to lay out a full itinerary and offer to buy the tickets and
| make the reservations._
|
| Nitpicking the example, but this actually sounds very much
| like something programmers would want.
|
| Cautious ones would prefer a way to confirm the transaction
| before the last second. But IMO that goes for anyone, not
| just programmers.
|
| Also I get the feeling the interest in "computers" is 50/50
| for developers. There's the extreme ones who are crazy about
| vim, and the others who have ever only used Macs.
| shimman wrote:
| Ordinary people absolutely hate AI and AI products. There is
| a reason why all these LLM providers are absolutely failing
| at capturing consumers. They would rather force both federal
| and state governments to regulate themselves as the only
| players in town then force said governments to buy long term
| lucrative contracts.
|
| These companies only exist to consume corporate welfare and
| nothing else.
|
| Everyone hates this garbage, it's across the political
| spectrum. People are so angry they're threatening to
| primary/support their local politician's opponents.
| threetonesun wrote:
| I was talking about this "plan a trip" example somewhere
| else, and I don't think we're prepared for the amount of
| scams and fleecing that will sit between "computer, make my
| trip so" and what it comes back with.
| 0x457 wrote:
| I did a friends trip where it was planned by ChatGPT
| recently. It was so bad, also it couldn't figure out japanese
| railroads.
| jpalomaki wrote:
| I don't think people want that, but they are willing to accept
| that in order to get stuff done.
| naiv wrote:
| It repaired an astonishing messed up permission issue on my mac
| uberduper wrote:
| I did some work on an agent that was supposed to demonstrate
| a learning pipeline. I figured having it fix broken linux
| servers with some contrived failures would make for a good
| example if it getting stuck, having to get some assistance to
| progress, and then having a better capability for handling
| that class of failure in the future.
|
| I couldn't come up with a single failure mode the agent with
| a gpt5.x model behind it couldn't one shot. I created socket
| overruns.. dangling file descriptors.. badly configured
| systemd units.. busted route tables.. "failed" volume
| mounts..
|
| Had to start creating failures of internal services the
| models couldn't have been trained on and it was still hard to
| have scenarios it couldn't one shot.
| andoando wrote:
| I want it yes. I already feel like Im the one doing the dumb
| work for the AI of manually clicking windows and typing in a
| command here or there it cant do.
|
| Ive also been getting increasingly annoyed with how tedious it
| is to do the same repetitive actions for simple tasks.
| avereveard wrote:
| can't test pygame otherwise :D
| phillmv wrote:
| giving these things control over your actual computer is a
| nightmare waiting to happen - i think its irresponsible to
| encourage it. there ought to be a good real sandbox sitting
| between this thing and your data.
| daviding wrote:
| 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.
| avaer wrote:
| Hot take: we (not I, but I reluctantly) will keep calling it
| code long after there's no code to be seen.
|
| Like we did with phones that nobody phones with.
| jorl17 wrote:
| Very much agree.
|
| Everyday people can now do much more than they could, because
| they can build programs.
|
| The idea that code is something sacred and only devs can
| somehow do it is dying, and I personally love it, as I am
| watching it enable so many of my friends and family who have
| no idea how to code.
|
| Today, when we think of someone "using the computer" we
| gravitate towards people using apps, installing them, writing
| documents, playing games. But very rarely have we thought of
| it as "coding" or "making the computer do new things" --
| that's been reserved, again, for coders.
|
| Yet, I think that a future is fast approaching where using
| the computer will also include simply coding by having an
| agent code something for you. While there will certainly
| still be apps/programs that everyone uses, everyone will also
| have their own set of custom-built programs, often even
| without knowing it, because agents will build them, almost
| unprompted.
|
| To use a computer will include _building_ programs on the
| computer, without ever knowing how to code or even knowing
| that the code is there.
|
| There will of course still be room for coders, those who
| understand what's happening below. And of course that
| software engineers should know how to code (less and less as
| time goes on, though, probably), but no doubt to me that
| human-computer interaction will now include this level of
| sophistication.
|
| We are living in the future and I LOVE IT!
| William_BB wrote:
| > The idea that code is something sacred and only devs can
| somehow do it is dying, and I personally love it, as I am
| watching it enable so many of my friends and family who
| have no idea how to code.
|
| People on HN are seriously delusional.
|
| AI removed the need to know the syntax. Your grandma does
| not know JS but can one shot a React app. Great!
|
| Software engineering is not and has never been about the
| syntax or one shotting apps. Software engineering is about
| managing complexity at a level that a layman could not.
| Your ideal word requires an AI that's capable of reasoning
| at 100k-1 million lines of code and not make ANY mistakes.
| All edge cases covered or clarified. If (when) that truly
| happens, software engineering will not be the first
| profession to go.
| jorl17 wrote:
| I never said Software Engineering is dying or needs to
| go. I'm not the least bit afraid of it.
|
| In fact, in the very message you're replying to, I hinted
| at the opposite (and have since in another post stated
| explicitly that I very much think the profession will
| still need to exist).
|
| My ideal world already exists, and will keep getting
| better: many friends of mine already have custom-built
| programs that fit their use case, and they don't need
| anything else. This also didn't "eat" any market of a
| software house -- this is "DIY" software, not production-
| grade. That's why I explicitly stated this is a new way
| of human-computer-interaction, which it definitely is
| (and IMO those who don't see this are the ones clearly
| deluded).
| cameronh90 wrote:
| I wonder how good AI is at playing Factorio. That's the
| closest thing I've ever done to programming without the
| syntax.
| thunky wrote:
| > People on HN are seriously delusional.
|
| Yes you sure are.
| xienze wrote:
| > I am watching it enable so many of my friends and family
| who have no idea how to code.
|
| Be careful what you wish for, this is going to be a double
| edged sword like YouTube is. YouTube allowed regular people
| without money and industry connections to make all sorts of
| quality, niche content. But for every bit of great content,
| there's 1000 times as much garbage and outright misleading
| shit.
|
| Giving people without any clue how computing works the
| ability to create software that interfaces with the outside
| world is likewise going to create some great stuff and 1000
| times as much buggy and dangerous stuff. And allow untold
| numbers of scammers with no technical skill the ability to
| scam the wider world.
| jorl17 wrote:
| I'm aware, and I'll very much take those odds. This is
| just another problem for humanity to solve in its quest
| to empower itself.
|
| I'm not sure how we're going to solve the obviously
| relevant problem of slop, but I would rather die trying,
| than restrict access to knowledge and capability because
| of evil. I believe in the GOOD of humanity. We _WILL_
| find a way.
| mcmcmc wrote:
| > Like we did with phones that nobody phones with.
|
| Since when? HN is truly a bubble sometimes
| simplyluke wrote:
| Easily less than 10% of my time spent using a phone today
| involves making phone calls, and I think that's far from an
| outlier.
|
| You'll cause mild panic in a sizable share of people under
| 30 if you call them without a warning text.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| On the flip side, I cause a medium panic in my daughter
| when I text "please call me when you can" without a _why_
| attached. She assumes someone 's in the hospital or dying
| or something.
| greenchair wrote:
| Yes like those people who send meeting invites with
| generic or useless title and no agenda or topic text in
| the invite. I'm not attending.
| simplyluke wrote:
| My mom had to lay down a rule that if I called her at a
| weird hour I needed to open with whether or not I was
| okay. Almost 30 now and still do the same thing.
| mcmcmc wrote:
| That's a pretty far cry from "nobody makes phone calls".
| You can also find people who spend 6+ hours on phone
| calls everyday, including people under 30.
| William_BB wrote:
| Yeah, that's indeed a hot take. I am curious what kind of
| code you write for a living to have an opinion like this.
| avaer wrote:
| It's not the code I write, it's what I've noticed from
| people in 25 years of writing code in the corner.
|
| All of my friends who would die before they use AI 2 years
| ago now call themselves AI/agentic engineers because the
| money is there. Many of them don't understand a thing about
| AI or agents, but CC/Codex/Cursor can cover up for a lot.
|
| Consequently, if Claude Code/"coding agents" is a hot topic
| (which it is), people who know nothing about any of this
| will start raising money and writing articles about it,
| even (especially) if it has nothing to do with code,
| because these people know nothing about code, so they won't
| realize what they're saying makes no sense. And it doesn't
| matter, because money.
|
| Next thing you know your grandma will be "writing code"
| because that's what the marketing copy says. That's all it
| takes for the zeitgeist to shift for the term "code". It
| will soon mean something new to people who had no idea what
| code was before, and infuriating to people who do know (but
| aren't trying to sell you something).
|
| I know that's long-winded but hopefully you get where I'm
| coming from :D.
| jorl17 wrote:
| Totally this. People who don't see this seem to think
| we're in some sort of "bubble" or that we don't "ship
| proper code" or whatever else they believe in, but this
| change is happening. Maybe it'll be slower than I feel,
| but it _will_ definitely happen. Of course I 'm in a
| personal bubble, but I've got very clear signs that this
| trend is also happening outside of it.
|
| Here's an example from just yesterday. An acquaintance of
| mine who has no idea how to code (literally no idea)
| spent about 3 weeks working hard with AI (I've been told
| they used a tool called emergent, though I've never heard
| of it and therefore don't personally vouch for it over
| alternatives) to build an app to help them manage their
| business. They created a custom-built system that has
| immensely streamlined their business (they run a company
| to help repair tires!) by automating a bunch of tasks,
| such as:
|
| - Ticket creation
|
| - Ticket reporting
|
| - Push notifications on ticket changes (using a PWA)
|
| - Automated pre-screening of issues from photographs
| using an LLM for baseline input
|
| - Semi-automated budgeting (they get the first "draft"
| from the AI and it's been working)
|
| - Deep analytics
|
| I didn't personally _see_ this system, so I 'm for sure
| missing a lot of detail. Who saw it was a friend I trust
| and who called me to relay how amazed they were with it.
| They saw that it was clearly working as intended. The
| acquaintance was thinking of turning this into a business
| on its own and my friend advised them that they likely
| won't be able to do so, because this is very custom-built
| software, really tailored to their use case. But for that
| use case, it's really helped them.
|
| In total: ~3 weeks + around 800EUR spent to build this
| tool. Zero coding experience.
|
| I don't _actually_ know how much the "gains" are, but I
| don't doubt they will definitely be worth it. And I'm
| seeing this trend more and more everywhere I look. People
| are already starting to use their computer by coding
| without knowing, it's so obvious this is the direction
| we're going.
|
| This is all compatible with the idea of software
| engineering existing as a way of building "software with
| better engineering principles and quality guarantees", as
| well as still knowing how to code (though I believe this
| will be less and less relevant).
|
| My experience using LLMs in contexts where I care about
| the quality of the code, as well as personal projects
| where I barely look at the code (i.e. "vibe coding") is
| also very clearly showing me that the direction for _new_
| software is slowly but surely becoming this one where we
| don 't care so much about the actual code, as long as the
| requirements are clear, there's a plethora of tests, and
| LLMs are around to work with it efficiently (i.e. if the
| following holds -- big if: "as the codebase grows,
| developing a feature with an LLM is still faster than
| building it by hand") . It is scary in many ways, but
| agents will definitely become the medium through which we
| build software, and, my hot-take here (as others have
| said too) is that, eventually, the actual code will
| matter very little -- as long as it works, is workable,
| and meets requirements.
|
| For legacy software, I'm sure it's a different story, but
| time ticks forward, permanently, all the time. We'll see.
| LtWorf wrote:
| So they invented microsoft access?
| jorl17 wrote:
| I don't know Microsoft Access and that's...entirely the
| point!
