11 ms·

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

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.

fourside 1y ago
> 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. One issue with junior devs is that because they’re not fully autonomous, you have to spend a non trivial amount of time guiding them and reviewing their code. Even if I had easy access to a lot of them, pretty quickly that overhead would become the bottleneck. Did you think that managing a lot of these virtual devs could get overwhelming or are they pretty autonomous?
- tom_m 1y ago
  You also have to provide accurate instructions. I find most often times, "bugs" aren't with writing code that doesn't compile or doesn't have passing tests. The "bugs" come from not understanding the requirements and what it is you're building. I'm not entirely sure AI will help this at all. People are generally bad at describing software and how they want it to work. They are inaccurate there or entirely omit things in the requirements. Yes, though, it would be overwhelming to manage a bunch of AI agents. Context switching and redirecting, guiding, will be very difficult and not everyone's cup of tea. If argue this isn't really a result of AI though. Many people are already in this boat today. The industry is set up in this way with contractors and outsourced devs that are at a junior level...because it's the attraction of cheap labor. Many businesses are attracted to this beyond programming. One of the questions is going to be, is the cost per token economics cheaper? So long as it's cheaper, AI coding agents will have a future. If it proves to not be cheaper (and this could take years to prove out), then I don't think it'll be as popular. I think people will need to go back to the drawing board on how we use AI agents or use AI for other purposes (like training, education, developer onboarding, code reviews, debugging, etc.)
- fabrice_d 1y ago
  They wrote "You still need to do a lot of work to get it production ready". So I would say it's not much better than real colleagues. Especially since junior devs will improve to a point they don't need your hand holding (remember you also were a junior at some point), which is not proven will happen with AI tools.
  - bmcahren 1y ago
    Counter-point A: AI coding assistance tools are rapidly advancing at a clip that is inarguably faster than humans. Counter-point B: AI does not get tired, does not need space, does not need catering to their experience. AI is fine being interrupted and redirected. AI is fine spending two days on something that gets overwritten and thrown away (no morale loss).
    - tom_m 1y ago
      There's going to be a limit though. Plus you have to instruct them correctly. B. Yea, that's true. I used to have over 4,000 GitHub contributions a year and it dropped to 1,000 as I got older and managed people. I used to be able to work 48 hrs straight but can't as much anymore...but you still have to be there to instruct the AI agent. It can't do it all on its own.
    - HappMacDonald 1y ago
      Counter-counter-point A: If I work with a human Junior and they make an error or I familiarize them with any quirk of our workflow, and I correct them, they will recall that correction moving forward. An AI assistant either will not remember 5 minutes later (in a different prompt on a related project) and repeat the mistake, or I'll have to take the extra time to code some reminder into the system prompt for every project moving forward. Advancements in general AI knowledge over time will not correlate to improvements in remembering any matters as colloquial as this. Counter-counter-point B: AI absolutely needs catering to their experience. Prompter must always learn how to phrase things so that the AI will understand them, adjust things when they get stuck in loops by removing confusing elements from the prompt, etc.
- rfoo 1y ago
  You don't need to be nice to your virtual junior devs. Saves quite a lot time too. As long as I spend less time reviewing and guiding than doing it myself it's a win for me. I don't have any fun doing these things and I'd rather yelling at a bunch of "agents". For those who enjoy doing bunch of small edits I guess it's the opposite.
  - HappMacDonald 1y ago
    I'm definitely wary of the concept of dismissing courtesy when working with AI agents, because I certainly don't want to lose that habit when I turn around and have to interact with humans again.
    - brookst 1y ago
      Exactly. Courtesy and kindness are largely for the benefit of the giver. People who think “now I’m free to be the jerk I really am” worry me.
      - rfoo 1y ago
        There's a very large gap between being super nice to a human and being a jerk. I don't think it benefits me much by very politely suggesting that its approach may not work and emphasize on the good part of the idea it generates and it would be better if it could try to push in another direction for example X. Like I do when talking to junior engineers. I usually just say, "This does not work because of ..., Y is good though, change your mind and assess X now". I can also say this when I'm not actually sure whether X works or not, without worrying about my words sending an intern / a junior engineer into days of struggling on a deadend.
        HappMacDonald 1y ago
        Relevent SMBC https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/ai-15 https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/ai-15
strangescript 1y ago
