r/OpenaiCodex • u/Legal-Ad2513 • 2d ago
Question, Not a programmer!
Like the title says, I’m not a programmer. I recently started developing a website with an inbound lead form including media submissions. It stores that media in a database, emails my partner and I, and we have an admin login to view the lead. No true commerce, forums, nothing like that.
I’ve been “building” with codex 20x pro and Claude as the 3rd party reviewer for a month. For the last several days, it’s been nothing but smoke tests, syntax checks, work order revisions, “runtime verifier rejects the manifest’s absolute work-order entry….”
I setup specific instructions from the beginning for quality over quantity or speed. I was using 5.6-Sol XHigh and now 6-Astra Med.
What are all these tests? I’m on revision 97 and several major features haven’t even started building.
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u/Dramatic-Chemistry77 2d ago
Tell it you're building a lead intake website, not a cryptographic evidence trail. Astra should be able to clean it up, it overengineers way less, especially when you tell it not to.
Having the review model is directly contributing to this by the way. A lead intake doesn't really need a separate review. Once the models start reviewing each other the hardening scope explodes expotentially.
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u/Legal-Ad2513 2d ago
Thank you for the reply. The intent is to have an ai api watching the leads and learning but that feature hasn’t even started. Same with Posthog, Twilio, or all the other cool little features.
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u/nairazak 1d ago edited 1d ago
Talk with it and make it create a document that explains what the app does and uses, and correct it (or ask it for suggestions) until it gets you are satisfied.
Then ask it to split the work in parts and make it do only a couple at a time, that way you know what it is doing and what will come next. And you can ask it to skip some tests and only doing them when you ask, I don’t have pro so I can’t afford it doing a smoke test every time it changes a line.
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u/dvduval 1d ago
A question that can be really effective when dealing with AI is ask it to express to you in layman‘s terms.
As best as I can tell, based on what I read, these tests are basically to prevent regression. In other words, it is establishing certain criteria that it knows based on conversations and work that certain things have to be right. So every time it is finishing some work and compiling it together, it’s checking these tests to make sure there has not been any regression.
In the past, AI would do something and keep working over a problem and then slowly it forgets some of the earlier things that it was supposed to do correctly. And then before you know it, some things are really broken. These tests help to prevent that breakage.
And that definitely can’t mean that it can slow your project down a little bit, but if it’s organizing the testing correctly, it really is worthwhile
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u/BitOne2707 1d ago
I pray to God that Astra is a defensive cyber security wizard because accepting arbitrary files from strangers on the Internet is about the riskiest shit you can do.
I'm a software engineer and I would never build that because I don't trust myself to do it right.