From copilot to junior engineer

I got early access to GPT‑5.2‑Codex and I think it’s the first time it fully upgraded the job title from “LLM as copilot” to “LLM as slightly overconfident junior staff engineer.” It does score well on SWE‑Bench Pro and solves real CTFs. How it gets there is as important. Native context compaction means it can actually keep a large codebase in its head without falling over, and the tool‑centric training makes it behave less like a autocomplete engine and more like someone who knows when to grep, when to run tests, and when to call a debugger. On the security side, OpenAI is basically saying the quiet part out loud: To make this good at high‑risk cyber tasks, you have to train offensive capability, then wrap it in trusted, sandboxed access and policy. So we are now in the world where the model can probably pop a shell, but only if the product and governance layers agree. Your AI dev is about to get competent enough to ship and to break things. The opportunity is in how you constrain, audit, and productize that power before your customers or your compliance team start asking the awkward questions.