Comment by CompoundEyes
9 hours ago
I’m doing enterprise coding tasks that used to take a month of whole team coordination from mockups to through development and testing in 3 days now. It’s all test driven development, codex 5.3 and a small team of two people who know how to hold it right orchestrating the agents. There’s no reason not to work this way. The sociotechnical engineering aspects of this change are fascinating and rewarding to solve.
I work for an old enterprise, so far rather conservative with LLM/AI usage. However the copilot cli adoption in the last 2 weeks is spreading light wild fire. Codex 5.3, a good instructions file and it works. Features are getting done and delivered in days, proper test coverage is done, proper documentation in place. Onboarding to it is also very fast.
Can you give an example of such features?
Porting tons of untyped js legacy front end code to vue with typescript and figma designs. Highly configurable business to business app (i.e lots of permutations). Everyone seems to have a “system”. I recommend looking at the OpenAI Cookbook for long running plans and do TDD to the extreme. https://developers.openai.com/cookbook/articles/codex_exec_p...
What's the feature that was built though? This sounds like low-value refactoring. They are fundamentally different development workflows.
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Many of my industry friends and I were skeptics about all the things the OP mentions, still am. And yet, I am able to push 30-40K lines of nearly perfect code a day now.
It's different just like the steam engine was different, except technology moves much 100x faster now than it did then. It's different and the same.
The 40k lines of code a day crows are amusing. In solving any problem solvable by code, there's a ratio of non-coding work to coding work, and codex et al all help immensely with the coding work but help less with the non-coding work.
Non-coding work is thinking about the system architecture, thinking about how data should flow, thinking about the problem to be solved, talking with people who will use it, discovering what their objectives are.
Producing 40k lines a code per day simply means you're not doing any of that work: the work that ensures you're building something worth building.
Which is why the result is massive, pointless things that don't do the things people actually need, because you've not taken any time to actually identify the problems worth solving or how to solve them.
It's a form of mania that recalls Kafka's The Burrow, where an underground creature builds and builds an endless series of catacombs without much purpose or coherence. When building becomes so easy when it was so hard -- and when it becomes more fun to build and watch codex's streams of diffs fly by, than to plan -- we forget the purpose of building, and building becomes its own purpose, which is why we usually so little actual productive impact on the world from the "40k lines of code a day" cohort.
What job are you in where you can even come up with problems that -need- 30-40k lines of code a day?
And how do you know they are nearly perfect?
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If you are pushing 40k lines of code per day you are an idiot and should be fired.
yeah... maybe he is working alone or bootstrapping a brand new thing?
Otherwise his entire team must collectively groan when a Slack message appears: "Got a new PR ready for review everybody!"
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I agree with your point that the original claim is unlikely to be true (and would be extremely foolish behavior even if it were true). I don't think it's good to flame people though, even if they did say something unreasonable.
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> "I am able to push 30-40K lines of nearly perfect code a day now."
It is physically and physiologically impossible for anyone to be reviewing "30-40K lines of nearly perfect code a day" to the extent needed to push it with confidence in a sensible development process.
Are you really reviewing 30-40k lines of code a day?
Why do you and many of your industry friends conveniently never actually post their 'perfect code' when asked for proof? I've asked like five different people now that make these claims and they just vanish into the ether.
Note that when code is shown, like the "browser" that was recently put on blast, it's often terrible.
Are we experiencing a huge influence campaign on HN?
do you understand every line of code you churn out?