Codex-maxxing(jxnl.co) |
Codex-maxxing(jxnl.co) |
This depends on where you're looking for "successful" people.
I generally agree with you - of those people who might report "revelations" through hallucinogenic drugs, the majority may misinterpret their drug-induced experience and hence be more confused / lost than before.
On the other hand, it can still be true that among those who eventually do have genuine spiritual insight, having used hallucinogenic substances is overrepresented compared to the general population.
Quoting from [1], where the author tried to find spiritually advanced individuals:
> Approximately 52% of participants had used hallucinogenic drugs at some point; none reported these as the trigger that led to PNSE.
PNSE = Persistent Non-Symbolic Experience.
My point is: while there are certainly people who go way overboard with the LLM stuff, that is not at odds with skillful use of LLMs being overrepresented in successful people.
I see now that you didn't make that point, but I already typed this all out and I'm gonna leave it.
[1] https://digitalcommons.ciis.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=...
With psychedelics you see the upsides in engineers who come to work the next day with designs informed by massive insights, and the downsides in people whose ‘massive insights’ result in socially abnormal behaviours.
LLMs seemingly provide validation and support, something very lacking in most lives. The distance between thinking loosely about, say, an app and getting positive feedback and absurd market predictions triggers similar ‘revelations’ in people with no meaningful context, and plays on the hopes of those who do. Much like with psychedelics, though, there is a self-supported self-validated cycle going on, prone to flights of excess.
There's a lot of stigma about it and a lot of opinionated people who don't know anything about them and still have a lot of judgements.
Then there are these people calling psychedelics hallucinogens. The former can give spiritual revelations and the latter gives vividly realistic, usually nightmarish, hallucinations.
There are also people putting an equal sign between crack cocaine and psylocibine mushrooms. But I don't think an addict will rob a petrol station with a screwdriver just to get another dose of magic mushrooms.
In such surroundings, it's just not a good idea to publicly say anything about drugs, unless you're so rich or known for your expertise, that you can shoulder some negative judgement and it's implications.
BTW. I have friends and relatives that have dealt with an actual psychosis. Not fun to experience up close. So, I don't want to take this metaphor too far. But if we're using big words like psychosis here, you might want to examine your motives, insecurities and reasoning a bit.
I've played with agentic AIs for coding and other use cases and have had some successes and failures. I'm fairly impressed with some stuff that is possible now and I use technology pragmatically. As I always have throughout my 30 year career.
For any new thing, there are always early adopters and those who really don't get it. And most other people let the early adopters figure things out and then end up copying what works some months/years later. And you always have some stragglers that can't or won't adapt that can't be helped.
Most of what this person describes in the article is very reasonable. Codex might not be the best model. But in terms of UX, OpenAI is getting a few things right that starting to make a difference. It's only a few months ago that their desktop app launched. It has gone through a pretty rapid evolution. As of a few weeks ago (it's that recent) you can install skills to connect your gmail, canva, google drive, work with ppt files, etc. In other words, it's now suitable for things other than programming. Before that, Claude CoWork was a few weeks earlier. So, this is all very new and fresh. I've tried some of this stuff and it mostly works as advertised.
The big picture here is that last year was about programmers discovering agentic AIs. This year, the business world is following. And there will be a lot of drama of people over doing it, making mistakes, etc. And lots of people whining about how they need to change and insisting that they shouldn't have to. Etc. But this stuff is clearly happening if you look through the noise a bit.
Well, I have barely anything to show for months of this. I made Termux more accessible on Android, made an MUD client for Emacs, fixed up some Emacspeak stuff because it's been abandonned going on 3 years now, and Emacs packages wait for no one, and tried added Grade 2 Braille entry support to BRLTTY. That failed because depression sucks and who would even use this vibe coded junk anyway.
The more open nature of Android made it rather easier. How far behind in features TalkBack is compared to VoiceOver, besides AI image description, made it feel like trying to heal a broken arm with pain pills. So I'm trying to tell myself that I can't fix everything, and that it's not my fault if other people, and companies, choose to not consider accessibility. I mean I can't help Google if they choose to not be helped.
Ah well, Global Accessibility Awareness Day is this Thursday. Maybe Apple will finally announce LLM image descriptions, and hopefully my iPhone 16 will be good enough for them because I can't afford to upgrade in this economy.
Do you post somewhere where I could follow what you're working on?
The further away you go, the more sensible takes you find.
SNL Weekend Update: Chad Maxxington on the Art of Looksmaxxing:
I bet you do, working at OpenAI you get paid for more token use.
Give each Codex an AgentName and ask them to mark their PR/issue/comments with those. Have one or two "managers" that manage PRs and overall project direction. I write the project directions and make long lasting issues. Each Codex session has an almost unachievable `/goal` but they are asked to achieve the goal by landing changes in `main` via PRs
I am running about 14 Codex sessions on 4 machines right now for about two weeks since OpenAI 10x'ed my 20x account and I simply can not run out of tokens fast enough.
Side note: I have multiple Claude accounts too but the new Claude Code `/goal` command is seriously broken. It waits long pauses between iterations and sometimes prematurely stops.
https://old.reddit.com/r/typescript/comments/1rjxo8z/what_if...
I think my architecture can be faster than tsgo albeit a much more painful codebase to work on. But I'm not claiming any sort of achievement yet.
