llcat --load invocation.json { ... parameters you want to override ... }
Conversations are stored as JSON files and you can have a different input and output. This means you can do stuff like
for i in *; do
cat "$i" | llcat --load settings.json -cr context.json > ../results/"${i}.output"
# or use attachments
llcat --load settings.json -a "$i" -cr context.json > ../results/"${i}.output"
done
And use a non-mutable conversation to apply the same context over a group of files.
To be fair, I don't think they do want you to be excited. They have a REST API. It does the obvious things a REST API would do with OpenAI - lets you interact with openai models via a REST API. This is a CLI for it. There's really nothing to describe that isn't in the name, it's the CLI for the OpenAI Rest API. If you don't already care about the REST API then this isn't really for you.
There is no conscientious reasoning here on their part - it's not 3D chess it's 0D chess.
It's lazy at a guttural level.
This is 'totally absent product management, even the utterly basic things a regular developer would think to do without professionals to support them'.
This would not even pass muster as Open Source for friends, or internal use.
it's a zero dollar company. OpenAI is a virus. It's a liability. The code almost certainly contains some trivial backdoors, since their entire infrastructure is backdoored.
It's kind of interesting that they're releasing this, because anyone with access to the OpenAI RestAPI has probably already vibe coded an equivalent to this. It's a trivial thing to bootstrap.
I imagine the play is RL your model to solve problems using your own tools which it knows how to use most efficiently until it defaults to using services like managed agents, etc.
Be careful getting too deep in OpenAI tooling because they end up deprecating almost everything in under two years, sometimes without even a formal notice.
Everything they make these days looks to be strongly vibecoded without a decent review or functional testing. This leads to basic avoidable bugs that annoy vast numbers of users.
Not only this, but when you point out an issue to them on GitHub, they have a history of blocking the reporting user instead of tackling the technical issue.
At this point, it’s safe to assume all net-new software is vibecoded. Who in their right mind would take a month to create an MVP when a bot can spit it out in an afternoon? Existing software isn’t necessarily immune, but there are still individuals that are fighting (or resisting the change) to keep their code base human readable. It’s a losing battle. Eventually those people are either gonna change their minds, leave or be pushed out. Then the agents will be unleashed upon those code bases too.
Saying "surely, everybody does X" is a sure way to be wrong. You're even spectacularly failing at making your own point by acknowledging in the very same comment that there are, in fact, people not doing it. Some people are different from you, deal with it.
That being said, it's true than we can assume most of new software are generated. No need for hyperbole on that. An interesting fact is that it makes grandfather's concern moot: people who are generating their code don't care much if a dependency goes unmaintained, they can have it replaced by an other one in matter of minutes.
There's an other objection to openai-cli we could raise, though: why use a generalist developer tool, containing probably hundred of features we don't need, when we could make a bespoke specialized version, perfectly fit to us, in like 25 minutes? I can get that there are audiences where this would not even come to mind to the users, but we're talking about a developer tool, here. The value of that is questionable. And ironically, those who might from benefit it the most are those who don't want to generate their code.
they didn't say "surely everybody does" they said "safe to assume all", when really what they should have said is "safe to assume any" meaning any that you encounter and consider using.
I think it makes sense as a reasonable heuristic going forward, assume the MVP was vibe coded or nearly vibe coded (a weeks worth of human / agent work together, then initial release)
Considering that "it's safe to assume everybody does X" while perfectly knowing "there are actually many people who don't, but who cares" is honestly kind of militant conformism. You can expect it without assuming.
This is not unique problem to vibecoding. Google was killing products before LLM and forcing you into deprecation churn loop for years. Problem is companies without strategy trying things and then moving to next shiny thing.
I am still salty about anthropic killing Claude design in December.
There is a difference between wanton "vibecoding" and AI-assisted coding.
The latter still gives you many-X productivity improvement while the quality is pretty close to handwritten code.
LLMs are still not good enough where you can unleash it upon a huge codebase and get good results btw. Quality goes to shit once a context uses up around 50k-100k tokens. That's often only enough for one feature change and whatever validation the LLM wants to do for it.
