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I think it's hard as he's done a huge article about coding with agents, with no code examples.

You can go look at his GitHub but it's a bewildering array of projects. I've had a bit of a poke around at a few of the seemingly more recent ones. Bit odd though as in one he's gone heavy on TS classes and another heavy on functions. Might be he was just contributing to one as it was under a different account.

And a lot of them seem to be tools that wrap a lot of cli tools. There is a ton of scaffolding code, to handle a ton of cli options. A LOT of logger stmts, one file I randomly opened was a logger stmt every other line.

So it's hard to judge, I found it hard to wade through the code as it's basically just a bunch of option handling for tool calls. It didn't really do much. But necessary, probably?

Just very different code than I need to write.

And there are some weird tells that make it hard to believe.

For example, he talks about refactoring for useEffect in React but I KNOW GPT5 is really rubbish at it.

Some code it's given me recently was littered with useEffect and useMemo when it wasn't needed. Then when challenged it got rid of some, then changed other stuff to useEffect when again, it wasnt needed.

And then got all confused and basically blew it's top.

Yet this person says he can just chuck a basic prompt at his codex cli, running GPT5 and it magically refractors the bad useEffects?

How are we getting such different results?



OP: If you give the llm examples like https://react.dev/learn/you-might-not-need-an-effect, it does a farily good job at refactoring useEffecs.

And yes refactoring sometimes re-introduces these, so it's not a perfect solution.


The irony here is that I did!

Having looked at the code a bit more, all I can say is that it's a lot of code to do little.

There's also a lot of naive error throwing going on.

And he seems to debug using logger stmts.

They're not scalable projects, you couldn't write enterprise software the way those projects are written. You would end up with such a volume of code.


Personally, my experience with codex is same as yours, no way I would ever use codex for TS projects and especially not React. I don't know this mate personally but if we were talking about this over beer I would probably tell you (after 3rd one when I am more open to being direct) that I think I trust this blog as much as I trust President (this one or previous ones) to tell the truth :)

My comment was more geared towards an insane amount of comments on myriad of "AI" / "agent coding" posts where soooooo many people will write "oh, such AI slop" assuming that average SWE would write it better. I don't know many things but working with these tools heavily over the last year or so (and really heavily last 6 months) I'll take their output over general average SWE every day of the week and twice on Sunday (provided that I am driving the code generation myself, not general AI generated code...)


(OP) the current projec is closed source. If you look at my cli tools, that's pure slop, all I care is that it works, so reviewing that code for sure will show some weird stuff. Does it matter? It's a tool to fetch logs form a server. I run it locally. As long as is does that reliably, idk about the code.


What does your current project do? Do you make money with it?




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