3 ms·

> Or at "do my taxes"? codex did my taxes this year (well it actually implemented a normalization pipeline and a tax computing engine which then did the taxes,

by baq 6mo ago

> Or at "do my taxes"? codex did my taxes this year (well it actually implemented a normalization pipeline and a tax computing engine which then did the taxes, but close enough)

William_BB 6mo ago
> well it actually implemented a normalization pipeline and a tax computing engine which then did the taxes, but close enough You can't seriously believe laymen will try to implement their own tax calculators.
- baq 6mo ago
  of course not. what I believe is that laymen will put all their tax docs into codex and tell it to 'do their taxes' and the tool will decide to implement the calculator, do the taxes and present only the final numbers. the layman won't even know there was a calculator implemented.
  - William_BB 6mo ago
    Yeah, good luck trusting the output!
    - baq 6mo ago
      check back in a couple of years!
      - William_BB 6mo ago
        Ah right! Reminds me of AGI by 2025 :D
  - TeMPOraL 6mo ago
    > the layman won't even know there was a calculator implemented. That's on company making the agentic harness. Hiding details of what computer does from the user is the original sin of this industry, and subsequent generations of developers and software companies keeps doubling down on it. (Case in point - I just downloaded the Codex app for Windows, and in the options I see it has two UI modes of operating, one of which is meant for "non coding" and apparently this means hiding the details of what the agent is doing. This is precisely where the layman is betrayed by the tool.)
tsimionescu 6mo ago
If your prompt was more complex than "do my taxes", then this is irrelevant.
- baq 6mo ago
  it was many hours of working with codex, guidance and comparing to known-good outputs from previous years, but a sufficiently smart model would be able to just do it without any steering; it'd still take hours, but my input wouldn't be necessary. a harness for getting this done probably exists today, gastown perhaps or something that the frontier labs are sitting on.
  - troupo 6mo ago
    > but a sufficiently smart model would be able to just do it without any steering; Yeah, yeah, we've heard "our models will be doing everything" for close to three years now. > a harness for getting this done probably exists today, gastown perhaps That got a chuckle and a facepalm out of me. I would at least consider you half-serious if you said "openclaw", at least those people pretend to be attempting to automate their lives through LLMs (with zero tangible results, and with zero results available to non-tech people).
  - procaryote 6mo ago
    If you can assume "a sufficiently smart piece of technology" that doesn't exist now, a lot of problems become trivial
    - baq 6mo ago
      yes. but then, respect the trendline, especially if it's exponential.
      - bavell 6mo ago
        Is it exponential or logistic?
ravenstine 6mo ago
Sounds fascinating! If you wrote an article on this I bet it'd have a good shot at making it to the home page of HN.

by baq 6mo ago

> Or at "do my taxes"? codex did my taxes this year (well it actually implemented a normalization pipeline and a tax computing engine which then did the taxes, but close enough)

William_BB 6mo ago

> well it actually implemented a normalization pipeline and a tax computing engine which then did the taxes, but close enough You can't seriously believe laymen will try to implement their own tax calculators.

baq 6mo ago
of course not. what I believe is that laymen will put all their tax docs into codex and tell it to 'do their taxes' and the tool will decide to implement the calculator, do the taxes and present only the final numbers. the layman won't even know there was a calculator implemented.
- William_BB 6mo ago
  Yeah, good luck trusting the output!
  - baq 6mo ago
    check back in a couple of years!
    - William_BB 6mo ago
      Ah right! Reminds me of AGI by 2025 :D
- TeMPOraL 6mo ago
  > the layman won't even know there was a calculator implemented. That's on company making the agentic harness. Hiding details of what computer does from the user is the original sin of this industry, and subsequent generations of developers and software companies keeps doubling down on it. (Case in point - I just downloaded the Codex app for Windows, and in the options I see it has two UI modes of operating, one of which is meant for "non coding" and apparently this means hiding the details of what the agent is doing. This is precisely where the layman is betrayed by the tool.)

tsimionescu 6mo ago

If your prompt was more complex than "do my taxes", then this is irrelevant.

baq 6mo ago
it was many hours of working with codex, guidance and comparing to known-good outputs from previous years, but a sufficiently smart model would be able to just do it without any steering; it'd still take hours, but my input wouldn't be necessary. a harness for getting this done probably exists today, gastown perhaps or something that the frontier labs are sitting on.
- troupo 6mo ago
  > but a sufficiently smart model would be able to just do it without any steering; Yeah, yeah, we've heard "our models will be doing everything" for close to three years now. > a harness for getting this done probably exists today, gastown perhaps That got a chuckle and a facepalm out of me. I would at least consider you half-serious if you said "openclaw", at least those people pretend to be attempting to automate their lives through LLMs (with zero tangible results, and with zero results available to non-tech people).
- procaryote 6mo ago
  If you can assume "a sufficiently smart piece of technology" that doesn't exist now, a lot of problems become trivial
  - baq 6mo ago
    yes. but then, respect the trendline, especially if it's exponential.
    - bavell 6mo ago
      Is it exponential or logistic?

ravenstine 6mo ago

Sounds fascinating! If you wrote an article on this I bet it'd have a good shot at making it to the home page of HN.