it feels like openai are at a ceiling with their models, codex1 seems to be another RLHF derivative from the same base model. You can see this in their own self reported o3-high comparison where at 8 tries they converge at the same accuracy. It also seems very telling they have not mentioned o4-high benchmarks at all. o4-mini exists, so logically there is an o4 full model right?
- aorobin 1y ago
  Seems likely that they are waiting to release o4 full results until the gpt-5 release later this year, presumably because gpt-5 is bundled with a roughly o4 level reasoning capability, and they want gpt-5 to feel like a significant release.
  - losvedir 1y ago
    Do you still think there will be a gpt-5? I thought the consensus was GPT-5 never really panned out and was released with little fanfare as 4.1.
    - aorobin 1y ago
      Yeah, just last month Altman said gpt-5 is coming in a few months, and betting/prediction sites are expecting it this year, probably in the summer.
    - brookst 1y ago
      Marketing names aren’t really connected to product generations. We might target v3 of a product for a date and then decide it’s really 2.4, doesn’t mean we won’t market something as v3 later.
NewEntryHN 1y ago
The advantage of Cursor is the reduced feedback loop where you watch it live and can intervene at any moment to steer it in the right direction. Is Codex such a superior model that it makes sense to take the direction of a mostly background agent, on which you seemingly have a longer feedback loop?
- scragz 1y ago
  it sounds like their approach is launch 5 with the same task and hopefully one works it out.
woah 1y ago
> 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. What's the benefit of this? It sounds like it's just a gimmick for the "AI will replace programmers" headlines. In reality, LLMs complete their tasks within seconds, and the time consuming part is specifying the tasks and then reviewing and correcting them. What is the point of parallelizing the fastest part of the process?
- ctoth 1y ago
  > Each task is processed independently in a separate, isolated environment preloaded with your codebase. Codex can read and edit files, as well as run commands including test harnesses, linters, and type checkers. Task completion typically takes between 1 and 30 minutes, depending on complexity, and you can monitor Codex’s progress in real time.
- johnjwang 1y ago
  In my experience, it still does take quite a bit of time (minutes) to run a task on these agentic LLMs (especially with the latest reasoning models), and in Cursor / Cline / other code editor versions of AI, it's enough time for you to get distracted, lose context, and start working on another task. So the benefit is really that during this "down" time, you can do multiple useful things in parallel. Previously, our engineers were waiting on the Cursor agent to finish, but the parallelization means you're explicitly turning your brain off of one task and moving on to a different task.
  - woah 1y ago
    In my experience in Cursor with Claude 3.5 and Gemini 2.5, if an agent has run for more than a minute it has usually lost the plot. Maybe model use in Codex is a new breed?
Jimmc414 1y ago
> We’ve long used local agents like Cursor and Claude Code, so we didn’t expect too much. If you don't mind, what were the strengths and limitations of Claude Code compared to Codex? You mentioned parallel task execution being a standout feature for Codex - was this a particular pain point with Claude Code? Any other insights on how Claude Code performed for your team would be valuable. We are pleased with Claude Code at the moment and were a bit underwhelmed by comparable Codex CLI tool OAI released earlier this month.
- t_a_mm_acq 1y ago
  Post realizing CC can operate same code base, same file tree on different terminals instances, it's been a significant unlock for us. Most devs have 3 running concurrently. 1. master task list + checks for completion on tasks. 2. operating on current task + documentation. 3. side quests, bugs, additional context. rinse and repeat once task done, update #1 and cycle again. Add in another CC window if need more tasks concurrently. downside is cost but if not an issue, it's great for getting stuff done across distributed teams..
  - naiv 1y ago
    do you have then instance 2 and 3 listening to instance 1 with just a prompt? or how does this work?
    - naiv 1y ago
      to answer my own questions , it is actually laid out in chapter 6 of https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/claude-code-best-practices https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/claude-code-best-pract...
criddell 1y ago
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.
- echelon 1y ago
  The never ending march of progress. It's probably over for these folks. There will likely(?, hopefully?) be new adjacent gradients for people to climb. In any case, I would worry more about your own job prospects. It's coming for everyone.
  - voidspark 1y ago
    It's his daughter. He is worried about his daughter first and foremost. Weird reply.
    - echelon 1y ago
      I'm sorry. I was skimming. I had no idea he mentioned his kid. I was running a quick errand between engineering meetings and saw the first few lines about hiring juniors, and I wrote a couple of comments about how I feel about all of this. I'm not always guilty of skimming, but today I was.
- hintymad 1y ago
  > 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.
runako 1y ago
