A Quick Look at OpenAI Symphony
First off, I should clarify that this is not a finished product; it’s closer to an AI orchestration demo. It basically serves as an example of how you might build an orchestration tool. Because of this, it only natively integrates with Linear for issue management. The program polls Linear and executes tasks according to the sequence defined in the workflow.
If you’re a developer, you probably already have GitHub connected to your Linear. When it runs, it does a git clone into the Symphony directory for each issue and then executes Codex. This means everything gets saved locally in that directory, so you’ll need to manage your disk space accordingly. There’s a sample workflow.md provided that you can modify, and if you’re not sure how to tweak it, you can just open up Codex and ask—it’ll figure it out for you.
Having a GitHub provider would be more convenient. Since I don’t typically use Linear, it feels a bit awkward for me. I’d much prefer having everything centralized.
Here are a few more thoughts:
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In
workflow.md, you define what actions should be taken based on the repository and the issue status. -
If something needs to be fixed after a review, you leave a comment and change the status to “rework”.
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Codex cloud can be slow and expensive. However, by installing Symphony on a local dev machine and registering issues on Linear, you effectively enable remote workflows from anywhere.
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When the Codex app handles multiple issues at once or has many registered projects, you have to constantly scroll up and down. Since Linear allows you to process issues one by one, that feels like a distinct advantage.
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On the other hand, if you want to actually run and debug things, you have to execute it directly yourself, which makes it feel like there’s room for improvement—or maybe not… Still, I think it would be great for team use.
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Notifications are also limited only to Slack. They’ve mentioned they don’t plan on adding more, so you’re probably better off forking it and customizing it yourself. Of course, Codex can handle the customization for you anyway -.-;