“Like, this thing is also able to cut its own tickets, because we give it full access. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can make a ticket to have it cut tickets, you can put in the ticket that you expected to file its own follow-up work.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading:
filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard
(the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Ryan Lopopolo
Opinion
Lopopolo: Coding models and harnesses are now isomorphic to human engineering capability
“The models are there enough. The harnesses are there enough where they're isomorphic to me and capability and the ability to do the job.”
Ryan LopopoloApr 7, 2026▶ 4:02Extreme Harness Engineering: 1M LOC, 1B toks/day, 0% human code or review — Ryan Lopopolo, OpenAI
Opinion
Lopopolo: Coding models have largely solved all tasks except hard and new
“And I think things that are hard and new is still something that the models need humans. Yeah. Drive. Yeah. But I think those other quadrants are largely solved, given the right scaffold and the right thing that's going to drive the agent to completion.”
Ryan LopopoloApr 7, 2026▶ 33:46Extreme Harness Engineering: 1M LOC, 1B toks/day, 0% human code or review — Ryan Lopopolo, OpenAI
Opinion
Lopopolo: Bearish on MCP due to forced token injection and compaction issues
“MCPs I'm pretty bearish on because the harness forcibly injects all those tokens in the context and I don't really get a say over it. They mess with auto compaction. The agent can forget how to use the tool. There's probably only like, what, three calls in Pla…”
Ryan LopopoloApr 7, 2026▶ 38:37Extreme Harness Engineering: 1M LOC, 1B toks/day, 0% human code or review — Ryan Lopopolo, OpenAI
AssertionNot checkable as stated
Lopopolo: Zero-code harness was 10x slower initially before outperforming any single engineer
“Honestly, the first month and a half was 10 times slower than I would be. But because we paid that cost, we ended up getting to something much more productive than any one engineer could be, because we built the tools, the assembly station for the agent to do …”
Ryan LopopoloApr 7, 2026▶ 5:17Extreme Harness Engineering: 1M LOC, 1B toks/day, 0% human code or review — Ryan Lopopolo, OpenAI
Disclosure
Lopopolo: OpenAI Frontier team operates with post-merge or zero human code review
“You know, we, we've moved beyond even the humans reviewing the code as well. Most of the human review is post merge at this point, but it's not even reviewed.”
Ryan LopopoloApr 7, 2026▶ 9:21Extreme Harness Engineering: 1M LOC, 1B toks/day, 0% human code or review — Ryan Lopopolo, OpenAI
Insight
Lopopolo: Reasoning models eliminate need for rigid state-machine scaffolding
“And this I think is like the fundamental difference between reasoning models and the four ones and four O's of the past where these models could not think. So you kind of had to put them in boxes with a predefined set of state transitions. Whereas here we have…”
Ryan LopopoloApr 7, 2026▶ 11:59Extreme Harness Engineering: 1M LOC, 1B toks/day, 0% human code or review — Ryan Lopopolo, OpenAI
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