> Parallel task execution: You can batch dozens of small edits (refactors, tests, boilerplate) and run them concurrently without context juggling. This is also part of a recent update to Zed. I typically use Zed with my own Claude API key.
- ai-christianson 1y ago
  Is Zed managing the containerized dev environments, or creating multiple worktrees or anything like that? Or are they all sharing the same work tree?
  - runako 1y ago
    As far as I know, they are sharing a single work tree. So I suppose that could get messy by default. That said, it might be possible to tell each agent to create a branch and do work there? I haven't tried that. I haven't seen anything about Zed using containers, but again you might be able to tell each agent to use some container tooling you have in place since it can run commands if you give it permission.
_bin_ 1y ago
I believe cursor now supports parallel tasks, no? I haven't done much with it personally but I have buddies who have. If you want one idiot's perspective, please hyper-focus on model quality. The barrier right now is not tooling, it's the fact that models are not good enough for a large amount of work. More importantly, they're still closer to interns than junior devs: you must give them a ton of guidance, constant feedback, and a very stern eye for them to do even pretty simple tasks. I'd like to see something with an o1-preview/pro level of quality that isn't insanely expensive, particularly since a lot of programming isn't about syntax (which most SotA modls have down pat) but about understanding the underlying concepts, an area in which they remain weak. Atp I really don't care if the tooling sucks. Just give me really, really good mdoels that don't cost a kidney.
quantumHazer 1y ago
CTO of an AI agents company (which has worked with AI labs) says agents works fine. Nothing new under the sun.
hintymad 1y ago
It looks we are in this interesting cycle: millions of engineers contribute to open-source on github. The best of our minds use the code to develop powerful models to replace exactly these engineers. In fact, the more code a group contributes to github, the easier it is for the companies to replace this group. Case in point, frontend engineers are impacted most so far. Does this mean people will be less incentivized to contribute to open source as time goes by? P.S., I think the current trend is a wakeup call to us software engineers. We thought we were doing highly creative work, but in reality we spend a lot of time doing the basic job of knowledge workers: retrieving knowledge and interpolating some basic and highly predictable variations. Unfortunately, the current AI is really good at replacing this type of work. My optimistic view is that in long term we will have invent or expand into more interesting work, but I'm not sure how long we will have to wait. The current generation of software engineers may suffer high supply but low demand of our profession for years to come.
- mikepurvis 1y ago
  My pessimistic view is that we're liable to end up cutting off the pipeline into the industry. Similar to lawyers replacing clerks with bots, if senior engineers can now command bots rather than mentor new hires, where is the on-ramp? How does one actually gain enough experience to become a senior? Or is all this a nothing-burger, since the new hires will just be commanding bots of their own, but on lower level tasks that they are qualified to supervise?
- Daishiman 1y ago
  > P.S., I think the current trend is a wakeup call to us software engineers. We thought we were doing highly creative work, but in reality we spend a lot of time doing the basic job of knowledge workers: retrieving knowledge and interpolating some basic and highly predictable variations. Unfortunately, the current AI is really good at replacing this type of work. Most of the waking hours of most creative work have this type of drudgery. Professional painters and designers spend most of their time replicating ideas that are well fleshed-out. Musicians spend most of their time rehearsing existing compositions. There is a point to be made that these repetitive tasks are a prerequisite to come up with creative ideas.
dakiol 1y ago
[flagged]
- obsolete_wagie 1y ago
  You need someone thats technical to look at the agent output, senior engineers will be around. Junior engineers are certainly being replaced
  - dakiol 1y ago
    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.
    - Rastonbury 1y ago
      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.
    - swat535 1y ago
      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?
- 1y ago
fullstackchris 1y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
sagarpatil 1y ago
https://www.augment.new/ https://www.augment.new/ has a similar feature (it uses sonnet 3.7) and I’m really impressed by it. Worth trying out.
manmal 1y ago
In the presentation, they highlighted that the changes it makes are minimally invasive. That sounded as if it’s less prone to going on vision quests, like Claude often does. Is that something you‘ve observed as well?
surgical_fire 1y ago
What kind of Junior devs are you people hiring that you still need to do a lot of work to get it production ready? I work with Junior devs. They are Junior in that they have to be pointed in the direction they must work, and would be out of their depth in guiding the implementation of major features. But simple code changes are pretty fine. LLMs are useful, I kind of like them as code assistants, but they are very far of being even a Junior dev in terms of actually performing work.