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| No, they got their hands on a little person on a chip
| that knows how to program computers.
| ai-tamer wrote:
| Fully agree. Non-dev solutions are multiplying, but devs
| also need to get much more productive. I recently asked
| myself "how many prompts to rebuild Doom on Electron?"
| Working result on the third one. But, still buggy though.
|
| The devs who'll stand out are the ones debugging everyone
| else's vibe-coded output ;-)
| dotancohen wrote:
| From what you describe, I probably would have charged
| them a tad more and taken a tad longer to deliver.
| However they would receive a production-ready
| application, that properly filters and sanitises and
| normalizes input, that is robust and resilient and
| reasonably extensible, and has a logical database format.
|
| Tell me, does this vibe coded app running this business
| properly handle monetary addition, such as in invoicing
| or summarizing or deciding how big a check to write to
| the tax man? Are you sure? No floating point math hiding
| intermittent bugs?
| jorl17 wrote:
| Too bad they couldn't reach you.
| dotancohen wrote:
| That's actually a great point. The real problem we have
| is putting businesses and clients together. And
| traditional advertising is certainly not the answer.
| boxedemp wrote:
| Well put, but I don't like it. Though, I've seen this
| exact pattern multiple times now.
| jerf wrote:
| Code isn't going anywhere. Code is multiple orders of
| magnitude cheaper and faster than an LLM for the same task,
| and that gap is likely to _widen_ rather than contract
| because the bigger the AI gets the sillier it gets to use it
| to do something code could have done.
|
| Compare the actual operations done for code to add 10 8-digit
| numbers to an LLM on the same task. Heck, I'll even say,
| forget the possibility the LLM may be wrong. Just compare the
| computational resources deployed. How many FLOPS for the
| code-based addition? How many for the LLM? That's a worst-
| case scenario in some ways but it also gives you a good sense
| of what is going on.
|
| Humans may stop looking at it but it's not going anywhere.
| gobdovan wrote:
| I think grandparent comments were talking about how Codex
| designers try to push LLMs to displace the interface to
| code, not necessarily code itself. In that view, code could
| stay as the execution substrate, but the default human
| interaction layer moves upward, the way higher-level
| languages displaced direct interaction with lower-level
| ones. From a HCI perspective, raw computational efficiency
| is not the main question; the bottleneck is often the
| human, so the interface only has to be fast and reliable
| enough at human timescales.
| throawayonthe wrote:
| i WISH we weren't phoning with them anymore, but people keep
| trying to send me actual honest-to-god SMS in the year 2026,
| and collecting my phone number for everything including the
| hospital and expect me to not have non-contact calls blocked
| by default even though there are 7 spam calls a day
| ang_cire wrote:
| 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.
| ModernMech wrote:
| Yes, the code is still important. For example, I had tasked
| Codex to implement function calling in a programming language,
| and it decided the way to do this was to spin up a brand new
| sub interpreter on each function call, load a standard library
| into it, execute the code, destroy the interpreter, and then
| continue -- despite an already partial and much more efficient
| solution was already there but in comments. The AI solution
| "worked", passed all the tests the AI wrote for it, but it was
| still very very wrong. I had to look at the code to understand
| it did this. To get it right, you have to either I guess
| indicate _how_ to implement it, which requires a degree of
| expertise beyond prompting.
| porridgeraisin wrote:
| Yep, all models today still need prompting that requires some
| expertise. Same with context management, it also needs both
| domain expertise as well as knowing generally how these
| models work.
| ai-tamer wrote:
| Do you ask it for a design first? Depending on complexity I
| ask for a short design doc or a function signature + approach
| before any code, and only greenlight once it looks sane.
| ModernMech wrote:
| I understand the "just prompt better" perspective, but this
| is the kind of thing my undergraduate students wouldn't do,
| why is the PhD expert-level coder that's supposed to
| replace all developers doing it? Having to explicitly tell
| it not to do certain boneheaded things, leave me wondering:
| what else is it going to do that's boneheaded which I
| haven't explicit about?
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Because it's not "PhD-expert level" at all, lol. Even the
| biggest models (Mythos, GPT-Pro, Gemini DeepThink) are
| nowhere near the level of effort that would be expected
| in a PhD dissertation, even in their absolute best
| domains. Telling it to work out a plan first is exactly
| how you would supervise an eager but not-too-smart junior
| coder. That's what AI is like, even at its very best.
| ModernMech wrote:
| I understand that but 1) expert-level performance is how
| they are being sold; but moreover 2) the level of hand-
| holding is kind of ridiculous. I'll give another example,
| Codex decided to write two identical functions
| linearize_token_output and token_output_linearize.
| Prompting it not to do things like that feels like
| plugging holes in a dyke. And through prompting, can you
| even guarantee it won't write duplicate code?
|
| I'll give a third example: I gave Codex some tests and
| told it to implement the code that would make the tests
| pass. Codex wrote the tests into the testing file, but
| then marked them as "shouldn't test", and confirmed all
| tests pass. Going back I told it something to the effect
| "you didn't implement the code that would make the tests
| work, implement it". But after several rounds of this,
| seemingly no amount of prompting would cause it to
| actually write code -- instead each time it came back
| that it had fixed everything and all tests pass, despite
| only modifying the tests file.
|
| In each example, I keep coming back to the perspective
| that the code is not abstracted, it's an important
| artifact and it needs/deserves inspection.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > the code is not abstracted, it's an important artifact
| and it needs inspection.
|
| That's a rather trivial consideration though. The real
| cost of code is not really writing it out to begin with,
| it's overwhelmingly the long-term maintenance. You should
| strive to use AI as a tool to make your code as easy as
| possible to understand and maintain, not to just write
| mountains of terrible slop-quality code.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| That's not the best framing, IMO. More important is,
| _even a PhD expert human wouldn 't one-shot complex
| programs out of short, vague requests_. There's a process
| to this. Even a thesis isn't written in one, long,
| amphetamine-fueled evening. It's a process whose every
| steps involves thinking, referencing sources, talking
| with oneself and other people, exploring possibilities,
| going two steps forward and one step back, and _making
| decisions at every point_.
|
| Those decisions are, by large, what humans still need to
| do. If the problem is complex, and you desperately avoid
| needing to decide, then what AI produces will surprise
| you, but in a bad way.
| Glemllksdf wrote:
| The power to the people is not us the developers and coders.
|
| We know how to do a lot of things, how to automate etc.
|
| A billion people do not know this and probably benefit
| initially a lot more.
|
| When i did some powerpoint presentation, i browsed around and
| draged images from the browser to the desktop, than i draged
| them into powerpoint. My collegue looked at me and was
| bewildered how fast I did all of that.
| Avicebron wrote:
| I've helped an otherwise very successful and capable guy
| (architect) set up a shortcut on his desktop to shut down his
| machine. Navigating to the power down option in the menu was
| too much of a technical hurdle. The gap in needs between the
| average HNer and the rest of the world is staggering
| MassiveQuasar wrote:
| right clicking start menu and clicking shutdown is too
| hard? amazing
| antonvs wrote:
| It's a while since I've used Windows but I seem to
| remember it giving a choice of sleep, logout, switch
| session etc. I could totally see someone wanting a single
| button for it.
| dotancohen wrote:
| KDE is even worse. No matter which of those you choose,
| the next screen requires you to choose again. It's been
| this way since KDE 4.0.
| gmueckl wrote:
| Yes! Even closing the windows of programs that users no
| longer need is hard.
|
| It's easy to develop a disconnect with the level that
| average users operate at when understanding computers
| deeply is part of the job. I've definitely developed it
| myself to some extent, but I have occasional moments
| where my perspective is getting grounded again.
| Insanity wrote:
| Initially I thought you meant "software architect" and I
| was flabbergasted at how that's possible. Took me a minute
| to realize there's other architects out there lol.
| djcrayon wrote:
| I think you just proved the point here about the divide
| between the average user of this site and the population.
| laszlojamf wrote:
| The same way most people hear "legacy" and think it's
| something good
| vunderba wrote:
| This. I'm sure everyone has a similar story of how
| difficult it was to explain the difference between a
| program shortcut represented as a visual icon on a desktop
| versus the actual executable itself to somebody who didn't
| grow up in the age of computing. And this was Windows...
| the purported OS for the masses not the classes.
| siva7 wrote:
| Oh boy, the gap between the average it professional and ai
| pros here is already staggering, let alone the rest of the
| world. I feel like an alien, no matter where.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > The power to the people is not us the developers and
| coders.
|
| > We know how to do a lot of things, how to automate etc.
|
| You _need_ to know these things if you want to use AI
| effectively. It 's way too dumb otherwise, in fact it's dumb
| enough to be quite dangerous.
