Open source builds community but adds operational costs

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 21:14

   One interesting decision that you made, which is unique across all of the major labs, is having this built in open source, right? The CLI is open source, the SDK and the app server are all open source. When and why did you decide that? It's not a given, especially, you know, there used to be jokes about OpenAI having things closed but this this is actually the opposite where like this is open whereas like some competitors would would ship closed source harnesses which again i i think it's very easy to understand why you want something closed source why did you want it open source there was something really cool about the idea of having the code open source because fundamentally what you're billing is you're billing a coding agent and so we were sort of like thinking about well if you have that you know you're obviously going to point it at itself and you know maybe you know

2. 22:03

   you can build a community of you know contributors that use it to improve it and then you know you can learn a lot from that also it felt at the time is like you know very clear to us that if we were going to be successful open source itself would change and the role of code itself would change and so being part of that community seemed important instead of divorced from it i think you know it's it's it's hard to solve problems if you don't sort of like witness them yourself and then the the other thing was just it still feels like early but it was very early at the time um it felt like we would have some ideas for how to solve things well um and we were co-designing these you know with with with the training and and and and the research and it's it's all about expressing like the capabilities of the model and like the most flexible in the best way

3. 22:53

   but also we didn't have all the answers and sort of being very open about hey this is what a good harness looks like this is how we think about it we did like a couple of like very technical like deep dives and blog posts and we talked about it a lot and we thought you know hey it's just like the world is vast out there just like you know crazy smart people it's like you know we're we're gonna get inspired by other open source project as well and so let's just make this a level playing field and sort of like encourage a lot of tinkering and exploration at this stage.

4. 23:28

   Now, this has been now, you know, like a year later, a year and a half later, which is a very long time and right now in this AI timeframe. But looking back or taking the experience, what are the benefits you've seen, the kind of enduring benefits, the enduring teams benefits from being open source? And just honestly, what are things that are kind of hard about being open source, right? Like, there must be downsides.

5. 23:50

   Like, just trying to get an honest take on both sides. Yeah, there are definitely downsides. It comes at a cost, right? The benefits are, it's awesome to build in the open. It's awesome to have, like, a small repo as well. Like, whenever we hire someone and they join the Codex team, it's like, they've seen the repo before. They've looked at PRs. Onboarding is done. Yeah, it's done. Yeah, it's like in onboarding, it's just like you use Codex to look at the repo, you know, with you and you ask some questions.

6. 24:21

   But it's like it's not it's not a secret issue that you can get productive right away. We get a lot of good contributions, although we get like, you know, a tsunami of like random stuff as well. Obviously, you and everyone else. Right. Open source is changing. I think this is one of the examples. That's right. And then to me, it just and to a lot of the team, it just brings a lot of energy to just be part of the community and like be directly contributing.

7. 24:44

   not just saying that we care about the community but actually doing things that you can see it's costing us effort we don't have to do it the downsides are it's separate from the rest of our code so sometimes we have to draw artificial boundaries and work across Across multiple repos, when we're working on something particularly exciting and, you know, we're building it in the open, then, you know, at times we find that, you know, others copy it, you know, before we have the time to release it.

8. 25:15

   And it's like, it's just a little bit sad. But also it's like, it's part of the game, you know, it's, it's like you're building in the open and it's like, you know, that's, that's sort of like the contract that you signed is like, you know, you can copy it. we have a very permissive license as well. But it does sting a little bit when you're working on something and you're like, you know. And then the third thing is just like everyone else is like, you know, we are overwhelmed with, you know, random contributions and, you know, we have to deal with that additional tax.

9. 25:42

   But then that pushes us to, you know, also like try and solve for it, right? Which I think is good. And on top of the open source,