fourside 1y ago

> 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. One issue with junior devs is that because they’re not fully autonomous, you have to spend a non trivial amount of time guiding them and reviewing their code. Even if I had easy access to a lot of them, pretty quickly that overhead would become the bottleneck. Did you think that managing a lot of these virtual devs could get overwhelming or are they pretty autonomous?

tom_m 1y ago
You also have to provide accurate instructions. I find most often times, "bugs" aren't with writing code that doesn't compile or doesn't have passing tests. The "bugs" come from not understanding the requirements and what it is you're building. I'm not entirely sure AI will help this at all. People are generally bad at describing software and how they want it to work. They are inaccurate there or entirely omit things in the requirements. Yes, though, it would be overwhelming to manage a bunch of AI agents. Context switching and redirecting, guiding, will be very difficult and not everyone's cup of tea. If argue this isn't really a result of AI though. Many people are already in this boat today. The industry is set up in this way with contractors and outsourced devs that are at a junior level...because it's the attraction of cheap labor. Many businesses are attracted to this beyond programming. One of the questions is going to be, is the cost per token economics cheaper? So long as it's cheaper, AI coding agents will have a future. If it proves to not be cheaper (and this could take years to prove out), then I don't think it'll be as popular. I think people will need to go back to the drawing board on how we use AI agents or use AI for other purposes (like training, education, developer onboarding, code reviews, debugging, etc.)
fabrice_d 1y ago
They wrote "You still need to do a lot of work to get it production ready". So I would say it's not much better than real colleagues. Especially since junior devs will improve to a point they don't need your hand holding (remember you also were a junior at some point), which is not proven will happen with AI tools.
- bmcahren 1y ago
  Counter-point A: AI coding assistance tools are rapidly advancing at a clip that is inarguably faster than humans. Counter-point B: AI does not get tired, does not need space, does not need catering to their experience. AI is fine being interrupted and redirected. AI is fine spending two days on something that gets overwritten and thrown away (no morale loss).
  - tom_m 1y ago
    There's going to be a limit though. Plus you have to instruct them correctly. B. Yea, that's true. I used to have over 4,000 GitHub contributions a year and it dropped to 1,000 as I got older and managed people. I used to be able to work 48 hrs straight but can't as much anymore...but you still have to be there to instruct the AI agent. It can't do it all on its own.
  - HappMacDonald 1y ago
    Counter-counter-point A: If I work with a human Junior and they make an error or I familiarize them with any quirk of our workflow, and I correct them, they will recall that correction moving forward. An AI assistant either will not remember 5 minutes later (in a different prompt on a related project) and repeat the mistake, or I'll have to take the extra time to code some reminder into the system prompt for every project moving forward. Advancements in general AI knowledge over time will not correlate to improvements in remembering any matters as colloquial as this. Counter-counter-point B: AI absolutely needs catering to their experience. Prompter must always learn how to phrase things so that the AI will understand them, adjust things when they get stuck in loops by removing confusing elements from the prompt, etc.
rfoo 1y ago
You don't need to be nice to your virtual junior devs. Saves quite a lot time too. As long as I spend less time reviewing and guiding than doing it myself it's a win for me. I don't have any fun doing these things and I'd rather yelling at a bunch of "agents". For those who enjoy doing bunch of small edits I guess it's the opposite.
- HappMacDonald 1y ago
  I'm definitely wary of the concept of dismissing courtesy when working with AI agents, because I certainly don't want to lose that habit when I turn around and have to interact with humans again.
  - brookst 1y ago
    Exactly. Courtesy and kindness are largely for the benefit of the giver. People who think “now I’m free to be the jerk I really am” worry me.
    - rfoo 1y ago
      There's a very large gap between being super nice to a human and being a jerk. I don't think it benefits me much by very politely suggesting that its approach may not work and emphasize on the good part of the idea it generates and it would be better if it could try to push in another direction for example X. Like I do when talking to junior engineers. I usually just say, "This does not work because of ..., Y is good though, change your mind and assess X now". I can also say this when I'm not actually sure whether X works or not, without worrying about my words sending an intern / a junior engineer into days of struggling on a deadend.
      - HappMacDonald 1y ago
        Relevent SMBC https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/ai-15 https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/ai-15

strangescript 1y ago

it feels like openai are at a ceiling with their models, codex1 seems to be another RLHF derivative from the same base model. You can see this in their own self reported o3-high comparison where at 8 tries they converge at the same accuracy. It also seems very telling they have not mentioned o4-high benchmarks at all. o4-mini exists, so logically there is an o4 full model right?