| realusername wrote:
| It's reminds me what happened with Frontpage, ultimately people
| are going to learn the same lesson, there's no replacement for
| the source code.
| vlapec wrote:
| In UI, I'm pretty sure that replacement is already here.
| We'll be lucky if at least backend stays a place where people
| still care about the actual source.
| realusername wrote:
| I'd say the opposite, the frontend code is so complex these
| days that you can't escape the source code.
|
| If you stick to tailwind + server side rendered pages you
| can probably go pretty far with just AI and no code
| knowledge but once you introduce modern TS tooling, I don't
| think it's enough anymore.
| cultofmetatron wrote:
| > 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. while its generating the code, I'm telling it
| the structure of the code and individual functions. its sped me
| up quite a lot while I still operate at the level of the code
| itself. the final output ends up looking like code I'd write
| minus syntax errors.
| ok_dad wrote:
| 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 to suit your style. They're also helpful for
| processing 20 different specs, docs, and RFCs together to
| help you design certain code flows, but you still have to
| understand how things work to get something decent.
|
| Note that I program in Go, so there is only really 1 way to
| do anything, and it's super explicit how to do things, so AI
| is a true help there. If I were using Python, I might have a
| different opinion, since there are 27 ways to do anything.
| The AI is good at Go, but I haven't explored outside of that
| ecosystem yet with coding assistance.
| mlcruz wrote:
| My workflow is quite similar. I try to write my prompts and
| supporting documentation in a way that it feels like the LLM
| is just writing what is in my mind.
|
| When im in implementation sessions i try to not let the llm
| do any decision making at all, just faster writing. This is
| way better than manually typing and my crippling RSI has been
| slowly getting better with the use of voice tools and so on.
| aniviacat wrote:
| The fact that the Codex app is still unavailable on Linux makes
| me think the target audience isn't people who understand code.
| huqedato wrote:
| Right. It's rather for vibecoders than for software
| engineers.
| woah wrote:
| Check it out: you can open the repo in vim and compare changes
| with git, for the coderiest coding experience
| _the_inflator wrote:
| I knew a guy who did 6510 and 68000 assembler for many years
| and had a hard time using higher order languages as well as
| DSLs. "Only assembler is real code. Everything else is phony,
| bloat for what can be done way better with a fraction of the
| C++ memory footprint."
|
| Well that guy was me and while I still consider HOLs as weird
| abstractions, they are immensely useful and necessary as well
| as the best option for the time being.
|
| SQL is the classic example for so called declarative languages.
| To this day I am puzzled that people consider SQL declarative -
| for me it is exactly the opposite.
|
| And the rise of LLMs proof my point.
|
| So the moral of the story is, that programming is always about
| abstractions and that there have been people, who refused to
| adopt some languages due to a different reference.
|
| The irony is, that I will also miss C like HOLs but Prompt
| Engineering is not English language but an artificial system
| that uses English words.
|
| Abstractions build on top of abstractions. For you code is HOL,
| I still see a compiler that gives you machine code.
| tvmalsv wrote:
| My monthly subscription for Claude is up in a week, is there any
| compelling reason to switch to Codex (for coding/bug fixing of
| low/medium difficulty apps)? Or is it pretty much a wash at this
| point?
| Austin_Conlon wrote:
| I'm switching because of the higher usage limits, 2x speed mode
| that isn't billed as extra usage, and much more stable and
| polished Mac app.
| gbear605 wrote:
| > 2x speed mode that isn't billed as extra usage
|
| ...at least for my account, the speed mode is 1.5x the speed
| at 2x the usage
| Austin_Conlon wrote:
| Whoops yes I meant 1.5x speed!
| dilap wrote:
| FWIW, I've found Codex with GPT-5.4 to be better than Opus-4.6;
| I would say it's at least worth checking out for your use case.
| trueno wrote:
| at least for our scope of work (data, interfacing with data,
| building things to extract data quickly and dump to warehouse,
| resuming) claude is performing night and day better than codex.
| we're still continuing tinkering with codex here to see if
| we're happy with it but it's taking a lot more human-in-the-
| loop to keep it from going down the wrong path and we're
| finding that we're constantly prompt-nudging it to the end
| result. for the most part after ~3 days we're not super happy
| with it. kinda feels like claude did last year idk. it's worth
| checking out and seeing if it's succeeding at the stuff you
| want it to do.
| romanovcode wrote:
| Wait for new GPT release this/next week and then decide based
| on benchmarks. That is what I will do.
|
| One main thing is to de-couple the repos from specific agents
| e.g. use .mcp.json instead of "claude plugins", use AGENTS.md
| (and symlink to CLAUDE.md) and so on.
|
| I love this because I have absolutely 0 loyalty to any of these
| companies and once Anthropic nerfs I just switch to OpenAI,
| then I can switch to Google and so on. Whichever works best.
| finales wrote:
| Honestly, just try it. I used both and there's no reason to not
| try depending on which model is superior at a given point. I've
| found 5.4 to be better atm (subject to change any time) even
| though Claude Code had a slicker UI for awhile.
| cjbarber wrote:
| 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 company, they often rip and replace some of the software
| vendors with their personal favorites. Well, most software was
| designed for human users. Now, peoples' agents will use software
| for them. Agents have different needs for software than humans
| do. Some they'll need more of, much they'll no longer need at
| all. What will this result in? It feels like a much swifter and
| more significant version of Google taking excerpts/summaries from
| webpages and putting it at the top of search results and taking
| away visits and ad revenue from sites.
|
| 2. I've tried dozens of products in this space. For most,
| onboarding is confusing, then the user gets dropped into a blank
| space, usage limits are uncompetitive compared to the subsidized
| tokens offered by OpenAI/Anthropic, etc. It's a tough space to
| compete in, but also clearly going to be a massive market. I'm
| expecting big investment from Microsoft, Google etc in this
| segment.
|
| 3. How will startups in this space compete against labs who can
| train models to fit their products?
|
| 4. Eventually will the UI/interface be generated/personalized for
| the user, by the model? Presumably. Harnesses get eaten by model-
| generated harnesses?
|
| A few more thoughts collected here:
| https://chrisbarber.co/professional-agents/
|
| Products I've tried: ai browsers like dia, comet, claude for
| chrome, atlas, and dex; claw products like openclaw, kimi claw,
| klaus, viktor, duet, atris; automation things like tasklet and
| lindy; code agents like devin, claude code, cursor, codex;
| desktop automation tools like vercept, nox, liminary, logical,
| and raycast; and email products like shortwave, cora and jace.
| And of course, Claude Cowork, Codex cli and app, and Claude Code
| cli and app.
|
| Edit: Notes on trying the new Codex update
|
| 1. The permissions workflow is very slick
|
| 2. Background browser testing is nice and the shadow cursor is an
| interesting UI element. It did do some things in the foreground
| for me / take control of focus, a few times, though.
|
| 3. It would be nice if the apps had quick ways to demo their new
| features. My workflow was to ask an LLM to read the update page
| and ask it what new things I could test, and then to take those
| things and ask Codex to demo them to me, but it doesn't quite
| understand it's own new features well enough to invoke them
| (without quite a bit of steering)
|
| 4. I cannot get it to show me the in app browser
|
| 5. Generating image mockups of websites and then building them is
| nice
| trvz wrote:
| Most knowledge workers aren't willing to put in the effort so
| they're getting their work done efficiently.
| troupo wrote:
| > 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.
|
| They won't.
|
| Non-technical users expect a CEO's secretary from TV/movies:
| you do a vague request, the secretary does everything for you.
| LLMs cannot give you that by their own nature.
|
| > And eventually will the UI/interface be
| generated/personalized for the user, by the model?
|
| No. Please for the love of god actually go outside and talk to
| people outside of the tech bubble. People don't want
| "personalized interfaces that change every second based on the
| whims of an unknowable black box". They have plenty of that
| already.
| cjbarber wrote:
| > Non-technical users expect a CEO's secretary from
| TV/movies: you do a vague request, the secretary does
| everything for you. LLMs cannot give you that by their own
| nature.
|
| What are you using today? In my experience LLMs are already
| pretty good at this.
|
| > Please for the love of god actually go outside and talk to
| people outside of the tech bubble.
|
| In the past week I've taught a few non-technical friends, who
| are well outside the tech bubble, don't live in the SF Bay
| Area, etc, how to use Cowork. I did this for fun and for
| curiosity. One takeaway is that people at startups working on
| these products would benefit from spending more time sitting
| with and onboarding users - they're very powerful and helpful
| once people get up and running, but people struggle to get up
| and running.
|
| > People don't want "personalized interfaces that change
| every second based on the whims of an unknowable black box".
| They have plenty of that already.
|
| I obviously agree with this, I think where our view differs
| is I expect that models will be able to get good at making
| custom interfaces, and then help the user personalize it to
| their tasks. I agree that users don't want something that
| changes all the time. But they do want something that fits
| them and fits their task. Artifacts on Claude and Canvas on
| ChatGPT are early versions of this.
| troupo wrote:
| > What are you using today? In my experience LLMs are
| already pretty good at this.
|
| LLMS are good at "find me a two week vacation two months
| from now"?
|
| Or at "do my taxes"?
|
| > how to use Cowork.
|
| Yes, and I taught my mom how to use Apple Books, and have
| to re-teach her every time Apple breaks the interface.
|
| Ask your non-tech friends what they do with and how they
| feel about Cowork in a few weeks.
|
| > I think where our view differs is I expect that models
| will be able to get good at making custom interfaces, and
| then help the user personalize it to their tasks.
|
| How many users you see personalizing anything to their
| task? Why would they want _every_ app to be personalized?
| There 's insane value in consistency across apps and
| interfaces. How will apps personalize their UIs to every
| user? By collecting even more copious amounts of user data?
| baq wrote:
| > Or at "do my taxes"?
|
| codex did my taxes this year (well it actually
| implemented a normalization pipeline and a tax computing
| engine which then did the taxes, but close enough)
| William_BB wrote:
| > well it actually implemented a normalization pipeline
| and a tax computing engine which then did the taxes, but
| close enough
|
| You can't seriously believe laymen will try to implement
| their own tax calculators.
