A Research Preview of Codex

In the preview video, I appreciated Katy Shi's comment on "I think this is a reflection of where engineering work has moved over the past where a lot of my time now is spent reviewing code rather than writing it."

Preview video from Open AI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhdpnbfH6NU&t=878s

As I think about what "AI-native" or just the future of building software loos like, its interesting to me that - right now - developers are still just reading code and tests rather than looking at simulations.

While a new(ish) concept for software development, simulations could provide a wider range of outcomes and, especially for the front end, are far easier to evaluate than just code/tests alone. I'm biased because this is something I've been exploring but it really hit me over the head looking at the Codex launch materials.

> rather than looking at simulations

You mean like automated test suites?

automated visual fuzzy-testing with some self-reinforcement loops

There's already library's for QA testing and VLM's can give critique on a series of screenshots automated by a playwright script per branch

Cool. Putting vision in the loop is a great idea.

Ambitious idea, but I like it.

SmolVLM, Gemma, LlaVa, in case you wanna play with some of the ones i've tried.

https://huggingface.co/blog/smolvlm

recently both llama.cpp and ollama got better support for them too, which makes this kind of integration with local/self-hosted models now more attainable/less expensive