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Comment by avital | Hacker News Reader

I work at OpenAI (not on Codex) and have used it successfully for multiple projects so far. Here's my flow:

- Always run more than one rollout of the same prompt -- they will turn out different

- Look through the parallel implementations, see which is best (even if it's not good enough), then figure out what changes to your prompt would have helped nudge towards the better solution.

- In addition, add new modifications to the prompt to resolve the parts that the model didn't do correctly.

- Repeat loop until the code is good enough.

If you do this and also split your work into smaller parallelizable chunks, you can find yourself spending a few hours only looping between prompt tuning and code review with massive projects implemented in a short period of time.

I've used this for "API munging" but also pretty deep Triton kernel code and it's been massive.

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> "Look through the parallel implementations, see which is best (even if it's not good enough), then figure out what changes to your prompt would have helped nudge towards the better solution."

How can non-technical people tell what's "best"? You need to know what you're doing at this point, look for the right pitfalls, inspect everything in detail... this right here is the entire counter-argument for LLMs eliminating SWE jobs...

I don’t think anyone expects software engineers will disappear and get replaced by janitors trained to proompt. I’m sure experts will stick around until the singularity curve starts looking funny. It’s probably gonna suck to enter the industry from now on, though.

> I don’t think anyone expects software engineers will disappear

holy gaslighting Christ have some links, lots of people think that

https://www.reddit.com/r/ITCareerQuestions/comments/126v3pm/...

https://medium.com/technology-hits/the-death-of-coding-why-c...

https://medium.com/@TheRobertKiyosaki/are-programmers-obsole...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/hessiejones/2024/09/21/the-auto...

and on and on, endless thinkpieces about this. Certainly SOMEONE, someone with a lot of money, thinks software engineers are imminently replaceable.

> until the singularity curve starts looking funny.

well there's absolutely no evidence whatsoever that we've made any progress to bringing about Kurzweil's God so I think regardless of what Sam Altman wants you to believe about "general AI" or those thinkpieces, experts are probably okay.

I think you are correct that people say this, but its absurd that they are saying it in the first place.

Coding/engineering/etc is all problem solving in a strucutred manner.

That skill is not going anywhere

oh I agree but the last three years has felt like an endless chorus of people telling me SWE was going to be obsolete very soon so I had to push back against the idea that "nobody" thinks that.

I wouldn't have to listen to people talk about it all the time if nobody thought it was true

(not GP) To be fair, just because someone says something doesn't mean they believe it. Most of those folks have to know they're being absurd. But I agree saying "nobody" thinks something is over the top. People on the internet can be quite looney tunes.

A lot of people believe that programming is the typing of odd sequences of characters into a computer.

To them, it seems LLMs are also perfectly capable of typing odd sequences of characters.

The idea that SWEs do actual structured problem solving is mostly native to industry insiders.

Thank you for this. A very well stated explanation of a major reason the hype is soo off base from the people doing the work every day.

> proompt

The verb you use when you only need to produce boilerplate.

> Prompt™

The verb you use when it's time to innovate.

Well, right, how does one become a senior engineer in a world where no one needs to hire a junior? I'm sure many other industries have experiences this already, where the only people who know anything retire and the people are left maintaining a system they could not rebuild such that when something goes wrong the only practicable choice is to replace it with new equipment.

That's where I see AI-written software going, write-once. Some talented engineer gets an AI system to create a whole k8s cluster to run an application and if any changes need to be made, bugs fixed, it will take another talented engineer to come in and have an AI write a replacement and throw out the old one.

Reminds me of this blog, The real value isn’t in the code [0], we're heading for a world that is only code and no one who knows what it does. But maybe it won't matter.

[0] https://jonayre.uk/blog/2022/10/30/the-real-value-isnt-in-th...

> Well, right, how does one become a senior engineer in a world where no one needs to hire a junior?