It's fair to say that most new software is written with AI help, but that doesn't mean someone just prompted a few things and pressed deploy.
Yeah, but then you get the user's side. Will users really trust and rely on software that was vibe coded in an afternoon? Maybe for games, but for something like a CLI you would depend on - do you want to depend on someone's vibe coded in an afternoon project?
I don't know the answer. I suspect the answer today is yes for any "boxed" products like CLIs, desktop apps, mobile apps, simple client side apps, SDKs, etc. Complex services that have a livesite and deployment orchestration and numerous moving parts are still struggling, but everyone is pushing there too anyway.
As for users, I think it depends on the individual users. A lot of the time users abstract your software as a blackbox. It either works or it doesn't, and as long as you can fix it quickly and they get every bizarre feature ask answered quickly, that's all what some care about.
Personally, I have an all times low trust in the software I run. I used to cruise Show HN, /r/selfhosted, and GitHub Trending for cool new software to play with, learn from, or get inspired by. I don't anymore because I see what agents generate at work all day long.
There used to be this old joke among us programmers that we think it's insane that people trust their life to software when we all know how buggy it all can be. It was true, but also we knew that we can eventually get decent enough software. This is also out of the window now. Everything on all those places is a vibecoded thing generated in a couple of hours and no one knows what code is in there. It'll only get worse.
Personally I think the Debian model of software distribution looks more and more appealing.
I.e. I think I could trust vibe coded software more if it had been version frozen to bug fixes only and used by a lot of people for a few months or so.
Sure they will. Case in point: Claude Code. I think its being vibe coded every afternoon, and indeed lots of programmers gladly take it with its various and often-changing quirks and small bugs. No biggie, it still gets the job done.
99% of people don't care, it's us programmers that are living in a bubble thinking that other people prioritize same stuff as we do. So yes, people won't care and will depend on someone's vibe coded apps, just like they use Windows, Adobe and whatnot even though those suck.
> Who in their right mind would take a month to create an MVP when a bot can spit it out in an afternoon
The people who need something more than an MVP, I would suppose. Bot sure does spit out a prototype faster than any human can, but actually building on that dogshit prototype becomes slower than someone with a clue writing by hand.
While I agree with the premise, I would argue with the conclusion. Yes agents can and do code fast. But if you're integrating software in business where people work in some patterns, more often than not there are "real life" happening. You learn that only by operating a system long enough to know these things. And competence accumulates, and the value of provider increases with the learned patterns. I think many devs live in tech world which is sometimes detached from physical world, world where people actually has to do some work, which takes time and system working in technical sense, doesnt work in practical sense.
I don't really know what to say tbh. I feel insane at times too but I'm being a realist and a pragmatist. I think I'm in the "changed their mind" camp because I got tired of fighting and can't deny reality. It is a losing battle. All approaches to manage changes in a traditional way also don't work. I have seen people who left because they can and I might follow suit too.
Like I think (or know) code reviews are also over. Someone asks me for a 10-11am brainstorming meeting regarding a concept they are working on, at 11:15 they have a "design doc" ready, at 1pm they ping me if I had a chance to review it yet, at 3pm I approve it, at 3:30pm they send a 7k line PR... "dude, that's not ok. I'm not reviewing 7k line change" so they say "oh yes absolutely sorry about that. that makes a lot of sense. Do you want 7 1k-line PRs? or 14 500-line PRs?" "hey Claude, split this into 10 commits and open 10 stacked PRs" :|
> Like I think (or know) code reviews are also over.
Whatever the size of code review chosen, merging totally unreviewed code to prod is still totally insane. There are a few AI code review products out there. The one I've used is fairly decent at picking out issues, though there's definitely some shortcomings vs a human reviewer with additional context (especially since not everything is written down for the bot to access). So I wouldn't say they are over. Even though the AI review isn't perfect, we all know human reviews aren't either.
As AI improves it'll be able to hold more of the codebase as context, enabling better, quicker reviews.