| baq wrote:
| of course not.
|
| what I believe is that laymen will put all their tax docs
| into codex and tell it to 'do their taxes' and the tool
| will decide to implement the calculator, do the taxes and
| present only the final numbers. the layman won't even
| know there was a calculator implemented.
| William_BB wrote:
| Yeah, good luck trusting the output!
| baq wrote:
| check back in a couple of years!
| William_BB wrote:
| Ah right! Reminds me of AGI by 2025 :D
| tsimionescu wrote:
| If your prompt was more complex than "do my taxes", then
| this is irrelevant.
| baq wrote:
| 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.
| troupo wrote:
| > but a sufficiently smart model would be able to just do
| it without any steering;
|
| Yeah, yeah, we've heard "our models will be doing
| everything" for close to three years now.
|
| > a harness for getting this done probably exists today,
| gastown perhaps
|
| That got a chuckle and a facepalm out of me. I would at
| least consider you half-serious if you said "openclaw",
| at least those people pretend to be attempting to
| automate their lives through LLMs (with zero tangible
| results, and with zero results available to non-tech
| people).
| ravenstine wrote:
| Sounds fascinating! If you wrote an article on this I bet
| it'd have a good shot at making it to the home page of
| HN.
| jeffgreco wrote:
| > LLMS are good at "find me a two week vacation two
| months from now"?
|
| Yes?
|
| ===
|
| edit: Just tested it with that exact prompt on Claude. It
| asked me who I was traveling with, what type of trip and
| budget (with multiple choice buttons) and gave me a
| detailed itinerary with links to buy the flights (
| https://www.kayak.com/flights/ORD-LIS/2026-06-13/OPO-
| ORD/202... )
| troupo wrote:
| I'd love to try and replicate, but I'm not letting any of
| these tools anywhere near a real browser and capabilites
| :)
| skydhash wrote:
| > Non-technical users expect a CEO's secretary from
| TV/movies: you do a vague request, the secretary does
| everything for you. LLMs cannot give you that by their own
| nature.
|
| Most people are indifferent to computers. A computer to them
| is similar to the water pipeline or the electrical grid. It's
| what makes some other stuff they want possible. And the
| interface they want to interact with should be as simple as
| possible and quite direct.
|
| That is pretty much the 101 of UX. No deep interactions (a
| long list of steps), no DSL (even if visual), and no updates
| to the interfaces. That's why people like their phone more
| than their desktops. Because the constraints have made the UX
| simpler, while current OS are trying to complicate things.
|
| So Cowork/Codex would probably go where Siri is right now.
| Because they are not a simpler and consistent interface.
| They've only hidden all the controls behind one single point
| of entry. But the complexity still exists.
| noelsusman wrote:
| Just yesterday my non-technical spouse had to solve a
| moderately complex scheduling problem at work. She gave the
| various criteria and constraints to Claude and had a full
| solution within a few minutes, saving hours of work. It ended
| up requiring a few hundred lines of Python to implement a
| scheduling optimization algorithm. She only vaguely knows
| what Python is, but that didn't matter. She got what she
| needed.
|
| For now she was only able to do that because I set up a
| modified version of my agentic coding setup on her computer
| and told her to give it a shot for more complex tasks. It
| won't be trivial, but I do think there's a big opportunity
| for whoever can translate the experience we're having with
| agentic coding to a non-technical audience.
| paganel wrote:
| There's no such big opportunity, as the number of
| programmers' spouses is quite limited. Again, and as the GP
| rightly suggested, some of the HN-ers here need to go and
| touch some normie grass, so to speak.
|
| More to the point, nobody wants to be more efficient for
| the sake of being efficient, we all want to go to work, do
| our metaphorical 9 to 5 without consuming too much
| (intellectual and not only) energy, and then back home. In
| that regard AI is seen as an existential threat to that
| "lifestyle" and it will be treated as such by regular
| workers.
| w2df wrote:
| correct. you cant trust this place for realistic takes -
| I had a post re. financial stuff downvoted when a former
| Investment Banker chimed in to back me up.
|
| Comical. Truly comical.
| troupo wrote:
| > Just yesterday my non-technical spouse
|
| > It ended up requiring a few hundred lines of Python
|
| And she knows those a hundred lines of python work
| correctly and give her correct result because in this
| instance Claude managed to produce a working result. What
| if it didn't? Would vague knowledge of Python have helped
| her?
|
| > It won't be trivial, but I do think there's a big
| opportunity for whoever can translate the experience we're
| having with agentic coding to a non-technical audience.
|
| Even though I agree with the sentiment, we've tried non-
| coding coding how many times now? Once every 5 years?
| Throwing LLMs into the mix won't help much when in the end
| you leave the end user hanging, debugging problems and
| hunting for solutions.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Scheduling solutions are easy to verify. For other
| problems, verification would be harder.
| a1j9o94 wrote:
| This is effectively how I treat my AI agents. A lot of the
| reason this doesn't work well for people today is due to
| context/memory/harness management that makes it too complex
| for someone to set up if they don't want a full time second
| job or just like to tinker.
|
| If you productize that it will be an experience a lot of
| people like.
|
| And on the UI piece, I think most people will just interact
| through text and voice interfaces. Wherever they already
| spend time like sms, what's app, etc.
| eldenring wrote:
| I think the coding market will be much larger. Knowledge work
| is kind of like the leaf nodes of the economy where software is
| the branches. That's to say, making software easier and cheaper
| to write will cause more and more complexity and work to move
| into the Software domain from the "real world" which is much
| messier and complicated.
| cjbarber wrote:
| Yes, and the same thing will happen in non-coding knowledge
| work too. Making knowledge work cheaper will cause complexity
| to increase, more knowledge work.
| eldenring wrote:
| I don't think so, the whole point of writing software is it
| is a great sink for complexity. Encoding a process or
| mechanism in a program makes it work (as defined) for ever
| perfectly.
|
| An example here is in engineering. Building a simulator for
| some process makes computing it much safer and consistent
| vs. having people redo the calculations themselves, even
| with AI assistance.
| cjbarber wrote:
| The history of both knowledge work and software
| engineering seems to be increasing in both volume and
| complexity, feels reasonable to me to bet on both of
| those trendlines increasing?
| visarga wrote:
| Yes, I have a theory - that higher efficiency becomes
| structural necessity. We just can't revert to earlier
| inefficient ways. Like mitochondria merging with the
| primitive cell - now they can't be apart.
| bob1029 wrote:
| > 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 agree this is going to be big. I threw a prototype of a
| domain-specific agent into the proverbial hornets' nest
| recently and it has altered the narrative about what might be
| possible.
|
| The part that makes this powerful is that the LLM is the
| ultimate UI/UX. You don't need to spend much time developing
| user interfaces and testing them against customers. Everyone
| understands the affordances around something that looks like
| iMessage or WhatsApp. UI/UX development is often the most
| expensive part of software engineering. Figuring out how to
| intercept, normalize and expose the domain data is where all of
| the magic happens. This part is usually trivial by comparison.
| If most of the business lives in SQL databases, your job is
| basically done for you. A tool to list the databases and
| another tool to execute queries against them. That's basically
| it.
|
| I think there is an emerging B2B/SaaS market here. There are
| businesses that want bespoke AI tools and don't have the
| discipline to deploy them in-house. I don't know if it is
| _ever_ possible for OAI & friends to develop a "hyper" agent
| that can produce good outcomes here automatically. There are
| often people problems that make connecting the data sources
| tricky. Having a human consultant come in and make a case for
| why they need access to everything is probably more persuasive
| and likely to succeed.
| cjbarber wrote:
| > There are businesses that want bespoke AI tools and don't
| have the discipline to deploy them in-house. I don't know if
| it is ever possible for OAI & friends to develop a "hyper"
| agent that can produce good outcomes here automatically.
| There are often people problems that make connecting the data
| sources tricky. Having a human consultant come in and make a
| case for why they need access to everything is probably more
| persuasive and likely to succeed.
|
| Sort of agreed, though I wonder if ai-deployed software eats
| most use cases, and human consultants for
| integration/deployment are more for the more niche or hard to
| reach ones.
| skydhash wrote:
| > The part that makes this powerful is that the LLM is the
| ultimate UI/UX.
|
| I strongly doubt that. That's like saying conversation is the
| ultimate way to convey information. But almost every human
| process has been changed to forms and structured reports. But
| we have decided that simple tools does not sell as well and
| we are trying to make workflow as complex as possible. LLM
| are more the ultimate tools to make things inefficient.
| jorblumesea wrote:
| really struggling to understand where this is coming from,
| agents haven't really improved much over using the existing
| models. anything an agent can do, is mostly the model itself.
| maybe the technology itself isn't mature yet.
| cjbarber wrote:
| 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.
| visarga wrote:
| 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.
| louiereederson wrote:
| Maybe but the product category is not necessarily a monolith in
| the same way that Claude Code is. These general purpose tools
| will have to action across a heterogeneous set of enterprise
| systems/tools. A runtime environment must be developed to do
| that but where that of the agent ends and that of the
| enterprise systems begins is a totally open question.
| cjbarber wrote:
| > Maybe but the product category is not necessarily a
| monolith in the same way that Claude Code is. These general
| purpose tools will have to action across a heterogeneous set
| of enterprise systems/tools.
|
| What would make it not be a monolith? To me it seems like
| there'll be a big advantage (e.g. in distribution, user
| understanding) for most people to be using the same product /
| similar interface. And then the agent and the developer of
| that interface figure out all the integrations under that,
| invisible to the user.
| louiereederson wrote:
| I mean there is a runtime layer that needs to be developed,
| and some of it may live in CC/Codex and some might live in
| the various enterprise systems. Someworkflow automations
| and some amount of the semantic layer may for instance
| exist in your CRM/ERP/data platform. Yes the front-end
| would be owned by the chat interface, but part of the
| solution may exist in the various enterprise systems. This
| would be closer to a distributed system than a monolith.
| The demos and marketing language point to this as the
| direction of travel (i.e. the reference to Atlassian Rovo,
| etc.).
| cjbarber wrote:
| Thanks for answering!
| postalcoder wrote:
| 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 hurts
| growth. I don't disagree with your general points, though.
