alt Hacker NewsI imagine this will be because a decent chunk of the IP in Codex is probably within its prompts, how they're built, and how they're sequenced and orchestrated, rather than in the codebase per se.
We had this discussion a few months ago where we talked about allowing people to choose an AI provider and provide their API key, thinking about enterprises with "preferred" (read: mandated) AI suppliers. We also wanted to offer the kind of very simple pricing that this is one way of enabling. But we realised pretty quickly that this would/could lead to leaking our back end prompts to customers and, although those prompts are only a part of the value add, if you could build a detailed trace of them then you'd be able to relatively easily reverse engineer a lot of what we're doing.
So we quickly dropped that idea.
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the trick about agentic systems is definitely how to do the prompting. things like automation and sandboxing are trivial in comparisson. if you generally ask via API model directly you can see what basic answers it actually yields and how fine tuning prompts and refinements to output as well as adversarial prompts etc are important to get relatively solid results.
a lot of expertise of certain domains' workflows is needed to make it functional within that domain. some of this can be yielded via prompting too etc so its also baoance of how much to prompt it vs. how much of it you wanna let it reason over itself. (if you tell it too much i lock it into a path and if you tell too little it will give incomplete results )
Perhaps AI providers should support this natively: the customer supplies the API key but doesn't get access to the transcripts.
I'm unable to understand how much value can be in low-definability non deterministic prompts. It feels like the kept the right divinity spell into a chest.