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365 points meetpateltech | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.408s | source
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johnjwang ◴[] No.44007301[source]
Some engineers on my team at Assembled and I have been a part of the alpha test of Codex, and I'll say it's been quite impressive.

We’ve long used local agents like Cursor and Claude Code, so we didn’t expect too much. But Codex shines in a few areas:

Parallel task execution: You can batch dozens of small edits (refactors, tests, boilerplate) and run them concurrently without context juggling. It's super nice to run a bunch of tasks at the same time (something that's really hard to do in Cursor, Cline, etc.)

It kind of feels like a junior engineer on steroids, you just need to point it at a file or function, specify the change, and it scaffolds out most of a PR. You still need to do a lot of work to get it production ready, but it's as if you have an infinite number of junior engineers at your disposal now all working on different things.

Model quality is good, but hard to say it's that much better than other models. In side-by-side tests with Cursor + Gemini 2.5-pro, naming, style and logic are relatively indistinguishable, so quality meets our bar but doesn’t yet exceed it.

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fourside ◴[] No.44007420[source]
> You still need to do a lot of work to get it production ready, but it's as if you have an infinite number of junior engineers at your disposal now all working on different things.

One issue with junior devs is that because they’re not fully autonomous, you have to spend a non trivial amount of time guiding them and reviewing their code. Even if I had easy access to a lot of them, pretty quickly that overhead would become the bottleneck.

Did you think that managing a lot of these virtual devs could get overwhelming or are they pretty autonomous?

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1. rfoo ◴[] No.44007712[source]
You don't need to be nice to your virtual junior devs. Saves quite a lot time too.

As long as I spend less time reviewing and guiding than doing it myself it's a win for me. I don't have any fun doing these things and I'd rather yelling at a bunch of "agents". For those who enjoy doing bunch of small edits I guess it's the opposite.

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2. HappMacDonald ◴[] No.44008571[source]
I'm definitely wary of the concept of dismissing courtesy when working with AI agents, because I certainly don't want to lose that habit when I turn around and have to interact with humans again.