The Codex bug tracker is a great insight into how wide the knowledge gap seem to be between users. The issue where people ask them to add back /undo or whatever it is instead of just learning to use git, probably reached 100 comments at least by now. People seemingly don't really understand the computers they use on a daily basis, and refuse to learn too.

We managed to generate probably-correct code, which can then be probably-corrected recursively to get to something that runs (usually).

This made everyone scream and lose their minds saying that code is finished, people think they don't need a technical cofounder anymore, think they don't need engineers anymore, etc. Then they're, at varying speeds, finding out they're wrong.

It seems oddly circular to me that the _exact hubris_ non-engineers have long accused engineers of - and we have indeed been too often guilty of - they themselves turn out to be JUST as guilty of! Just like engineers thought all sales did was bother people, and all marketing did was send emails, and all support did was tell people to turn it off and on again, and all product did was copy google... they all apparently thought all engineers did was tik-tak-click-clack type code all day and when it compiled it was done. Not knowing how much higher-order... well, engineering, there is to it.

Where are all the CTOs during all of this? I thought someone was supposed to be sticking up for their org? Sales, marketing, etc all seem to have entrenched C-suite people keeping their fiefdoms resistant to erosion by outsourcing, downsizing, etc. But all our CTOs seems to have collectively thrown us to the wolves.

I suspect most people don't even know there's a there there.

For instance, while I now know that file systems have permissions, before I became a programmer, I spent maybe ten years thinking of permissions as a special, obscure system thing that you should never touch.

For that matter, I suspect many people don't know basic things like that a file system isn't inherently the operating system.

And, where would you go to learn this information? Your Mac doesn't ship with a manual—how would you know one exists? Furthermore, I would wager that perhaps most people have never learned how anything works requiring a manual and are simply unaware that that's a thing.

All to say, I'm not sure "refusal" is the right term.

The knowledge gap is very real. Because unsavvy users are just going to paste the API key into codex and say "make it work". For the truly lazy/uninformed, codex has computer use, and are going to tell it go into Vercel/Netlify/Stripe/Cloudflare for them, and get the API key, and save it to .env for them. So users knowing they need such a feature in the first place should be celebrated when the alternative is even dumber.

That's the product that is being sold here… why shame the users for expecting what was marketed to them?