There was a generation of programmers who obsessed about memory alignment, bit packing, SoA vs AoS, memory arenas, handwritten assembly, etc. For well over a decade now, a todo app would take 800MB in RAM, but it has really cool mark-done animation so people would use it. If it's slow on your machine, get the new i7 or M58 mac to experience this awesome todo app.
Sort of, that's the mindset you get because you've no clue how the app actually works.
We have a 100% vibe-coding team, and yes, when they couldn't pass through the CI/CD at some point, they contacted the Ops team and literally said "the agent said the problem is on your side".
This reminded me my dad's story. "In highschool we used to tell our teachers we couldn't do our homework because lights were out." Take anyway you want.
In MacOS there are two ChatGPT apps. The new one and the old one called ChatGPT classic. No matter how hard I try, I can’t get the new one to work with either the “live” realtime mode or the vocal transcription feature.
It’s absurd, I have the latest OS version, a M4 MacBook, but the new app seems to be buggy as hell.
Is this the new software quality standard we should expect from a company that is worth billions (if not trillions)?
This has become the new standard, better get used to it. You have to stay on your feet no matter what technology you use. The time of picking one and sticking with it for years is long gone.
> You have to stay on your feet no matter what technology you use
This was said about web technologies and crypto and every other hype cycle, and it's never been true at all. The vast majority of people are okay just picking something reasonable or a default, and sticking with it.
It's not difficult to imagine that pi.dev will be around in 10 years, and it's not difficult to imagine that vim, visual studio, vscode, linux and ext4 will still be around in 10 years.
I don't know what kind of massive innovation you see here. This is like flying cars; every couple years there's a demo of a flying car of some variety, some people immediately short mercedes, and 5 years later mercedes is still around, making slightly more modern cars than before.
If you really believe that the tech-news hype cycle reflects reality, I urge you to go solve an advent of code in a normal programming language, maybe that'll help get you back on track.
Makes sense. Very hard for humans to keep up with LLM-generated code. But LLMs/Agents have no problem with this. So they are using the dev style that would drive their business towards generating more money. A funny concept for a non-profit organization.
> Very hard for humans to keep up with LLM-generated code
Not at all. It's hard to keep up with lines of code per day, i.e. quantity.
It's not difficult for humans to keep up with the quality, and produce far superior quality code by writing it themselves or instructing an LLM what exactly to implement, down to each function's API surface (if typing is the bottleneck).
A lot of you people are forgetting that there's an engineering aspect to programming, and LLMs are really really really terrible at it out of the box.
Let's say you can let AI design and 3D print 1 large real-life bridge per week. Would you say that humans can't keep up? Or would you point out that there's a difference between what civil engineers do and what an LLM with a 3D printer does?
I don't see how buggy software directly leads to generating more money? A company being successful doesn't somehow magically make them infallible, 100% rational or immune to making mistakes (as you are implying).
I don't know why people keep harping on buggy software.. it really is the average not the exception. I mean we see this with all the defects in existing software that agents find.
I love how people all pretend that they and most engineers are god like programmers. Sure, some people are really good. My 30 years of experience say that is like 5%, maybe if you are at google or a really good start up, that can creep up to 30-50%.
By far the majority of engineers are not elegant or even really craftsman like. Add to this that unless you are working on a pet project you are usually neck deep in something that has had teams working in it for years.
It creates situations where most engineers don't really know what the code base does below the surface area where they are making feature changes. So work gets cobbled on or patched in where people are comfortable making changes.
All I can say is I would much rather have 3 open Opus 5.5 instances than a team of 3 working for me if we are only talking about delivering high quality code. I don't think that is the only value of engineers, but I think we are at a point where the models have way exceeded average engineer ability. There are still tendencies for "compatability everything" and "don't rock the boat" in the current frontier LLMs that can create architectural issues, but if you know what to look for when working, it isn't generally an issue.
I mean just remember how mush everyone complained about buggy games or MacOs or whatever before LLMs even came around.
I am not implying that at all. All I'm saying is that humans can't keep up with LLM/agent rates of code generation but agents come, so what is unusable for humans is ok for LLMs.
