I wrote a long comment but refreshed by accident before I could post it, so here we go again:
I'll write a post when I finish Pine Town, but I don't know what I could say about Codex in it. I think a big issue is that I don't know what others don't know, as the way I use LLMs (obviously) feels natural to me. Here are some tips that you may or may not already know:
* Reset the context as often as you can. LLMs like short contexts, so when you reach a point where the information has converged into something (e.g. the LLM has done a lot of work and you want it to change one of the details), reset the context, summarize what you want, and continue.
* Give the LLM small tasks that are logically coherent. Don't give it large, sprawling, open-ended tasks, but also don't give it chunks so tiny that it doesn't know what they're for.
* Explain the problem in detail, and don't dictate a solution. The LLM, like a person, needs to know why it's doing what it's doing, and maybe it can recommend better solutions.
* Ask it to challenge you. If you try to shoehorn the LLM too much, it might go off the rails trying to satisfy an impossible request. I've had a few times where it did crazy things because I didn't realize the thing I was asking for wasn't actually possible with the way the project was set up.
That's what I can think of off the top of my head, but maybe I'll write a general "how to work with LLMs" post. I don't think there's anything specifically different about Codex, and there must be a million such posts already, so I don't know if anyone will find value in the above... For me, it Just Worked™, but maybe that's just because I stumbled upon some specific technique that most people don't use.
> I wrote a long comment but refreshed by accident before I could post it...
So I was going to write a commiseration and a screed about what a colossal UI failure this is, that you can so easily lose such work. But FWIW, before posting I searched to see if there are any extensions to address this. There are several for Chrome, but on Firefox I ended up trying "Textarea Cache", and sure enough if you close the page, and reopen it later, you can click the icon to recover your words.
