A few days ago I put Codex on the task of translating a library from Rust to Java, and it nailed it.
Admittedly, it wasn’t a very complex codebase, but it was still pretty incredible to see, especially considering that for an human it would have been a tedious work of likely 1/2 full days, while Codex completed it in about ~20 minutes, almost perfectly.
I remember that 5 years ago, automatic translation from one language to another was only a thing of dreams and few tech demos.
I'm pretty convinced now that a lot of the work I've done over the years on cross language bindings could be done by Codex in just a few minutes, or, better yet, by translating the source library directly.
That said it is still no match for an experienced human dev, so I strongly doubt traditional coding is dead, but I think we are going to see more single dev+agent teams going forward, where the dev focuses on complex tasks while the agent can write the glue and maintain the boilerplate.
They are very powerful tools
A few days ago I put Codex on the task of translating a library from Rust to Java, and it nailed it.
Admittedly, it wasn’t a very complex codebase, but it was still pretty incredible to see, especially considering that for an human it would have been a tedious work of likely 1/2 full days, while Codex completed it in about ~20 minutes, almost perfectly.
I remember that 5 years ago, automatic translation from one language to another was only a thing of dreams and few tech demos.
I'm pretty convinced now that a lot of the work I've done over the years on cross language bindings could be done by Codex in just a few minutes, or, better yet, by translating the source library directly.
That said it is still no match for an experienced human dev, so I strongly doubt traditional coding is dead, but I think we are going to see more single dev+agent teams going forward, where the dev focuses on complex tasks while the agent can write the glue and maintain the boilerplate.