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511 points meetpateltech | 6 comments | | HN request time: 1.012s | source | bottom
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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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1. obsolete_wagie ◴[] 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
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2. dakiol ◴[] 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.
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3. alfalfasprout ◴[] 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.

4. Rastonbury ◴[] No.44012045{3}[source]
Also right now, the way things are output is still constrained by an actual human engineer, junior or senior. If AI makes juniors 1.5x as effective, the company that is still investing in juniors is going to beat the competitor who decided to save costs and stop investing.
5. swat535 ◴[] No.44013348{3}[source]
Let's say AI writes perfect, bug free code. Then what?

Suppose we grant the most optimistic scenario: AI generates flawless, production-ready code. No bugs, no regressions, no tech debt. Code is no longer written, it’s summoned.

Cool. But.. now what?

Who writes the requirements? Product managers typing prompts into a text box? CEOs dragging Figma elements and calling it shipped?

How does that scale? Who maintains the systems those prompts create? Other LLMs? And who maintains them? More AI?

It turtles all the way down, a recursive stack of AI maintaining AI, until we’re effectively simulating full stack human engineers in digital form.

At some point, aren't we just reinventing ourselves.. in Python?

6. ◴[] No.44014796[source]