aorobin 1y ago
Seems likely that they are waiting to release o4 full results until the gpt-5 release later this year, presumably because gpt-5 is bundled with a roughly o4 level reasoning capability, and they want gpt-5 to feel like a significant release.
- losvedir 1y ago
  Do you still think there will be a gpt-5? I thought the consensus was GPT-5 never really panned out and was released with little fanfare as 4.1.
  - aorobin 1y ago
    Yeah, just last month Altman said gpt-5 is coming in a few months, and betting/prediction sites are expecting it this year, probably in the summer.
  - brookst 1y ago
    Marketing names aren’t really connected to product generations. We might target v3 of a product for a date and then decide it’s really 2.4, doesn’t mean we won’t market something as v3 later.

NewEntryHN 1y ago

The advantage of Cursor is the reduced feedback loop where you watch it live and can intervene at any moment to steer it in the right direction. Is Codex such a superior model that it makes sense to take the direction of a mostly background agent, on which you seemingly have a longer feedback loop?

scragz 1y ago
it sounds like their approach is launch 5 with the same task and hopefully one works it out.

woah 1y ago

> 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. What's the benefit of this? It sounds like it's just a gimmick for the "AI will replace programmers" headlines. In reality, LLMs complete their tasks within seconds, and the time consuming part is specifying the tasks and then reviewing and correcting them. What is the point of parallelizing the fastest part of the process?

ctoth 1y ago
> Each task is processed independently in a separate, isolated environment preloaded with your codebase. Codex can read and edit files, as well as run commands including test harnesses, linters, and type checkers. Task completion typically takes between 1 and 30 minutes, depending on complexity, and you can monitor Codex’s progress in real time.
johnjwang 1y ago
In my experience, it still does take quite a bit of time (minutes) to run a task on these agentic LLMs (especially with the latest reasoning models), and in Cursor / Cline / other code editor versions of AI, it's enough time for you to get distracted, lose context, and start working on another task. So the benefit is really that during this "down" time, you can do multiple useful things in parallel. Previously, our engineers were waiting on the Cursor agent to finish, but the parallelization means you're explicitly turning your brain off of one task and moving on to a different task.
- woah 1y ago
  In my experience in Cursor with Claude 3.5 and Gemini 2.5, if an agent has run for more than a minute it has usually lost the plot. Maybe model use in Codex is a new breed?

Jimmc414 1y ago

> We’ve long used local agents like Cursor and Claude Code, so we didn’t expect too much. If you don't mind, what were the strengths and limitations of Claude Code compared to Codex? You mentioned parallel task execution being a standout feature for Codex - was this a particular pain point with Claude Code? Any other insights on how Claude Code performed for your team would be valuable. We are pleased with Claude Code at the moment and were a bit underwhelmed by comparable Codex CLI tool OAI released earlier this month.

t_a_mm_acq 1y ago
Post realizing CC can operate same code base, same file tree on different terminals instances, it's been a significant unlock for us. Most devs have 3 running concurrently. 1. master task list + checks for completion on tasks. 2. operating on current task + documentation. 3. side quests, bugs, additional context. rinse and repeat once task done, update #1 and cycle again. Add in another CC window if need more tasks concurrently. downside is cost but if not an issue, it's great for getting stuff done across distributed teams..
- naiv 1y ago
  do you have then instance 2 and 3 listening to instance 1 with just a prompt? or how does this work?
  - naiv 1y ago
    to answer my own questions , it is actually laid out in chapter 6 of https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/claude-code-best-practices https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/claude-code-best-pract...

criddell 1y ago

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.

echelon 1y ago
The never ending march of progress. It's probably over for these folks. There will likely(?, hopefully?) be new adjacent gradients for people to climb. In any case, I would worry more about your own job prospects. It's coming for everyone.
- voidspark 1y ago
  It's his daughter. He is worried about his daughter first and foremost. Weird reply.
  - echelon 1y ago
    I'm sorry. I was skimming. I had no idea he mentioned his kid. I was running a quick errand between engineering meetings and saw the first few lines about hiring juniors, and I wrote a couple of comments about how I feel about all of this. I'm not always guilty of skimming, but today I was.
hintymad 1y ago
> 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.

runako 1y ago

> Parallel task execution: You can batch dozens of small edits (refactors, tests, boilerplate) and run them concurrently without context juggling. This is also part of a recent update to Zed. I typically use Zed with my own Claude API key.

ai-christianson 1y ago
Is Zed managing the containerized dev environments, or creating multiple worktrees or anything like that? Or are they all sharing the same work tree?
- runako 1y ago
  As far as I know, they are sharing a single work tree. So I suppose that could get messy by default. That said, it might be possible to tell each agent to create a branch and do work there? I haven't tried that. I haven't seen anything about Zed using containers, but again you might be able to tell each agent to use some container tooling you have in place since it can run commands if you give it permission.

