In an effort to transform the way software developers engage with artificial intelligence, OpenAI has released Codex, a new AI-powered coding agent. Beginning on Friday, ChatGPT Pro, Enterprise, and Team subscribers will have access to this new feature. In contrast to earlier ChatGPT versions, Codex is made especially for coding jobs and positions itself as an engineer’s virtual colleague.

OpenAI claims that Codex is capable of automatically creating code from natural language, repairing errors, running tests, and making recommendations for performance enhancements. Codex is unique in that it can work independently on sandboxed code, doing tasks in up to 30-minute periods. In order to accommodate more intricate development processes, OpenAI intends to expand these sessions in the future.

In order to maintain confidentiality and data integrity, Codex was first incorporated within the ChatGPT web application and has been prohibited from accessing the Internet. It is powered by codex-1, an OpenAI o3 reasoning model that has been specially adapted for software development.

The long-term goal of Codex is to function as a completely autonomous coding agent, eliminating the need for human programming and allowing engineers to assign whole jobs to the system, said Josh Tobin, OpenAI’s research lead for agents. Codex is already being used internally by OpenAI programmers to automate coding activities and manage to-do lists. They often work on many projects at once while concentrating on higher-level objectives.

According to Codex product lead Alexander Embiricos, several early-stage organizations are already incorporating Codex into on-call engineering teams in order to preserve system stability. This suggests that Codex has the ability to establish itself as a standard tool in actual software development settings.

OpenAI intends to monetize Codex after evaluating user demand and performance, even though it is presently free for ChatGPT users. The introduction coincides with the growing popularity of AI-driven code production. Anthropic and Google, two other significant tech companies, are also making significant investments in related technology. For instance, Windsurf recently released its own line of coding models, while Google just launched AlphaEvolve, a new AI agent for algorithm creation.

Notably, OpenAI’s history is deeply ingrained in Codex. As the company’s first attempt at AI-assisted coding, the term originally surfaced in 2021. With ChatGPT’s enormous success, Codex is now becoming OpenAI’s next big idea, and it has the potential to completely change software engineering. The creation of Codex is OpenAI’s audacious wager that AI will play a significant role in coding in the future—not only as an aid, but as a genuine collaborator.