[alexwhb]

As much as my first gut reaction to this article was to be excited about its conclusion, I can’t say my experience matches up. Are LLMs perfect? Absolutely not, but I can point to many examples in my own work where using Codex has saved me easily a week or more—especially when it comes to tedious refactors. I don’t agree with the conclusion; the real-world improvement and progress I’ve seen in the last year in the problem-solving quality of these agents has been pretty astounding.

The reason for my excitement about the conclusion is obvious: I want programmers and people to stay in demand. I find the AI future to be quite bleak if this tech really does lead to AGI, but maybe that’s just me. I think we’re at a pretty cool spot with this technology right now—where it’s a powerful tool—but at some point, if or when it’s way smarter than you or me… I'm not sure that's a fun happy future. I think work is pretty tied to our self worth as humans.

[jimbo808]

> but I can point to many examples in my own work where using Codex has saved me easily a week or more

Care to share a few of these examples?

[alexwhb]

Sure thing. I work on a few projects for my company. The main one is an Android and iOS audiobook-media-player app. I had to update the Android side to use the Google Media3 library instead of the legacy ExoPlayer library. In a typical app this would be pretty straightforward, but we’ve mixed in a lot of custom elements that made the transition quite challenging. I actually attempted it manually back in the day and probably spent three or four days on it, but I simply didn’t have time to finish, so I shelved it. A few months ago I tried again in Codex; within two prompts it was done flawlessly and starting from the beginning.

Another example: I also maintain the back-end API for these apps. There was a lot of old utility code that was messy, unorganized, and frankly gross. I had Codex completely reorganize the code into a sensible folder structure and strip out any functions that weren’t being used anymore—something like 300-plus functions. Doing that by hand would easily have taken a day or more

I could go on, but those were the two initial “aha” moments that showed me how powerful this tool can be when it’s used for the right tasks.