_bin_ 1y ago

I believe cursor now supports parallel tasks, no? I haven't done much with it personally but I have buddies who have. If you want one idiot's perspective, please hyper-focus on model quality. The barrier right now is not tooling, it's the fact that models are not good enough for a large amount of work. More importantly, they're still closer to interns than junior devs: you must give them a ton of guidance, constant feedback, and a very stern eye for them to do even pretty simple tasks. I'd like to see something with an o1-preview/pro level of quality that isn't insanely expensive, particularly since a lot of programming isn't about syntax (which most SotA modls have down pat) but about understanding the underlying concepts, an area in which they remain weak. Atp I really don't care if the tooling sucks. Just give me really, really good mdoels that don't cost a kidney.

quantumHazer 1y ago

CTO of an AI agents company (which has worked with AI labs) says agents works fine. Nothing new under the sun.

hintymad 1y ago

It looks we are in this interesting cycle: millions of engineers contribute to open-source on github. The best of our minds use the code to develop powerful models to replace exactly these engineers. In fact, the more code a group contributes to github, the easier it is for the companies to replace this group. Case in point, frontend engineers are impacted most so far. Does this mean people will be less incentivized to contribute to open source as time goes by? P.S., I think the current trend is a wakeup call to us software engineers. We thought we were doing highly creative work, but in reality we spend a lot of time doing the basic job of knowledge workers: retrieving knowledge and interpolating some basic and highly predictable variations. Unfortunately, the current AI is really good at replacing this type of work. My optimistic view is that in long term we will have invent or expand into more interesting work, but I'm not sure how long we will have to wait. The current generation of software engineers may suffer high supply but low demand of our profession for years to come.

mikepurvis 1y ago
My pessimistic view is that we're liable to end up cutting off the pipeline into the industry. Similar to lawyers replacing clerks with bots, if senior engineers can now command bots rather than mentor new hires, where is the on-ramp? How does one actually gain enough experience to become a senior? Or is all this a nothing-burger, since the new hires will just be commanding bots of their own, but on lower level tasks that they are qualified to supervise?
Daishiman 1y ago
> P.S., I think the current trend is a wakeup call to us software engineers. We thought we were doing highly creative work, but in reality we spend a lot of time doing the basic job of knowledge workers: retrieving knowledge and interpolating some basic and highly predictable variations. Unfortunately, the current AI is really good at replacing this type of work. Most of the waking hours of most creative work have this type of drudgery. Professional painters and designers spend most of their time replicating ideas that are well fleshed-out. Musicians spend most of their time rehearsing existing compositions. There is a point to be made that these repetitive tasks are a prerequisite to come up with creative ideas.

dakiol 1y ago

[flagged]

obsolete_wagie 1y ago
You need someone thats technical to look at the agent output, senior engineers will be around. Junior engineers are certainly being replaced
- dakiol 1y ago
  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.
  - Rastonbury 1y ago
    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.
  - swat535 1y ago
    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?
1y ago

fullstackchris 1y ago

[flagged]

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

sagarpatil 1y ago

https://www.augment.new/ https://www.augment.new/ has a similar feature (it uses sonnet 3.7) and I’m really impressed by it. Worth trying out.

manmal 1y ago

In the presentation, they highlighted that the changes it makes are minimally invasive. That sounded as if it’s less prone to going on vision quests, like Claude often does. Is that something you‘ve observed as well?

surgical_fire 1y ago

What kind of Junior devs are you people hiring that you still need to do a lot of work to get it production ready? I work with Junior devs. They are Junior in that they have to be pointed in the direction they must work, and would be out of their depth in guiding the implementation of major features. But simple code changes are pretty fine. LLMs are useful, I kind of like them as code assistants, but they are very far of being even a Junior dev in terms of actually performing work.