About how well OpenAI Codex handles real programming beyond its demos.
Has this happened?
Yes 65 (52%)Not sure 22 (18%)No 38 (30%)
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
Hacker News has set AI a lot of challenges over the years. Which ones has it met?
About how well OpenAI Codex handles real programming beyond its demos.
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
How did it mess up the "make every fifth line bold" prompt?
Also, to follow up on the original comment, AI demos are nice, but being a student of history there are still fundamental challenges with these systems. My skepticism is in how much prompting is really required and how can it understand higher level semantics like code refactoring, reproducible examples, large scale design patterns etc.
This synthesis of sequential symbolic processes and probabilistic neural generation is really exciting though.
When the amount of human code edits and tweaking for complex programs goes down from hours to seconds then that's when I'll be impressed and scared.