On call with Codex

Key Takeaways

The magic for me of building products is seeing other people use them, get the spark of delight when they start using it in ways that I completely didn't expect. My name is Calvin. I work on the codeex team as an engineer here at OpenAI. It's come together really quickly. But the end result that we're launching to the world is something that frankly is pretty magical in my opinion and has sort of changed the way that I write software as an engineer. Typically when engineers are running services, there's one person or a couple people on the team who act as the on call. So they're kind of the like first line of defense as like a firefighter for the team. And actually, I'm that this week. So it's particularly top of mind for me. At any moment, I might get paged and have to abandon whatever I was working on and context switch to this new thing to figure out what's going on. There are a couple things that Codeex really helps with here. Often times when you're on call, you'll get some sort of alert and you'll kind of look through the error logs and you'll see, oh, hey, there's an error at this one particular part of the codebase. And sometimes it's something I'm familiar with, but sometimes it's not. When the minutes and seconds matter in terms of responding to an issue, the first thing I'll do is just fire off that stack trace into codeex to understand where the issue is happening and see if it can fix it. Usually, I'll like do that as a first line of defense. And often the results that comes back are pretty good. Does this make you do what you got to do? I'm actually getting paged right now. Uh let's see. Uh so right now we have like a high number of error or rollouts which are failing. Um this alert has been a little flaky though every time. Oops. Okay. Uh okay. Another thing that I use Codex for is uh tuning our alerting. Right now, since we're about to go into launch, uh we haven't fully tuned this to where it needs to be. Sometimes we get alerting and it's kind of a false positive where you used to kind of work as an individual engineer and like you'd have your task and you'd be writing code. Now it allows you to work almost more like you're your own team or like a manager of a team. I can just send it over to Codeex. Now I can just consider it done. [Music]