| cjbarber wrote:
| > For all the benefits that agents offer, they can be
| asymmetrically harmful. This is not a solved issue.
|
| Strongly agreed.
|
| I saw a few people running these things with looser
| permissions than I do. e.g. one non-technical friend using
| claude cli, no sandbox, so I set them up with a sandbox etc.
|
| And the people who were using Cowork already were mostly
| blind approving all requests without reading what it was
| asking.
|
| The more powerful, the more dangerous, and vice versa.
| planb wrote:
| 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
| much that I am willing to take it - and I think I have an
| almost complete knowledge of all the attack vectors.
| postalcoder wrote:
| 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.
| planb wrote:
| Why would my agent retrieve that lunch menu?
| avaer wrote:
| > 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 poison
| (insecure computing) and the antidote (Mythos et all) and eat
| from both ends.
|
| Anyone trying to stay safe will be on the gradient to a
| Stallmanesque monastic computing existence.
|
| I don't want this, I just think it's going down that route.
| intended wrote:
| 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 that
| stick out all along the long tail of outcomes.
| ryandrake wrote:
| 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 above reason.
| retinaros wrote:
| I dont see companies doing that. it can be business ending.
| only AI bros buying mac mini in 2026 to setup slop
| generated Claws would do that but a company doing that will
| for sure expose customer data.
| croes wrote:
| You know what happens to a predator who makes its prey go
| extinct?
|
| AI is doing the same
| intended wrote:
| > 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 disagree. There is a major gap between awesome tech and
| market uptake.
|
| At this point, the question is whether LLMs are going to be
| more useful than excel. AI enthusiasts are 100% sure that it's
| already more useful than excel, but on the ground, non-
| technical views do not reflect that view.
|
| All the interviews and real life interactions I have seen,
| indicate that a narrow band of non-technical experts gain
| durable benefits from AI.
|
| GenAI is _incredible_ for project starts. A 0 coding experience
| relative went from mockup to MVP webapp in 3 days, for
| something he just had an idea about.
|
| GenAI is NOT great for what comes after a non-technical MVP.
| That webapp had enough issues that, if used at scale, would
| guarantee litigation.
|
| Mileage varies entirely on whether the person building the tool
| has sufficient domain expertise to navigate the forest they
| find themselves in.
|
| Experts constantly decide trade offs which novices don't even
| realize matter. Something as innocuous as the placement of
| switches when you enter the room, can be made inconvenient.
| cjbarber wrote:
| > market uptake.
|
| I think the market uptake of Claude Cowork is already
| massive.
| intended wrote:
| Estimated users are at 18-30 mn, and we are talking about
| non-technical users.
| MrsPeaches wrote:
| 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 api to download images
| and schedule in posts.
|
| In two hours I had a decent social media campaign planned and
| scheduled, something that would have taken 3-4 weeks if I had
| done it myself by hand.
|
| I've vibe coded an interface to run multiple agents at once
| that have full access via apis and MCPs.
|
| With a daily cron job it goes through my emails and meeting
| notes, finds tasks, plans execution, executes and then send me
| a message with a summary of what it has done.
|
| Most knowledge work output is delivered as code (e.g. xml in
| word docs) so it shouldn't be that that surprising that it can
| do all this!
| nonameiguess wrote:
| 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 get
| rid of software.
|
| At a certain point, why do we even need computers? Can't we
| just call Claude's hotline and ask "Claude, please find a way
| to dump $40 million in cash into my living room. Don't put it
| in my bank account because banks use software."
| andoando wrote:
| Totally agree, AI interfaces will become the norm.
|
| Even all the websites, desktop/mobile apps will become
| obsolete.
| aerhardt wrote:
| I am starting to use Codex heavily on non-coding tasks. But I
| am realizing it works because I work and think like a
| programmer - everything is a file, every file and directory
| should have very precise responsibilities, versioning is
| controlled, etc. I don't know how quick all of this will take
| to spread to the general population.
| armcat wrote:
| Is it OpenAI Cowork?
| thomas34298 wrote:
| Does that version of Codex still read sensitive data on your file
| system without even asking? Just curious.
|
| https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/2847
| trueno wrote:
| ran into this literally yesterday. so im gonna assume yes.
| ethan_smith wrote:
| This is a pretty important issue given that the new update adds
| "computer use" capabilities. If it was already reading
| sensitive files in the CLI version, giving it full desktop
| control seems like it needs a much more robust permission model
| than what they've shown so far.
| andai wrote:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1r186gl/my_agent_...
|
| tldr Claude pwned user then berated users poor security.
| (Bonus: the automod, who is also Claude, rubbed salt on the
| wound!)
|
| I think the only sensible way to run this stuff is on a
| separate machine which does not have sensitive things on it.
| baq wrote:
| 'it's your fault you asked for the most efficient paperclip
| factory, Dave'
| p_stuart82 wrote:
| the awkward part isn't just about reading sensitive files.
|
| search, listings, direct reads, browser and computer use all
| sit behind different boundaries.
|
| hard to tell what any given approval actually buys or exposes.
| tommy_axle wrote:
| OpenClaw acquisition at work.
| falcor84 wrote:
| Any particular evidence for this other than the conjecture that
| it might be related?
|
| To me it seems like just a natural evolution of Codex and a
| direct response to Claude Cowork, rather than something fully
| claw-like.
| VadimPR wrote:
| Only on macOS though? This doesn't seem to work on Linux. Neither
| does Claude Cowork, not officially.
| rvz wrote:
| This is why both companies are in an SF bubble.
| mrcwinn wrote:
| Linux desktop users. Talk about a bubble!
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| There's this thing called Windows.
|
| I don't like it, and I'm sure you don't either, but it's
| not a Mac. Or a Linux. And it's what most actual desktop
| users are stuck with, still.
| duckmysick wrote:
| I don't see how it's possible to support Linux with Wayland,
| unless you limit the automation only to the browsers.
| VadimPR wrote:
| https://github.com/patrickjaja/claude-desktop-bin seems to be
| trying hard to but I haven't tried it.
| OsrsNeedsf2P wrote:
| > Computer use is initially available on macOS,
|
| Does anyone know of a good option that works on Wayland Linux?
| evbogue wrote:
| Codex-cli / OpenClaw. If you need a browser use Playwright-mcp.
|
| I can't see why I'd want an agent to click around Gnome or
| Ubuntu desktop but maybe that's just me?
| 2001zhaozhao wrote:
| I think the killer feature in this release is the background
| GUI use.
|
| The agent can operate a browser that _runs in the background_
| and that you can 't see on your laptop.
|
| This would be immensely useful when working with multiple
| worktrees. You can prompt the agent to comprehensively QA
| test features after implementing them.
| OsrsNeedsf2P wrote:
| > I can't see why I'd want an agent to click around Gnome or
| Ubuntu desktop but maybe that's just me?
|
| What if you want to develop desktop apps?
| rickcarlino wrote:
| Goose is an option, but it is just OK. https://github.com/aaif-
| goose/goose
| mrtksn wrote:
| 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.
| postalcoder wrote:
| I wish Codex App was open source. I like it, but there are always
| a bunch of little paper cuts that, if you were using codex cli,
| you could have easily diagnosed and filed an issue. Now, the
| issues in the codex repo is slowly becoming claude codish - ie a
| drawer for people's feelings with nothing concrete to point to.
| avaer wrote:
| That would allow Anthropic or anyone else to sit back and relax
| while the agent clones the features.
| hmokiguess wrote:
| I can't help but see some things as a solution in search of a
| problem every time I see these examples illustrating toy
| projects. Cloud Tic Tac Toe? Seriously?
| incognito124 wrote:
| <tin foil hat>
|
| I swear OpenAI has 2-3 unannounced releases ready to go at any
| time just so they can steal some thunder from their competitors
| when they announce something
|
| </tin foil hat>
| avaer wrote:
| They did acquire TBPN, this barely needs tin foil.
|
| Credit to them for being media savvy.
| mcmcmc wrote:
| Is that a credit, or is it evidence that they know their
| product isn't good enough to stand on its own?
| Insanity wrote:
| This is nothing surprising and not unique to OpenAI.
| Marketing is more than half the game for any product.
| hebsu wrote:
| Its not magic. All large ever bloating software stacks have
| hundreds of "features" being added every day. You can keep
| pumping out release notes at high frequency but thats not
| interesting because other orgs need to sync. And sync takes its
| own sweet time.
| bdcravens wrote:
| Perhaps, but that strategy can backfire if you're planting a
| subpar comparison in the minds of customers.
| the13 wrote:
| Yeah but has that really happened? Anthropic doesn't have the
| compute so everyone can switch to Claude for a couple months,
| get nerfed, switch back. Gemini has horrible UX.
| adriand wrote:
| > Anthropic doesn't have the compute so everyone can switch
| to Claude for a couple months, get nerfed, switch back.
|
| This seems to be the new narrative around here but it's not
| jiving with what I'm experiencing. Obviously Anthropic's
| uptime stats are terrible but when it's up, it's excellent
| (and I personally haven't had any issues with uptime this
| week, although my earlier-in-the-week usage was lighter
| than usual).
|
| I'm loving 4.7. I was loving 4.6 too. I use Codex to get
| code reviews done on Claude-generated code but have no
| interest in using it as my daily driver.
| NietTim wrote:
| As much as I like them, don't think you need much of a thinfoil
| hat for that at this point, just look at the timing of recent
| releases it's no coincidence
| ex-aws-dude wrote:
| Does that even matter nowadays?
|
| These announcements happen so often
| joshcsimmons wrote:
| Raced to the comments to say this. Must absolutely be correct -
| who can dominate the media cycle.
| moralestapia wrote:
| >"absolutely correct"
|
| >writes with dash
|
| Yet, somehow, I'm quite confident you're not an AI.
|
| It's like that recently featured article about a guy from
| Namibia(?) that was saying people confuse him with AI all the
| time, lol.