And LLMs being required is very profitable to those who sell LLMs.
It's sort of nuts how bad the Codex app is. In a month, I've "vibe-coded" my own replacement which does everything I care about significantly better, especially their remote chat functionality which just feels completely half-baked and broken. And I'm not getting a 6 figure salary to work on it. I don't understand what they're doing.
I've been working on something in a similar class for about a year called llcat
It came out of a lack of their being an LLM-native tool that feels like cURL or other unix-friendly things such as awk or sed.
I wanted a reference tool that was stateless, explicit, low-level, and composable without modal settings.
I couldn't find anything so I wrote it myself.
Instead of config files, llcat can index into files with jq or line numbers and save invocations for later. For instance
and then Conversations are stored as JSON files and you can have a different input and output. This means you can do stuff like And use a non-mutable conversation to apply the same context over a group of files.One of my favorites is this pattern:
and so on...Since there's no hidden state you can use it in shell scripts and get operational guarantees.
I've put a lot of effort into this and use it daily. If you can give it a go and give me feedback and file bugs, I'd love it.
https://github.com/day50-dev/llcat
There wasn't a cli before? I guess I just used the vscode extension before and assumed there was a cli?
Wait, wasn't codex the "openai cli"? Their product names are so confusing (chat, vs. work ?!).. almost like the whole thing is vibecoded.
It's the logical conclusion of having as the ultimate goal vibe managing a business.
The claim that the name alone explains the tool is weak: a CLI wrapper still needs one line stating what problem it solves and who should use it.
2 trillion dollar company can't put 1 single sentence describing what something is, why it's useful, what it's for - instead barfs technical jargon.
It's like if someone handed you an arcane set of page 20-40 of an IKEA assembly manual and expected you to be excited.
About what? Exactly?
To be fair, I don't think they do want you to be excited. They have a REST API. It does the obvious things a REST API would do with OpenAI - lets you interact with openai models via a REST API. This is a CLI for it. There's really nothing to describe that isn't in the name, it's the CLI for the OpenAI Rest API. If you don't already care about the REST API then this isn't really for you.
There is no conscientious reasoning here on their part - it's not 3D chess it's 0D chess.
It's lazy at a guttural level.
This is 'totally absent product management, even the utterly basic things a regular developer would think to do without professionals to support them'.
This would not even pass muster as Open Source for friends, or internal use.
It's very likely come out of necessity. It doesn't need to look pretty.
it's a zero dollar company. OpenAI is a virus. It's a liability. The code almost certainly contains some trivial backdoors, since their entire infrastructure is backdoored.
Edit: look at this crap for example:
https://github.com/openai/openai-cli/blob/main/scripts/run
(just the first file I looked at.) it's obviously half of a backdoor. Some other process somewhere happens to give the other half.
bru what ? This is just a standard `go run` wrapper to run the CLI lol
It's kind of interesting that they're releasing this, because anyone with access to the OpenAI RestAPI has probably already vibe coded an equivalent to this. It's a trivial thing to bootstrap.
It's easy to vibe code a kind of messy thing that works, very had to maintain and improve pure vibed stuff.
When should I use this over Codex? Is this supposed to be called by other tools/agents?
Codex = agent harness
OpenAI CLI = wrapper around API
> wrapper around API
aka curl? :-/
to be fair `gh` works so much better for me than crafting curl requests (even with LLMs)
Curl with token usage so it’s better.
that was my assumption, maybe you use Claude but want it to use OpenAI image generation or something. this got a physical shrug out of me.
I imagine the play is RL your model to solve problems using your own tools which it knows how to use most efficiently until it defaults to using services like managed agents, etc.
Honestly surprised this wasn't available sooner.
Does this consume the monthly flat rate subscription quota or API credits.
Does Anthropic have something similar.
I understand "claude -p" has been unreliable to use with subscription quota and often required "extra usage" credits.
Be careful getting too deep in OpenAI tooling because they end up deprecating almost everything in under two years, sometimes without even a formal notice.
Everything they make these days looks to be strongly vibecoded without a decent review or functional testing. This leads to basic avoidable bugs that annoy vast numbers of users.
