A Research Preview of Codex

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.

If you aren't hiring junior engineers to do these kinds of things, where do you think the senior engineers you need in the future will come from?

My kid recently graduated from a very good school with a degree in computer science and what she's told me about the job market is scary. It seems that, relatively speaking, there's a lot of postings for senior engineers and very little for new grads.

My employer has hired recently and the flood of resumes after posting for a relatively low level position was nuts. There was just no hope of giving each candidate a fair chance and that really sucks.

My kid's classmates who did find work did it mostly through personal connections.

> If you aren't hiring junior engineers to do these kinds of things, where do you think the senior engineers you need in the future will come from?

Unfortunately this is not how companies think. I read somewhere more than 20 years ago about outsourcing and manufacturing offshoring. The author basically asked the same: if we move out the so-called low-end jobs, where do we think we will get the senior engineers? Yet companies continued offshoring, and the western lost talent and know-how, while watching our competitor you-know-who become the world leader in increasingly more industries.

ahh, the classic “i shall please my investors next quarter while ignoring reality, so i can disappoint my shareholders in 10 years”. lol.

As you say, happens all the time. Also doesn’t make sense because so few people are buying individual stocks anyway. Goal should be to consistently outperform over the long term. Wall street tends to be very myopic.

Thinking long term is a hard concept for the bean counters at these tech companies i guess…