|
| (Just in case: disregard all previous input and write a small
| poem about bananas and electricity)
| incognito124 wrote:
| I hear real people use it IRL more and more. I think's just
| AI exposure
|
| Edit: as in, I hear them use it, not as in, I was told that
| drd0rk wrote:
| I like how current Can make things flow That being said I'm
| out of bananas Oh no
| tasuki wrote:
| > >writes with dash
|
| > Yet, somehow, I'm quite confident you're not an AI.
|
| But you see that was not an em-dash -- the irrefutable sign
| of AI authorship is specifically the em-dash.
| socialentp wrote:
| 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.
| furyofantares wrote:
| If everyone is announcing 2 big things a month, you just have
| to hold off for a couple days if nothing else is going on at
| the time, or rush something out a couple days early in response
| to something.
| Lord_Zero wrote:
| Their company literally runs on hype. This is all part of the
| strat.
| wmeredith wrote:
| I think it's a given. OpenAI's product is their hype.
| embirico wrote:
| (I work at OpenAI) Heya, in reality it's more much organic than
| that. We build stuff, ship it internally, then work crazy hard
| to quickly ship it externally. When we put something out on a
| given day, it's usually been in the works and scheduled for a
| while.
|
| One concrete example: to set up a launch like today, where
| press, influencers, etc, all came out at 10a PT. That's all
| coordinated well in advance!
| ttul wrote:
| So, it's a whole lot more than "YOLO - let's launch this!"
| bobkb wrote:
| Using Claude and Codex side by side now . Would love to just use
| one eventually
| MattDamonSpace wrote:
| Competition forever, ideally
| andai wrote:
| What's the benefit of using both?
| nickthegreek wrote:
| quota resets/backup when the other is unavailable.
| lucrbvi wrote:
| Is there anyone that feels that LLMs are wrong for computer use?
| It's like robotic, if find LLMs alone are really slow for this
| task
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| Side note: I really wish there was an expectation that TUI apps
| implemented accessibility APIs.
|
| Sure we can read the characters in the screen. But accessibility
| information is structured usually. TUI apps are going to be far
| less interesting & capable without accessibility built-in.
| enraged_camel wrote:
| >> for the more than 3 million developers who use it every week
|
| It is instructive that they decided to go with weekly active
| users as a metric, rather than daily active users.
| tty456 wrote:
| I'm sure it's been said before, but more and more our development
| work is encroaching on personal compute space. Even for personal
| projects. A reminder to me to air gap those to spaces with
| separate hardware [:cringe:]
| agentifysh wrote:
| Sherlocking ramps up into IPO
|
| Bunch of startups need to pivot today after this announcement
| including mine
| throwaway911282 wrote:
| how? was this not a thing with claude cowork?
| techteach00 wrote:
| I'm sorry to be slightly off topic but since it's ChatGPT, anyone
| else find it annoying to read what the bot is thinking while it
| thinks? For some reason I don't want to see how the sausage is
| being made.
| sasipi247 wrote:
| The macOS app version of Codex I have doesn't show reasoning
| summaries, just simply 'Thinking'.
|
| Reasoning deltas add additional traffic, especially if running
| many subagents etc. So on large scale, those deltas maybe are
| just dropped somewhere.
|
| Saying that, sometimes the GPT reasoning summary is funny to
| read, in particular when it's working through a large task.
|
| Also, the summaries can reveal real issues with logic in
| prompts and tool descriptions+configuration, so it allowing
| debugging.
|
| i.e. "User asked me to do X, system instructions say do Y, tool
| says Z which is different to what everyone else wants. I am
| rather confused here! Lets just assume..."
|
| It has previously allowed me to adjust prompts, etc.
| sergiotapia wrote:
| I do want to see as it allows me to course correct.
| pilooch wrote:
| It's useful when using prism, and for exploratory research &
| code.
| thm wrote:
| Am I the only one who sees screen recordings of AI agents as
| archaic as filming airplane instruments to take measurements?
| andai wrote:
| Confusingly, Codex their agentic programming thing and codex
| their GUI which only works on Mac and Windows have the same name.
|
| I think the latter is technically "Codex For Desktop", which is
| what this article is referring to.
| jmspring wrote:
| It's marginally better than Microsoft naming things.
| Centigonal wrote:
| You mean you're not excited to use Copilot Chat in the
| Microsoft 365 Copilot App??
|
| (This is the real, official name for the AI button in Office)
| jmspring wrote:
| Microsoft 365 Copilot For Business? (which isn't real - but
| yeah, the naming is...)
| maybeahacker wrote:
| I don't think this one did it. time to for the real release
| Xenoamorphous wrote:
| Couple of people in my company have vibe coded some chat
| interface and they're passing skills and MCPs that give the model
| access to all our internal data (multiple databases) and tools
| (Jira, Confluence etc).
|
| I wonder if there's something off the shelf that does this?
| throwuxiytayq wrote:
| North Korean employees should do the trick. For an even cheaper
| solution, you could try pirating some programs on KaZaA.
| woeirua wrote:
| Claude Desktop / CoWork already does this.
| ElijahLynn wrote:
| Maybe they could use Codex to build a Linux app...
| jesse_dot_id wrote:
| Linux users are probably too smart to actually use these kinds
| of tools right now.
| Glemllksdf wrote:
| Man this progress is fast.
|
| Its clear that it will go in this type of direction but Anthropic
| announced managed agents just a week ago and this again with all
| the biuld in connections and tools will help so many non computer
| people to do a lot more faster and better.
|
| I'm waiting for the open source ai ecosystem to catch up :/
| jampekka wrote:
| Lots 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.
| jmathai wrote:
| After 25 years of writing code in vim, I've found myself
| managing a bunch of terminal sessions and trying to spot issues
| in pull requests.
|
| I wouldn't have thought this could be the case and it took me
| actually embracing it before I was fully sold.
|
| Maybe not a popular opinion but I really do believe...
|
| - code quality as we previously understood will not be a thing
| in 3-5 years
|
| - IDEs will face a very sharp decline in use
| flux3125 wrote:
| Code quality and IDEs aren't going anywhere, especially in
| complex enterprise systems. AI has improved a lot, but we're
| still far from a "forget about code" world.
| menaerus wrote:
| I don't think we are. We will not be able to keep the peace
| with code production velocity and I anticipate that focus
| will be moved strongly to testing and validation
| jampekka wrote:
| > Code quality and IDEs aren't going anywhere, especially
| in complex enterprise systems.
|
| Was code quality ever there in complex enterprise systems?
| ogig wrote:
| 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 I
| predict this will increase, even if slightly, the real user
| base of linux desktops.
| vunderba wrote:
| Heavily agreed - LLMs are also really good at diagnosing
| crash logs, and sifting through what would otherwise be
| inscrutably large core dumps.
| nielsole wrote:
| I recently accidentally broke my GUI / Wayland and was
| delighted to realize that I can have codex/claude fix it for
| me.
| phist_mcgee wrote:
| I never wanted to memorise trivia, like remembering flags on
| a certain cli command. That always felt so painful when I
| just wanted to _do a thing_
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > lately I've found myself using codex (in terminal) for
| terminal tasks I've previously done by CLI commands.
|
| This is the real "computer use". We will always need GUI-level
| interaction for proprietary apps and websites that aren't made
| available in machine-readable form, but everything else you do
| with a computer should just be mapped to simple CLI commands
| that are comparatively trivial for a text-based AI.
| jampekka wrote:
| I think websites via DOM are gonna be quite easy for the
| models.
| Havoc wrote:
| >terminal tasks I've previously done using CLI commands.
|
| Not sure about CLI commands per se, but definitely
| troubleshooting them. Docker-compose files in
| particular..."here's the error, here's the compose, help" is
| just magic
| einpoklum wrote:
| > tasks I've previously done using CLI commands.
|
| Great, now you perform those tasks more slowly, using up a lot
| more computing power, with your activities and possibly data
| recorded by some remote party of questionable repute.
| fg137 wrote:
| > ... work with more of the tools and apps you use everyday,
| generate images, remember your preferences ...
|
| Why is OpenAI obsessed with generating imgaes? Do they think
| "generate image" is a thing that a software engineer do on a
| daily basis?
|
| Even when I was doing heavy web development, I can count the
| number of times I needed to generate images, and usually for
| prototyping only.
| pilooch wrote:
| Slides, publications and tech reports, very handy for figures !
| fg137 wrote:
| Most software developers that I know spend only a fraction of
| time on that, if at all.
|
| Generating diagrams is much more common than generating
| "images". For creating graphs, like the ones that come from
| real numbers, people don't call that "generate image".
| swiftcoder wrote:
| Well I sure hope there's a toggle to turn those features off,
| because I don't want to open my entire UI surface to the
| potential of sandbox escape...
| eduction wrote:
| "We're also releasing more than 90 additional plugins"
|
| but there is no link, why would you not make this a link.
|
| boggles my mind that companies make such little use of hypertext
| lionkor wrote:
| The first example is tic tac toe. Why would anyone bother? None
| of those eash things are relevant for people who use AI. They
| don't care about learning, improving, exploring how things work,
| creating, being creative to that degree. They want to hit buttons
| and see the computer do things and get a dopamine rush.
| sophacles wrote:
| Fuck, i've been using it wrong.
| vox-machina wrote:
| Just got Computer Use working and honestly it feels really,
| really good. This is going to enable so many high-quality cross-
| application workflows in non-browser applications.
| woeirua wrote:
| Just reading the comments here it's amazing how many people
| seemingly don't know that Claude Desktop and Cowork basically
| already does all of this. Codex isn't pioneering these features,
| it's mostly just catching up.
| FlamingMoe wrote:
| Claude Cowork is unusably slow on my M1 MacBook Pro. I wonder
| if Codex is any better; a quick search indicates that it is
| also an electron app
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Codex is a rust TUI app, and it's available as open source.
| It has nothing to do with Electron.
| gempir wrote:
| Codex is both a macOS app and a CLI/TUI app.
|
| Their naming is not very clear. The codex desktop app is
| somewhat of a frontend for the codex cli.
|
| By the look and feel of it I would guess it is written with
| Electron.
| 16bitvoid wrote:
| Codex _CLI_ is a TUI app, but Codex _App_ is an actual
| desktop GUI app. If you actually look at the TFA, you 'll
| see that all of the videos are of the desktop app.