Not only this, but when you point out an issue to them on GitHub, they have a history of blocking the reporting user instead of tackling the technical issue.
At this point, it’s safe to assume all net-new software is vibecoded. Who in their right mind would take a month to create an MVP when a bot can spit it out in an afternoon? Existing software isn’t necessarily immune, but there are still individuals that are fighting (or resisting the change) to keep their code base human readable. It’s a losing battle. Eventually those people are either gonna change their minds, leave or be pushed out. Then the agents will be unleashed upon those code bases too.
Saying "surely, everybody does X" is a sure way to be wrong. You're even spectacularly failing at making your own point by acknowledging in the very same comment that there are, in fact, people not doing it. Some people are different from you, deal with it.
That being said, it's true than we can assume most of new software are generated. No need for hyperbole on that. An interesting fact is that it makes grandfather's concern moot: people who are generating their code don't care much if a dependency goes unmaintained, they can have it replaced by an other one in matter of minutes.
There's an other objection to openai-cli we could raise, though: why use a generalist developer tool, containing probably hundred of features we don't need, when we could make a bespoke specialized version, perfectly fit to us, in like 25 minutes? I can get that there are audiences where this would not even come to mind to the users, but we're talking about a developer tool, here. The value of that is questionable. And ironically, those who might from benefit it the most are those who don't want to generate their code.
they didn't say "surely everybody does" they said "safe to assume all", when really what they should have said is "safe to assume any" meaning any that you encounter and consider using.
I think it makes sense as a reasonable heuristic going forward, assume the MVP was vibe coded or nearly vibe coded (a weeks worth of human / agent work together, then initial release)
Considering that "it's safe to assume everybody does X" while perfectly knowing "there are actually many people who don't, but who cares" is honestly kind of militant conformism. You can expect it without assuming.
You put it better than me
This is not unique problem to vibecoding. Google was killing products before LLM and forcing you into deprecation churn loop for years. Problem is companies without strategy trying things and then moving to next shiny thing.
I am still salty about anthropic killing Claude design in December.
Claude Design was/is absolutely brilliant. The embedded skill in work and code is capable but the experience of Claude design was so much cleaner.
There is a difference between wanton "vibecoding" and AI-assisted coding.
The latter still gives you many-X productivity improvement while the quality is pretty close to handwritten code.
LLMs are still not good enough where you can unleash it upon a huge codebase and get good results btw. Quality goes to shit once a context uses up around 50k-100k tokens. That's often only enough for one feature change and whatever validation the LLM wants to do for it.
It's fair to say that most new software is written with AI help, but that doesn't mean someone just prompted a few things and pressed deploy.
Yeah, but then you get the user's side. Will users really trust and rely on software that was vibe coded in an afternoon? Maybe for games, but for something like a CLI you would depend on - do you want to depend on someone's vibe coded in an afternoon project?
I don't know the answer. I suspect the answer today is yes for any "boxed" products like CLIs, desktop apps, mobile apps, simple client side apps, SDKs, etc. Complex services that have a livesite and deployment orchestration and numerous moving parts are still struggling, but everyone is pushing there too anyway.
As for users, I think it depends on the individual users. A lot of the time users abstract your software as a blackbox. It either works or it doesn't, and as long as you can fix it quickly and they get every bizarre feature ask answered quickly, that's all what some care about.
Personally, I have an all times low trust in the software I run. I used to cruise Show HN, /r/selfhosted, and GitHub Trending for cool new software to play with, learn from, or get inspired by. I don't anymore because I see what agents generate at work all day long.
There used to be this old joke among us programmers that we think it's insane that people trust their life to software when we all know how buggy it all can be. It was true, but also we knew that we can eventually get decent enough software. This is also out of the window now. Everything on all those places is a vibecoded thing generated in a couple of hours and no one knows what code is in there. It'll only get worse.
Personally I think the Debian model of software distribution looks more and more appealing.
I.e. I think I could trust vibe coded software more if it had been version frozen to bug fixes only and used by a lot of people for a few months or so.