You don't. Unless the person is super brilliant I just don't think the industry needs many more new people, there are enough for the next 1-2 decades and after that humans will probably not be needed at all.

People should go where the demand is - medicine, education, policing or whatever it may be.

> People should go where the demand is - medicine, education, policing or whatever it may be.

'Where' is becoming an increasingly small niche with ever higher educational requirements.

One could put a lot of time into open source or run your own side hustle to build up experience to a senior engineer level.

I don't see the corporate path being the best way given the circumstances.

> How can non-technical people tell what's "best"? You need to know what you're doing at this point, look for the right pitfalls, inspect everything in detail... this right here is the entire counter-argument for LLMs eliminating SWE jobs...

I'm not sure a tool that positions itself as a "programmer co-worker" is aiming to be useful to non-technical people. I've said it before, but I don't think LLMs currently are at the stage where they enable you to do things you have 0 experience in, but rather can help you speed up working through things you are familiar with. I think people who claim LLMs will completely replace jobs are hyping the technology without really understanding it.

For example, I'm a programmer, but never done any firmware flashing with UART before via a USB flasher. Today I managed to do that in 1-2 hours thanks to ChatGPT helping me out understanding how to do it. If I'd do it completely on my own, I'm sure it would have taken me at least the full day to do so, instead of the time it took. I was able to see when it got mislead, and could rewrite/redirect from there on, but someone with 0 programming experience, probably wouldn't have been able to.

It depends on their setup and where they or the LLM gets stuck. If an experienced programmer is there to back them up, then a total beginner could totally make something. That is, given some familiarity with the terminal, specifically the know-how to setup a git repo on GitHub and clone it locally, and then setting up env keys and Aider, and the know-how to run npm I and npm run dev, a non programmer with some terminal skills someone is able to make simple games, purely by talking to Aider using the /voice command. When the LLM or they get stuck is when they'll need some backup from somebody with a decent amount of programming experience to get unstuck. Depending on what their doing though, it's entirely possible they won't get stuck until much further along in the dev process.

How much faster is this than simply writing the code yourself?

Easily 5-10x or even more in certain special cases (when it'd take me a lot of upfront effort to get context on some problem domain). And it can do all the "P2"s that I'd realistically never get to. There was a day where I landed 7 small-to-medium-size pull requests before lunch.

There are also cases where it fails to do what I wanted, and then I just stop trying after a few iterations. But I've learned what to expect it to do well in and I am mostly calibrated now.

The biggest difference is that I can have agents working on 3-4 parallel tasks at any given point.

This has been my experience too. Certain tickets that would’ve taken me hours (and in one case, days), I’ve been able to finish in minutes.

Other tasks take maybe the same amount of time.

But just autocomplete saves micro-effort all day long.

I end up asking the same question when experimenting with tools like Cursor. When it can one-shot a small feature, it works like magic. When it struggles, and the context gets poisoned and I have to roll back commits and retry part of the way through something, it hits a point where it was probably easier for me to just write it. Or maybe template it and have it finish it. Or vice versa. I guess the point being that best practices have yet to truly be established, but totally hands-off uses have not worked well for me so far.

Why commit halfway through implementing something with Cursor? Can you not wait until it’s created a feature or task that has been validated and tests written for it?

Why not create a branch and rollback only what needs to be rolled back? Branches are O(1) with git, right?

OP was insinuating that rolling back commits is a pain point.

Well, same statement applies. Rolling back commits is also O(1) and just as easy. And if you branch to start with it's not even a "rollback" through the commit history, it's just a branch switch. Feel like OP has never used git before or something.

Which seems like a tooling issue, imo. In Aider, it's just /undo.

Why wait until everything is finalized before committing? Git is distributed/local, so while one philosophy is to interact with it as little as possible, the other one is to commit early and commit often, and easily be able to rollback to a previous (working) state, with the caveat that you clean-up history before firing off a PR.

