Re:GPT-5.3-Codex
by logicprog on Thursday February 05, 2026 @08:14PM
(#46907764)
> single useful ... preferably reliable, program that solves a non-trivial problem that hasn't been solved before a bunch of times in publicly available code
How many such programs are there in general? The vast vast majority of programs that are written are slight modifications, reorganizations, or extensions, of one or more programs that are already publicly available a bunch of times over. Even the ones that aren't could fairly easily be considered just recombinations of different pieces of programs that have been written and are publicly available dozens or more times over, just different parts of them combined in a different order. Hell, most code is a reorganization or recombination of the exact same types of patterns just in a different way corresponding to different business logic or algorithms, if you want to push it that far. And yet plenty of deeply unoriginal programs are very useful and fill a useful niche, so they get written anyway.
My point being that if there aren't, as a percentage, very many reliable, useful, and original programs that have been written in the decades since open source became a thing, why would we expect a five-year-old technology to have done so, especially when, obviously, the more reliable original and broadly useful programs have already written, the narrower the scope for new ones to satisfy the originality criteria.
It should also be noted that even if agents give 100x productivity gains to writing a useful tool or service or program or improving existing ones with new features. We still wouldn't expect them to give necessarily very many much productivity gains at all to writing original programs, precisely because of their current technology is a product of deep thinking, understanding a specific domain, seeing a niche, inspiration, science, talent and luck much more than the ability to even do productive engineering.
How many such programs are there in general? The vast vast majority of programs that are written are slight modifications, reorganizations, or extensions, of one or more programs that are already publicly available a bunch of times over. Even the ones that aren't could fairly easily be considered just recombinations of different pieces of programs that have been written and are publicly available dozens or more times over, just different parts of them combined in a different order. Hell, most code is a reorganization or recombination of the exact same types of patterns just in a different way corresponding to different business logic or algorithms, if you want to push it that far. And yet plenty of deeply unoriginal programs are very useful and fill a useful niche, so they get written anyway.
My point being that if there aren't, as a percentage, very many reliable, useful, and original programs that have been written in the decades since open source became a thing, why would we expect a five-year-old technology to have done so, especially when, obviously, the more reliable original and broadly useful programs have already written, the narrower the scope for new ones to satisfy the originality criteria.
It should also be noted that even if agents give 100x productivity gains to writing a useful tool or service or program or improving existing ones with new features. We still wouldn't expect them to give necessarily very many much productivity gains at all to writing original programs, precisely because of their current technology is a product of deep thinking, understanding a specific domain, seeing a niche, inspiration, science, talent and luck much more than the ability to even do productive engineering.