Ultimately users have to decide and I have to show a very strong case that someone should use a nonofficial rewrite over Microsoft's own code.
Will tsz be a success? I am not sure. Am I learning and having fun? for sure!
Main difference would be just in how they're used (general purpose assistant vs "coding assistant") but the actual capabilities seem to be identical.
The problem I encounter is the inability of the LLM to look stuff up and respond to me. "What's that name of that database table?" "What are all the services that call this endpoint?" "Are there any open PRs for this repo right now?"
Once information can flow in both directions not just one it will be a gamechanger for me.
I can still type while doing it but it's so nice to just hold a button (or double tap to lock recording) and just brain dump what I need.
I type very fast but I feel like the unaltered speech to text allows me to express more quickly any uncertainty or doubt that I have or when I don't know exactly how to best ask for what I want.
I also like to play dumb with agents and ask it for the best option for something that I already know the answer to, just to see if it's gonna be correct, it helps get a sense of the limits of each model. That's also quicker on voice.
I don't think it makes use of intonation for the built in one, I use Hex on mac for speech to text
By this pretty cool dude -> https://github.com/kitlangton/Hex
He must be a pleasure to work with
At what point do we stop calling this development ? It's nothing even close to the process of development or engineering. "I tried to migrate X". No you didn't, you tried to ask an LLM and hoped for the best.
I mean, honestly at what point would you bother, there's no learning happening, there's no creativity happening, just talking to a literal text generator to request your refund while you go for a shower, novelty, maybe even convenient but absolutely not development.
> When I come back to Slack, replies are often already sitting in drafts. I still decide what gets sent, but the expensive part of gathering context is done.
This just feels so dystopian to me. I hope that I never work with you or someone else doing this.
I personally do use LLMs for work messaging but I'm extremely careful to state clearly like "here's a draft for that quotation request that Claude wrote:" or something like that. I would never present that as my own words.
If instead of LLM you googled do you also say "Here are the CPU architectures pytorch supports, that Google search returned"
If I've researched something and it's my thoughts, it's from me. If I've Google for 30 seconds and copied over the top result, then I generally say it.
Or rather, I generally don't even send that message because I try to my messages have actual substance.
Help me prioritize what matters most.
If someone asks me a question, research the answer as deeply as you can and draft a reply for me, but do not send it."
This is a very dangerous road to go down. You may feel like you are getting more done but end up living your life on autopilot, without any introspection or applying your own taste.
And about voice mode, I thought it was a good idea but I seriously don't know how you guys use it, my thoughts whenever I use voice are "aaaaaaaaahhhhhh, uhmmm" and then cancel it so that I can type and organize my thoughts. I don't really think those "brain dumps" are useful when you are thinking out loud like "We should really do X oh wait but actually Y is in the way and we have to take into consideration Z, but wait Y was actually done" and so on, and it turns out that your assumptions are wrong, it becomes a mess. I am in favor of the LLM to work with facts and always verify it. To me this post is basically selling Codex app and that's it, nothing new inside.
- growing fast as fuck
- overepresentation on starred repos (even though stars mean less these days, it is definitely something to look at)
- overepresentation in `rust`
- in terms of aliveness, codex is first
The cost of memory-as-files isn't writing them. It's that the agent will cheerfully claim it updated something and not actually do it, or write a one-line stub that satisfies the spec but loses the original signal. Without a verification layer, the vault accumulates plausible-looking entries that quietly drift from reality.
What ended up working for me was treating the agent's self-reported summary as a wish, not a fact. A separate process diffs the actual file system against the claimed changes and flags mismatches.
After a few cycles, the agent gets calibrated and stops claiming things that don't survive a file check. That has the side benefit of making the diff review itself much higher signal: most of what shows up is real.
The split I'd make early is per-agent instructions vs. cross-thread shared notes.
They sound like the same artifact, but “what this agent should always do” and “what sibling work just learned” age very differently. Mixing them means the wisdom gets stale together.
But seriously: It's a game. If that kind of "productivity" is seen as a positive measure of their worth, then in this game they're rewarded for optimizing it.
And the game is simply fucked up.
And that's not new. Ye olde corpo rat race has always often revolved not around maximizing the things that are useful, but instead around maximizing the things that the boss-man perceives to be valuable.
Here in 2026, if the boss-man is himself boss-maxxing by using a bot to evaluate performance, this kind of automated charade would probably work very well. Champagne would fall from the heavens. Doors would open. Velvet ropes would part.
This game is quite clearly not sustainable and must ultimately collapse, but it's still a game with winners and losers. Historically, lots of unsustainable games have left winners standing around when the the games ultimately collapses.
(And, to be frank: It's perfectly OK to hate the game. It's also OK to hate the players and the mediators.)
"I'm breakfastmaxxing. I'm a cerealpilled bowlcel in my milk era. I'm a slicemoded breadchad." etc.
(/s)
- "If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?"
- "If you’re so rich, why aren’t you smart?"
The problem I had eventually was that dictating all day is itself something that wears you out, so you get hoarse and honestly a bit more tired from it when you do it too much.
But no, overall a good Dragonfly grammar should be something that keeps you at least up to par with your typing speed.
I have my phone, I'm going for a walk, what app am I opening?
Or do you want it to speak to you too? I think this would have to be TTS on your phone. You can have ChatGPT speak to you but I don't see that feature in Codex.