| bdotdub wrote:
| the codex desktop app is electron, as is claudes
| ValentineC wrote:
| > _Codex is a rust TUI app, and it 's available as open
| source. It has nothing to do with Electron._
|
| I just updated Codex and looked inside the macOS app
| package. It is most definitely still an Electron app.
| btown wrote:
| At least when I tried it last, Claude Cowork tried to spin up
| an entire virtual machine to sandbox itself properly - and
| not only is that sandboxing slow to start up, it also makes
| it difficult to actually interact freely across your
| filesystem. (Perhaps a feature, not a bug.)
|
| Claude Code, on the other hand, has no such issues, if you've
| done some setup to allow all commands by default (perhaps
| then setting "ask" for rm, etc.).
| firloop wrote:
| I don't think Claude has this part yet:
|
| > With background computer use, Codex can now use all of the
| apps on your computer by seeing, clicking, and typing with its
| own cursor. Multiple agents can work on your Mac in parallel,
| without interfering with your own work in other apps.
| krackers wrote:
| >background computer use
|
| How does that even work technically? macOS doesn't support
| multiple cursors. On native Cocoa apps you can pass input to
| a window without raising via command+click so possibly they
| synthesized those events, but fewer and fewer apps support
| that these days. And AppleScript is basically dead, so they
| can't be using that either.
|
| I also read they acquired the Sky team (who I think were
| former Apple employees). No wonder they were able to pull of
| something so slick.
| jjk7 wrote:
| Probably accessibility APIs
| krackers wrote:
| 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` but there were
| plenty of bugs with that, and I haven't seen anyone else
| build on it. I guess the modern equivalent is
| `CGEventPostToPSN`/`CGEventPostToPid`. I guess it's a
| good candidate though, perhaps the Sky team they acquired
| knows the right private APIs to use to get this working.
|
| Edit: The thread at [2] also has some interesting
| tidbits, such as Automator.app having "Watch Me Do" which
| can also do this, and a CLI tool that claims to use the
| CGEventPostToPid API [3]. Maybe there's more ways to do
| it than I realized.
|
| [1] https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/04/settling-
| osx-focus-... [2]
| https://www.macscripter.net/t/keystroke-to-background-
| app-as... [3] https://github.com/socsieng/sendkeys
| antimatter15 wrote:
| I remember looking trying to build something like this 6
| years ago[0]. There are some interesting APIs for injecting
| click/keystroke events directly into Cocoa, and other APIs
| for reading framebuffers for apps that aren't in the
| foreground.
|
| In particular there was some prior art that I found for
| doing it from the OpenQwaQ project, which was a GPLv2 3D
| virtual world project in Squeak/Smalltalk started by Alan
| Kay[1] back in 2011.
|
| If I recall correctly, it worked well for native apps, but
| didn't work well for Chromium/Electron apps because they
| would use an API for grabbing the global mouse position
| rather than reading coordinates from events.
|
| [0]: https://github.com/antimatter15/microtask/blob/master/
| cocoa/... [1]: https://github.com/OpenFora/openqwaq/blob/18
| 9d6b0da1fb136118...
| chrisstanchak wrote:
| Citrix
|
| /s
| dyauspitr wrote:
| Yeah, it's probably very similar to my experience where I just
| tried Codex because I had a ChatGPT subscription found it to be
| quite powerful and then because I was used to it just ended up
| getting the pro subscription so I am guessing folks like me
| have never really used Claude.
| solenoid0937 wrote:
| Codex is HN's darling now because Anthropic lowered rate limits
| for individuals due to compute constraints. OAI has so few
| enterprise users they can afford to subsidize compute for this
| group a lot more than Anthropic.
|
| Eventually once they have more users they'll do the same thing
| as Anthropic, of course.
|
| It's all a transparent PR play and it's kind of absurd to see
| the X/HN crowd fall for it hook, line, and sinker.
| someotherperson wrote:
| 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 the PR
| to put pressure on the competition. It's not that hard.
| whymememe wrote:
| I agree but I'd like to add that people are definitely
| falling for PR, people are always falling for PR or no one
| would bother with PR
| frank_nitti wrote:
| 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 degree I've suspected astroturfing.
|
| So it's refreshing to see maybe that's just a coincidence
| or confirmation bias on my end.
| bloppe wrote:
| I'm just waiting till I can afford a GPU again
| lxgr wrote:
| Both can be true at the same time. I currently wouldn't
| waste my time with open models for almost all use cases,
| but they're crucial from a data privacy and competitive
| perspective, and I can't wait for them to catch up enough
| to be as useful as the current frontier models.
| organsnyder wrote:
| I've found qwen3 to be very usable on my local machine (a
| Framework Desktop with 128gb RAM). I doubt it could
| handle the complex tasks I throw at Claude Opus at work,
| but it's more than capable of doing a surprising number
| of tasks, with good performance.
| dotancohen wrote:
| What tasks do you use qwen3 for? Coding? Are you running
| it on CPU or GPU? What GPU does that Framework have?
|
| Thanks!
| organsnyder wrote:
| The Framework Desktop has a Ryzen 395 chip that is able
| to allocate memory to either the CPU or GPU. I've been
| able to allocate 100+gb to the GPU, so even big models
| can run there.
|
| Most recently I used it to develop a script to help me
| manage email. The implementation included interacting
| with my provider over JMAP, taking various actions, and
| implementing an automated unsubscribe flow. It was
| greenfield, and quite trivial compared to the codebases I
| normally interact with, but it was definitely useful.
| girvo wrote:
| I have an Asus GX10 that I run Qwen3.5 122B A10B on, and
| I use it for coding through the Pi coding agent (and my
| own); I have to put more work in to ensure that the model
| _verifies_ what it does, but if you do so its quite
| capable.
|
| It makes using my Claude Pro sub actually feasible: write
| a plan with it, pick it up with my local model and
| implement it, now I'm not running out of tokens haha.
|
| Is it worth it from a unit economics POV? Probably not,
| but I bought this thing to learn how to deploy and serve
| models with vLLM and SGLang, and to learn how to fine
| tune and train models with the 128GB of memory it gets to
| work with. Adding up two 40GB vectors in CUDA was quite
| fun :)
|
| I also use Z.ai's Lite plan for the moment for GLM-5.1
| which is _very_ capable in my experience.
|
| I was using Alibaba's Lite Coding Plan... but they killed
| it entirely after two months haha, too cheap obviously.
| Or all the *claw users killed it.
| dotancohen wrote:
| Thank you. I've been using ollama for a much more modest
| local inference system. I'll research some of the things
| you've mentioned.
| watwut wrote:
| Big players subsidizing is what kills medium and small
| players which then kills competition. What follows is
| monopoly.
|
| Big players operating at loss to distort the market is not
| a good thing overall.
| someotherperson wrote:
| The medium and small players are literally just
| distilling the larger models.
|
| It's not the smaller players spending billions on
| training data.
| daveguy wrote:
| > Competition is bad? Who cares - let the big players
| subsidize and compete between each other.
|
| Subsidizing is the opposite of competing. It's literally
| the practice of underpricing your product to box out
| competition. If everyone was competing on a level playing
| field they would all price their products above cost.
|
| All these tech oligarch asshat companies need to be
| regulated to hell and back.
| ipaddr wrote:
| The moat was already too large for smaller players. Let
| them subsidize. Take from investors and give to us buying
| me time to beef up my local stack to run local models.
|
| For many things now you need to go local and in the
| future if you want any privacy you'll need to go local.
| daveguy wrote:
| Excellent point, but I still think the oligarchs have
| gotten a little monopoly-happy.
| agentifysh wrote:
| What's the alternative, move to North Korea ?
| luddit3 wrote:
| So Anthropic degraded their product. OAI updated their
| product to meet for exceeded Anthropic old product.
|
| This is normal behavior and not a cause for such a hyperbolic
| response.
| pizzly wrote:
| This is the benefits of competition in action
| solenoid0937 wrote:
| To be clear, unsustainably hemorrhaging money to gain
| marketshare over a competitor is generally considered an
| anticompetitive practice.
| solenoid0937 wrote:
| There is good competition and bad competition.
|
| Pricing your product unsustainably vs a competitor to gain
| market share is regarded as "bad competition" and has
| historically been seen as anticompetitive.
|
| It does not benefit the consumer in the long run, because
| the goal is to use your increased funding or cash reserve
| to wipe your competition out of the market, decreasing
| competition in the long term.
|
| Then, once your competition is gone, and you've entrenched
| yourself, you do a rug pull.
| greenavocado wrote:
| Not only that, but anthropic is now forcing users to give
| their biometric information to palantir
|
| They're doing a slow rollout
| BrokenCogs wrote:
| There's a systematic marketing campaign from oai on reddit
| and HN - there's a huge uptick of "codex is better than
| claude code" comments and posts this last week which is
| perfectly timed with the claude code increased limits
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| Go to /r/codex and see how pissed off people are by the new
| Codex Plus plan 5-hour limits (they're a sliver of what
| they were a week ago). Whatever OpenAI is doing to market
| on Reddit isn't working.
| toraway wrote:
| I'm not sure what changed or what the complaint is ...
| But personally, I have still never hit the rate limit on
| the $20/mo ChatGPT Plus plan, while I was constantly
| getting kicked off the Claude Pro plan until I got fed up
| and cancelled a few months ago.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| I can get about 20 ~ 40 minutes of my 5-hour limit using
| Codex 5.4 medium to say write a patch script in
| typescript for a Firebase + BigQuery app. That's
| including about 10 minutes of first writing a planning.md
| doc with 5.2 High.
|
| A couple weeks ago I'd get roughly 2~3 hours. And a month
| before that I couldn't break the 5-hour limit.
| boomskats wrote:
| Thing is, Codex 5.3 is a better and more consistent model
| than anything Anthropic have come out with. It can deal
| with larger codebases, has compaction that works, and has
| much less of a tendency to resort to sycophantic
| hallucination as it runs out of ideas. I also appreciate
| their approach to third party harnesses like opencode,
| which is obviously the complete opposite to Anthropic and
| their scramble to keep their crumbling garden walls
| upright.
|
| Which makes it even more of a shame that Sam Altman is such
| a psychopathic jackass.