Sure they will. Case in point: Claude Code. I think its being vibe coded every afternoon, and indeed lots of programmers gladly take it with its various and often-changing quirks and small bugs. No biggie, it still gets the job done.
99% of people don't care, it's us programmers that are living in a bubble thinking that other people prioritize same stuff as we do. So yes, people won't care and will depend on someone's vibe coded apps, just like they use Windows, Adobe and whatnot even though those suck.
> Who in their right mind would take a month to create an MVP when a bot can spit it out in an afternoon
The people who need something more than an MVP, I would suppose. Bot sure does spit out a prototype faster than any human can, but actually building on that dogshit prototype becomes slower than someone with a clue writing by hand.
While I agree with the premise, I would argue with the conclusion. Yes agents can and do code fast. But if you're integrating software in business where people work in some patterns, more often than not there are "real life" happening. You learn that only by operating a system long enough to know these things. And competence accumulates, and the value of provider increases with the learned patterns. I think many devs live in tech world which is sometimes detached from physical world, world where people actually has to do some work, which takes time and system working in technical sense, doesnt work in practical sense.
This type of comments is making me insane.
I don't really know what to say tbh. I feel insane at times too but I'm being a realist and a pragmatist. I think I'm in the "changed their mind" camp because I got tired of fighting and can't deny reality. It is a losing battle. All approaches to manage changes in a traditional way also don't work. I have seen people who left because they can and I might follow suit too.
Like I think (or know) code reviews are also over. Someone asks me for a 10-11am brainstorming meeting regarding a concept they are working on, at 11:15 they have a "design doc" ready, at 1pm they ping me if I had a chance to review it yet, at 3pm I approve it, at 3:30pm they send a 7k line PR... "dude, that's not ok. I'm not reviewing 7k line change" so they say "oh yes absolutely sorry about that. that makes a lot of sense. Do you want 7 1k-line PRs? or 14 500-line PRs?" "hey Claude, split this into 10 commits and open 10 stacked PRs" :|
> Like I think (or know) code reviews are also over.
Whatever the size of code review chosen, merging totally unreviewed code to prod is still totally insane. There are a few AI code review products out there. The one I've used is fairly decent at picking out issues, though there's definitely some shortcomings vs a human reviewer with additional context (especially since not everything is written down for the bot to access). So I wouldn't say they are over. Even though the AI review isn't perfect, we all know human reviews aren't either.
As AI improves it'll be able to hold more of the codebase as context, enabling better, quicker reviews.
This type of comments gives me the impression that HN is riddled with AI marketing bots.
Most people are practical
Reality is making you question your sanity.
The comments are just accurately describing that new, insane reality.
There are different ways of using AI. Experienced software developers can easily still test their "vibe coded" app for most common bugs.
https://xkcd.com/1483/
>Eventually all the people who hate this kind of thing are going to be dead, and the ones who use it are going to be in control.
The West has fallen.
There was a generation of programmers who obsessed about memory alignment, bit packing, SoA vs AoS, memory arenas, handwritten assembly, etc. For well over a decade now, a todo app would take 800MB in RAM, but it has really cool mark-done animation so people would use it. If it's slow on your machine, get the new i7 or M58 mac to experience this awesome todo app.
I'm so curious what you do when the providers go down. Do you tell your boss you can't fix the incident because your token quota is out?
Sort of, that's the mindset you get because you've no clue how the app actually works.
We have a 100% vibe-coding team, and yes, when they couldn't pass through the CI/CD at some point, they contacted the Ops team and literally said "the agent said the problem is on your side".
…yes? This is the equivalent of an electrician showing up to your house without tools.
It would be faster to setup a deepseek locally hosted instance or glm than try and build by hand, assuming all hosted providers were down somehow.
Which is to say, there is no token quota. If you run out you buy more.
How many times have you heard "we can't work because GitHub is down?". This has nothing to do with AI, and yes, it's commonplace.
Not to mention the "yes, there's a bug. We opened a ticket to the maintainer. Now we wait".
This reminded me my dad's story. "In highschool we used to tell our teachers we couldn't do our homework because lights were out." Take anyway you want.
