On May 16, 2025, OpenAI announced its latest development, Codex, a cloud-based software engineering assistant capable of working on multiple tasks simultaneously. Codex is powered by codex-1, a version of OpenAI's o3 model specifically optimized for software development. This development marks an important milestone in the field of AI-based coding, which has gained significant popularity in recent months.
Codex can perform a variety of tasks, such as writing features, answering questions about codebases, fixing bugs, and proposing pull requests. Each task runs in its own cloud-based, isolated environment, preloaded with the user's GitHub repository. According to OpenAI's blog post: Technical teams at OpenAI have started using Codex as part of their daily toolkit. It is most often used by OpenAI engineers to offload repetitive, well-scoped tasks, like refactoring, renaming, and writing tests, that would otherwise break focus. Running Codex takes between 1-30 minutes, depending on the complexity of the task, and users can monitor the process in real-time.
The service is initially available to ChatGPT Pro, Enterprise, and Team users, with Plus and Edu users gaining access later. In the first few weeks, users will have "generous access," but the company will later introduce limitations and offer the option to purchase additional credits. The significance of Codex lies in its potential to significantly accelerate software development processes while allowing developers to focus on more complex, creative tasks. OpenAI's vision is that Codex agents will eventually become "virtual teammates," autonomously completing tasks that would take human engineers hours or even days to accomplish.
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Maxwell Zeff
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OpenAI's Codex is a cloud-based software engineering agent capable of handling multiple coding tasks in parallel, such as writing features, answering codebase questions, fixing bugs, and proposing pull requests, all within secure, isolated environments.
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Katherine Li
