> the entire appeal of Claude Code is that it does everything itself, like figuring out what files to read/change

how is this appealing? I think I must be getting old because the idea of letting a language model run wild and run commands on my system -- that's unsanitized input! --horrifies me! What do you mean just let it change random files??

I'm going to have to learn a new trade, IDK

In the OpenAI demo of codex they said that it’s sandboxed.

It only has access to files within the directory it’s run from, even if it calls tools that could theoretically access files anywhere on your system. Also had networking blocked, also in a sandboxes fashion so that things like curl don’t work either.

I wasn’t particularly impressed with my short test of Codex yesterday. Just the fact that it managed to make any decent changes at all was good, but when it messed up the code it took a long time and a lot of tokens to figure out.

I think we need fine tuned models that are good at different tasks. A specific fine tune for fixing syntax errors in Java would be a good start.

In general it also needs to be more proactive in writing and running tests.

It shows you the diff and you confirm it, asks you before running commands, and doesn't allow accessing files outside the current dir. You can also tell it to not ask again and let it go wild, I've built full features this way and then just go through and clean it up a bit after.