At the current capabilities of most LLMs + my personal tolerance for slop, the most productive workflow seems to be: spin up multiple agents in the background to work on small scope, straightforward tasks while I work on something bigger that requires more exploration, requirements gathering, or just plain more complex/broad changes to the code. Review the output of the agents or unstick them when there is downtime.

IMO just keeping an IDE window open and babysitting an agent while it works is less productive than just writing the code mostly yourself with AI assistance in the form of autocomplete and maybe highly targeted oneshots using manual context provided "Edit" mode or inline prompting.

My company is dragging their feet on AI governance and let the OpenAI key I was using expire, and what I noticed was that my output of small QoL PRs and bugfixes dropped drastically because my attention remains focused on higher impact work.

For me, it’s not that the actual coding is faster. It’s that you can do other things at the same time.

If I’m writing an integration, I can be researching the docs while the agent is coding something up. Worst case, I throw all of the agents work away while now having done research. Best case, it gets a good enough implementation that I can run with.

> Worst case, I throw all of the agents work away while now having done research

The worst case is you take the agent's work without really understanding it, continue doing it indefinitely and at some point get a buggy repo you have no idea how to handle - at the exact same moment some critical issue pops up and your agent has no clue how to help you anymore.

I don't think GP said they couldn't do their job, but you instantly jumped to incompetence. That seems little uncharitable to me.

Have no idea what GP can or cannot do and wasn't talking about that. I'm saying what the worst case that can happen when people work with agents, and it can happen to anyone who isn't carefully verifying and testing the agent's work.

Totally. I feel like it’s akin to jamming with someone. We both go down our own paths for a bit, then I have a next step for it, and I can review what it last came up with and iterate while it does more of its own thing. Rinse, repeat. This is more fun and less energy consuming than “do it all yourself”, which certainly means a lot.

This way works for me. Any time I tried to treat it as a colleague that I can just assign tasks to, it’s failed miserably.

Do you find yourself ditching on the things when they change something important with the new prompt? I don't get how people aren't absolutely exhausted by actually implementing this prompt messing advice when I thought there were studies saying small seemingly insignificant changes greatly change the result, hide blind spots, and even having a prompt for engineering a better prompt has knock on increases in instability. Do people just have a higher tolerance for doing work that is not related to the problem than I do? Perhaps I only work on stuff there is no prior example for, but every few days I read someone's anecdote on here and get discouraged in all new ways.

Not to downplay the issue you raise but I haven't noticed this.

Every iteration I make on the prompts only make the request more specified and narrow and it's always gotten me closer to my desired goal for the PR. (But I do just ditch the worse attempts at each iteration cycle)

Is it possible that reasoning models combined with the actual interaction with the real codebase makes this "prompt fragility" issue you speak of less common?

No, I've played with all the reasoning models and they just make the noise and weirdness even worse. When I dig into every little issue, it's always something incredibly bespoke. Like the actual documentation that's on the internet is out of date for the library that was installed and the API changed, the way the one library works in one language is not how it works in the other language, just all manner of surprising things. I really learned a lot about the limits of digital representation of information.

Can it be used to fix bugs? Because the ChatGPT web app is full of them and I don't think they are getting fixed. Pasting big amounts of text freezing the tab is one of them.

Bugs? Those are grubby human work.

Seriously, everyone should get good at fixing bugs. LLMs are terrible at it when it’s slightly non-obvious and since everyone is focusing on vibe coding, I doubt they’ll get any better.

The Android app is even worse.

If that is what the best unlimited AI can deliver we are safe for at least 10 years more.

Sounds like you're manually doing something that could form the basis of further reinforcement learning.

Nudging the UI slightly for this exact flow could generate good training data.

You guys are doing great work, codex too, keep at it.

how much would this cost you if you didn't work at OpenAI?

I think the Pro plan is $200/mo for everyone? (But honestly I don't know the GPU cost and I'm interested in this question)

I thought you had privileged and complementary access from working there

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