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Embracing the parallel coding agent lifestyle

(simonwillison.net)
159 points jbredeche | 2 comments | 06 Oct 25 10:40 UTC | HN request time: 0.416s | source
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jmtulloss ◴[10 Oct 25 04:16 UTC] No.45535330[source]▶
Why aren’t more folks using Codex cloud? Simon’s post mentions it, but the vast majority of comments are talking about parallel agents locally or getting distracted while agents are running.

Personally I’ve found that where AI agents aren’t up to the task, I better just write the code. For everything else, more parallelism is good. I can keep myself fully productive if many tasks are being worked on in parallel, and it’s very cheap to throw out the failures. Far preferable imo to watching an agent mess with my own machine.

replies(1): >>45535371 #
simonw ◴[10 Oct 25 04:28 UTC] No.45535371[source]▶
Could be that it's a bit harder to get started with?

You have to configure your "environment" for it correctly - with a script that installs the dependencies etc before the container starts running. That's not an entirely obvious process.

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jmtulloss ◴[10 Oct 25 04:30 UTC] No.45535379[source]▶
Good point. The environments I’ve set up have been pretty easy but I’ll admit that at first I was very annoyed that it couldn’t just use a pre-existing GitHub action workflow.

Edit: environment setup was also buggy when the product launched and still is from time to time. So, now that I have it set up I use it constantly, but they do need to make getting up and running a more delightful experience.

replies(1): >>45536473 #
1. angelmm ◴[10 Oct 25 08:17 UTC] No.45536473[source]▶
Also, Codex Cloud and similar services require you to give fully access to your repository, which might trigger some concerns. If you can run it locally, you still have the control, same development environment, and same permissions.
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2. jmtulloss ◴[10 Oct 25 09:01 UTC] No.45536691[source]▶
It doesn’t have access to your repo when the agent is running (unless you give it internet access and credentials). The code is checked out into the sandbox before it’s let loose.