In MacOS there are two ChatGPT apps. The new one and the old one called ChatGPT classic. No matter how hard I try, I can’t get the new one to work with either the “live” realtime mode or the vocal transcription feature.
It’s absurd, I have the latest OS version, a M4 MacBook, but the new app seems to be buggy as hell.
Is this the new software quality standard we should expect from a company that is worth billions (if not trillions)?
> Is this the new software quality standard we should expect from a company that is worth billions (if not trillions)?
For a while, yes.
This has become the new standard, better get used to it. You have to stay on your feet no matter what technology you use. The time of picking one and sticking with it for years is long gone.
> You have to stay on your feet no matter what technology you use
This was said about web technologies and crypto and every other hype cycle, and it's never been true at all. The vast majority of people are okay just picking something reasonable or a default, and sticking with it.
It's not difficult to imagine that pi.dev will be around in 10 years, and it's not difficult to imagine that vim, visual studio, vscode, linux and ext4 will still be around in 10 years.
I don't know what kind of massive innovation you see here. This is like flying cars; every couple years there's a demo of a flying car of some variety, some people immediately short mercedes, and 5 years later mercedes is still around, making slightly more modern cars than before.
If you really believe that the tech-news hype cycle reflects reality, I urge you to go solve an advent of code in a normal programming language, maybe that'll help get you back on track.
It’s all greenfield and I’m not surprised to see deprecation. Eventually tooling will distill into what works.
Makes sense. Very hard for humans to keep up with LLM-generated code. But LLMs/Agents have no problem with this. So they are using the dev style that would drive their business towards generating more money. A funny concept for a non-profit organization.
> Very hard for humans to keep up with LLM-generated code
Not at all. It's hard to keep up with lines of code per day, i.e. quantity.
It's not difficult for humans to keep up with the quality, and produce far superior quality code by writing it themselves or instructing an LLM what exactly to implement, down to each function's API surface (if typing is the bottleneck).
A lot of you people are forgetting that there's an engineering aspect to programming, and LLMs are really really really terrible at it out of the box.
Let's say you can let AI design and 3D print 1 large real-life bridge per week. Would you say that humans can't keep up? Or would you point out that there's a difference between what civil engineers do and what an LLM with a 3D printer does?
I don't see how buggy software directly leads to generating more money? A company being successful doesn't somehow magically make them infallible, 100% rational or immune to making mistakes (as you are implying).
I don't know why people keep harping on buggy software.. it really is the average not the exception. I mean we see this with all the defects in existing software that agents find.
I love how people all pretend that they and most engineers are god like programmers. Sure, some people are really good. My 30 years of experience say that is like 5%, maybe if you are at google or a really good start up, that can creep up to 30-50%.
By far the majority of engineers are not elegant or even really craftsman like. Add to this that unless you are working on a pet project you are usually neck deep in something that has had teams working in it for years.
It creates situations where most engineers don't really know what the code base does below the surface area where they are making feature changes. So work gets cobbled on or patched in where people are comfortable making changes.
All I can say is I would much rather have 3 open Opus 5.5 instances than a team of 3 working for me if we are only talking about delivering high quality code. I don't think that is the only value of engineers, but I think we are at a point where the models have way exceeded average engineer ability. There are still tendencies for "compatability everything" and "don't rock the boat" in the current frontier LLMs that can create architectural issues, but if you know what to look for when working, it isn't generally an issue.
I mean just remember how mush everyone complained about buggy games or MacOs or whatever before LLMs even came around.
> as you are implying
I am not implying that at all. All I'm saying is that humans can't keep up with LLM/agent rates of code generation but agents come, so what is unusable for humans is ok for LLMs.
And LLMs being required is very profitable to those who sell LLMs.
Never did I imply any bugs
It's sort of nuts how bad the Codex app is. In a month, I've "vibe-coded" my own replacement which does everything I care about significantly better, especially their remote chat functionality which just feels completely half-baked and broken. And I'm not getting a 6 figure salary to work on it. I don't understand what they're doing.