OpenAI’s annual developer conference on Monday was a spectacle of ambitious AI product launches, from a app store for ChatGPT for a dazzling Video generation API that brought creative concepts to life. But for the companies and technical leaders watching closely, the most important announcement was the silence Codex general availabilitythe company’s AI software engineer. This release signals a profound shift in the way software – and, by extension, modern business – is built.
While other announcements captured the public’s imagination, the production-ready release of Codexsupercharged by a new specialized model and one suite of enterprise-grade toolsis the engine behind the entire OpenAI vision. It is the tool that builds tools, the proven agent in a world full of potential agents, and the clearest articulation of the company’s strategy for winning the venture.
THE Codex general availability move it from one “search view” for a fully supported product, complete with a new software development kit (SDK)one Slow integrationand administrative controls for security and monitoring. This transition declares that Codex is ready for mission-critical work at the world’s largest companies.
“We think this is the best time in history to be a builder; It’s never been so quick to go from idea to product,” said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman during the opening lecture presentation. “Software used to take months or years to build. You’ve seen that it can now take a few minutes to build with AI.”
This acceleration is not theoretical. It’s a reality born from OpenAI’s own internal use — a huge “dog food” effort that serves as the definitive case study for corporate clients.
Inside GPT-5-Codex: the AI model that autonomously codes for hours and generates 70% productivity gains
At the heart of the Codex update is GPT-5 Codexa version of OpenAI’s latest flagship model that was “purposefully trained for Codex and agent coding.” The new model is designed to function as a standalone teammate, going far beyond simple code autocompletion.
“Personally, I like to think of it as a human teammate,” explained Tibo Sottiaux, OpenAI engineer, during a technical session at Codex. “You can pair a program with it on your computer, delegate it to it, or, as you’ll see, you can assign it a task without explicit warning.”
This new model allows “adaptive thinking,” allowing you to dynamically adjust the time and computational effort spent on a task based on its complexity. For simple requests, it’s fast and efficient, but for complex refactoring projects, it can run for hours.
An engineer during the technical session noted: “I saw the GPT-5-Codex model run productively for over seven hours… in a marathon session.” This ability to handle complex, long-running tasks is a significant leap beyond the simple, one-off interactions that define most AI coding assistants.
The results within OpenAI were dramatic. The company reported that 92% of its technical staff now use Codex daily, and these engineers complete 70% more pull requests (a measure of code contribution) each week. Usage has increased tenfold since August.
“When we as a team see the statistics, it’s great,” Sottiaux shared. “But even better is to be having lunch with someone who says ‘Hey, I use Codex all the time. Here’s a cool thing I do with it. Do you want to hear about it?”
How OpenAI uses Codex to build its own AI products and detect hundreds of bugs daily
Perhaps the most compelling argument for the importance of Codex is that it is the foundational layer upon which OpenAI’s other flashy announcements have been built. During the DevDay eventthe company introduced custom arcade games and a dynamic AI-powered website for the conference itself, all developed using Codex.
In a session, engineers demonstrated how they built “story board,” a personalized creative tool for the film industry, in just 48 hours during an internal hackathon. “We decided to test Codex, our coding agent… we would send tasks to Codex between meetings. We review and merge PRs into production very easily, which Codex even allowed us to do on our phones,” said Allison August, solutions engineering lead at OpenAI.
This reveals a critical insight: the rapid innovation showcased at DevDay is a direct result of the productivity flywheel created by Codex. AI is an essential part of the manufacturing process for all other AI products.
An important enterprise-facing feature is the new, more robust code review feature. OpenAI said this “Codex GPT-5 purposefully trained to excel at ultra-thorough code review,” allowing you to explore dependencies and validate a programmer’s intent against the actual implementation to find high-quality bugs. Internally, almost all pull requests in OpenAI are now reviewed by Codex, detecting hundreds of issues daily before they reach a human reviewer.
“You save time, you ship with more confidence,” Sottiaux said. “There’s nothing worse than finding a bug after we’ve released the feature.”
Why enterprise software teams are choosing Codex over GitHub Copilot for mission-critical development
The maturation of Codex is central to OpenAI’s broader strategy to conquer the enterprise market, a move essential to justifying its massive valuation and unprecedented computational expenses. During a press conference, CEO Sam Altman confirmed the strategic change.
“The models already exist and you should expect a big focus from us on truly winning companies with amazing products, starting here,” Altman said during a private press conference.
OpenAI President and Co-Founder Greg Brockman immediately added: “And you can already see that with Codex, which I think was incredibly successful and grew very quickly.”
For technical decision makers, the message is clear. While consumer-facing agents who take dinner reservations are still gaining a foothold, Codex is a proven business agent offering substantial ROI today. Companies like Cisco have already implemented Codex in their engineering organizations, reducing code review time by 50% and reducing project deadlines from weeks to days.
With the new Codex SDKEnterprises can now incorporate this agent power directly into their own custom workflows, such as automating fixes in a CI/CD pipeline or even creating self-evolving applications. During a live demo, an engineer presented a mobile app that updated its own user interface in real time based on a natural language prompt, all powered by the integrated Codex SDK.
Although the launch of a app ecosystem on ChatGPT and the breathtaking view Sora 2 API correctly generated headlines, the Codex general availability marks a more fundamental and immediate transformation. It’s the silent but powerful engine driving the next era of software development, transforming the abstract promise of AI-driven productivity into a tangible, implementable reality for today’s businesses.
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