←back to thread

A Research Preview of Codex

(openai.com)
383 points meetpateltech | 4 comments | 16 May 25 15:02 UTC | HN request time: 0.7s | source
Show context
johnjwang ◴[16 May 25 16:27 UTC] 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.

replies(12): >>44007420 #>>44007425 #>>44007552 #>>44007565 #>>44007575 #>>44007870 #>>44008106 #>>44008575 #>>44008809 #>>44009066 #>>44009783 #>>44010245 #
1. dakiol ◴[16 May 25 20:58 UTC] No.44009783[source]▶
This whole "LLMs == junior engineers" is so pedantic. Don't we realize that the same way senior engineers thinkg that LLMs can just replace junior engineers, high-level executives think that LLMs will soon replace senior ones?

Junior engineers are not cattle. They are the future senior ones, they bring new insights into teams, new perspectives; diversity. I can tell you the times I have learnt so many valuable things from so-called junior engineers (and not only tech-wise things).

LLMs have their place, but ffs, stop with the "junior engineer replacement" shit.

replies(2): >>44009808 #>>44009961 #
2. obsolete_wagie ◴[16 May 25 21:03 UTC] No.44009808[source]▶
You need someone thats technical to look at the agent output, senior engineers will be around. Junior engineers are certainly being replaced
replies(1): >>44009832 #
3. dakiol ◴[16 May 25 21:07 UTC] No.44009832[source]▶
Thanks, Sherlock. Now, tell me, when senior engineers start to retire, who will replace them? Ah, yeah, I can hear you say "LLMs!". And LLMs will rewrite themselves so we won't need seniors anymore writing code. And LLMs will write all the code companies need. So obvious, of course. We won't need a single senior because we won't have them, because they are not hired these days anymore. Perfect plan.
4. alfalfasprout ◴[16 May 25 21:32 UTC] No.44009961[source]▶
TBH the people I see parroting the LLM=junior engineer BS are almost always technically incompetent or so disconnected at this point from what's happening on the ground that they wouldn't know either way.

I've been using the codex agent since before this announcement btw along with most of the latest LLMs. I literally work in the AI/ML tooling space. We're entering a dangerous world now where there's super useful technology but people are trying to use it to replace others instead of enhance them. And that's causing the wrong tools to be built.