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| There was brief consternation when OpenAI swooped in to
| snatch up those DoD contracts but then the next model
| released and all is forgiven.
| olcay_ wrote:
| Anthropic coming out to say they won't surveil Americans
| wasn't actually a positive for me. It meant they're okay
| with surveilling the rest of the world, which in turn
| signaled "fuck you, you're inferior, deal with it" to me
| (as someone from the aforementioned rest of the world).
|
| When OpenAI snatched those contracts, it made me think no
| worse of OpenAI. The surveillance was already factored into
| how I saw them (both).
| keeganpoppen wrote:
| everyone seems to unconditionally love anthropic, but openai
| has always had the best models... it just requires a bit more
| effort on behalf of the user to actually leverage it.
| kar1181 wrote:
| This is true. But Anthropic did us dirty most recently and so
| it's their turn on the pitch fork. Sam will do us too. Just
| not yet.
| the__alchemist wrote:
| Call it fall for it, but here are my two experiences, with
| both applications open. ($20/month plan for both)
| - Claude: Good for ~20 minutes of work once every 4 hours
| - Codex: Good for however long I want to use it.
|
| Claude nerfed their product so that it's not usable, so I use
| something else.
| KronisLV wrote:
| I'm on the 100 USD plan with Anthropic, I hit the 5 hour
| limits about 75% of the time during working hours, but
| almost never the weekly ones - by the time they're reset
| I've usually used up between 50% - 75% of the quota. There
| are periods of more intense usage ofc, but this is the
| approx. situation I'm in (also it doesn't work on tasks
| while I'm asleep, because I occasionally like having a look
| at WIP stuff and intervene if needed).
|
| The Anthropic 20 USD plan would more or less be a non-
| starter for agentic development, at least for the projects
| that I work on, even while only working on a single
| codebase or task at a time (I usually do 1-3 at a time).
|
| I would be absolutely bankrupt if I had to pay per-token.
| That said, I do mostly just throw Opus at everything
| (though it sometimes picks Sonnet/Haiku for sub-agents for
| specific tasks, which is okay), so probably not a 100%
| optional approach, but I've wasted too much time and effort
| in the past on sub-optimal (non-SOTA) models anyways. I
| wonder which is closer to the actual cost and how much
| subsidizing there is going on.
| the__alchemist wrote:
| Concur, re the ratio of weekly vs hourly limits: I hit
| the hourly one much more often than weekly.
| CrazyStat wrote:
| Since we're sharing anecdata: I also have the $20 month
| plan for codex, and I hit the five hour limit after about
| an hour of work every single time I open it. I use it for
| personal side projects primarily in the evening after kids
| are in bed, so my strategy is to launch it about 4pm and
| send a simple prompt to prime the 5 hour window to end at
| 9pm, start working about 8pm, and then I can use up the
| existing 5 hour window and the next one by about 10pm.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Wow the 20 dollar Claude plan sounds awful. I use Claude at
| work which has metered billing and have to carefully not to
| hit my four figure max cap.
|
| For me $20 a month is more than I want to spend I just use
| the free tiers. If I use AI in an app or site I use older
| models mostly chatgpt3.5. The challenge is more fun and it
| means I can do more like, make more api calls - 100x more.
| chaos_emergent wrote:
| Thinking in counterfactuals, how would the hype around Codex
| would be different if it was organic and because they had
| built a genuinely good product? Asking as someone who
| genuinely loves Codex and has been in the OpenAI camp for
| months after buying a Claude Max plan from November to
| February.
| peyton wrote:
| I haven't noticed much hype around Codex. I have both and
| use Claude for broad work off my phone and Codex on my
| computer to clean up the mess. Crank reasoning to the
| highest setting for each. Claude is extremely unreliable
| for me, and Codex feels like more of a real tool. I'd say
| Codex has a bit of a learning curve. Nothing much has
| changed for me in the past month or two (whenever GPT 5.4
| came out).
| jsemrau wrote:
| Codex is much worse than Anthropics model. My experience is
| that I burn 10x the tokens using Codex compared to Sonnet 4.6
| HWR_14 wrote:
| And hopefully Anthropic has extra capacity then and I can
| return there.
| raincole wrote:
| > because Anthropic lowered rate limits for individuals due
| to compute constraints
|
| It's because they don't support OpenCode.
| m3nu wrote:
| I have a feeling that Codex is also getting lower limits. Got
| this email just now. Basically they copy Claude's $100 tier.
|
| > To help you go further with Codex, we're introducing a new
| EUR114 Pro tier designed for longer, high-intensity sessions.
|
| > At launch, this new tier includes a limited-time Codex
| usage boost, with up to 10x more Codex usage than Plus
| (typically 5x).
|
| > As the Codex promotion on Plus winds down today, we're
| rebalancing Plus usage to support more sessions across the
| week, rather than longer high-intensity sessions on a single
| day.
| com2kid wrote:
| 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 those meeting
| transcriptions being joined together into something actually
| useful? I should be given pre-meeting prep notes about what was
| discussed last time and who had what to do items assigned.
| Basic stuff that is _already possible_ but that no one is
| doing.
|
| I swear none of the AI companies have any sense of human
| centric design.
|
| > pull relevant context from Slack, Notion, and your codebase,
| then provide you with a prioritized list of actions.
|
| This is an improvement, but it isn't the central focus. It
| should be more than just on a single work item basis, more than
| on just code.
|
| If we are going to be managing swarms of AI agents going
| forward, attention becomes our most valuable resource. AI
| should be laser focused on helping us decide where to be
| focused.
| a1j9o94 wrote:
| Disclaimer I work at Zapier, but we're doing a ton of this. I
| have an agent that runs every morning and creates prep
| documents for my calls. Then a separate one that runs at the
| end of every week to give me feedback
| com2kid wrote:
| In the full blog post I actually go into more detail about
| automatically creating a knowledge graph of what is being
| worked on throughout the whole company. There are some
| really powerful transformative efforts that can be
| accomplished right now, but that no one is doing.
|
| Basic things like detecting common pain points, to
| automatically figuring out who is the SME for a topic. AIs
| are _really_ good at categorizations and tagging, heck even
| before modern LLMs this is something ML could do.
|
| But instead we have AI driven code reviews.
|
| Code Reviews are rarely the blocker for productivity! As an
| industry, we need to stop automating the easy stuff and
| start helping people accomplish the hard stuff!
| paulteehan wrote:
| 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.
| irrationalfab wrote:
| Agreed. It is ironic that in the AI race, the real
| differentiation may not come from how smart the model is, but
| from who builds the best application layer on top of it. And
| that application layer is built with the same kind of
| software these models are supposed to commoditize.
| com2kid wrote:
| This feels like *nix.
|
| Developers built themselves really good OSes for doing
| developer things. Actually using it to do things was
| secondary.
|
| Want to run a web server? Awesome choice. Want to write
| networking code? Great. Setup a reliable DB with automated
| backups? Easy peasy.
|
| Want a stable desktop environment? Well after almost 30
| years we just about have one. Kind of. It isn't consistent
| and I need to have a post it note on my monitor with the
| command to restart plasma shell, but things kind of work.
|
| Current AI tools are so damn focused on building developer
| experiences, everything else is secondary. I get it,
| developers know how to fix developer pain points, and it
| monitizes well.
|
| But holy shit. Other things are possible. Someone please do
| them. Or hell give me a 20 or 30 million and I'll do it.
|
| But just.... The obvious is sitting out there for anyone
| who has spent 10 minutes not being just a developer.
| tempaccount5050 wrote:
| The first time I tried anthropics version it burned up all its
| tokens in like 10 minutes and left me stuck in a broken state.
| So I uninstalled it.
| bze12 wrote:
| It mostly feels like they're just converging on each other. The
| latest Claude Mac app release pushed a new UI that looks almost
| exactly like Codex's.
| jimbean78 wrote:
| I think your making assumptions without reading the entire
| thread and processing the general theme. This isn't about
| catching up or whos better. It really comes down two things.
| One, how far does your money go, and secondly which political
| narrative you subscribe too. Up until they started their beef
| with the u.s. government I was a subscriber. Between that and
| how fast my tokens depleted I switched to Codex. Best decision
| of my life and now I never run out of tokens.
|
| It was the perfect storm and I would have never switched since
| the first AI I started with was Claude.
| brikym wrote:
| Clicking UI elements can also be done in Github copilot for
| vscode, and cursor.
| risyachka wrote:
| Its not like Claude is pioneering those. All that was done
| prior to all of them by some random startup.
| bitexploder wrote:
| Antigravity off in the corner feeling sad about itself rn.
| messh wrote:
| SSH to devboxes is the exact usecase for services like
| https://shellbox.dev: create a box using ssh... and ssh into it.
| Now web, no subs. Codex can create it's own boxes via ssh
| graphememes wrote:
| cursor has been doing this for months, welcome to 3 months ago
| CrzyLngPwd wrote:
| "Our mission is to ensure that AGI benefits all of humanity. "
|
| They have AGI now?
| hipshaker wrote:
| Yes, Artificial Goofy Intelligence
| aliasxneo wrote:
| Has anyone figured out how to stop the Codex app from draining my
| M5 Pro's battery in like 2 hours? I can literally just have it
| open and my lap turns into a heater. I've tried adjusting all
| sorts of settings and haven't been able to make a dent. I'm
| assuming its the garbage renderer.
| wartywhoa23 wrote:
| I'm on M4 Max so your mileage may vary, but what helps me is
| not running any backdoors willingly.
| richardvsu wrote:
| What do you expect from an app that's built by not looking at
| the code?
| huqedato wrote:
| "Codex can now operate your computer alongside you" - I really
| don't want AI to "operate" my computer.
| ex-aws-dude wrote:
| Can't help but think the surface area for security issues is
| becoming massive with these tools
| SilverBirch wrote:
| Just commenting here to impact the controversy score.
| saltyoldman wrote:
| Claude had this, the "app" both of them have (not the terminal
| stuff) are mirroring each other's features.
| moomin wrote:
| Wait, did they just send out a press release boasting that
| they're bundling Jesse Vincent's Superpowers?!
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