How Codex Happened
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OpenAI’s Codex team shifted from a step-by-step, sandboxed coding assistant toward agent-style workflows after testing GPT-5 alongside competitors and observing it “stop too early.” By June 2026, Codex reached more than 5 million weekly active users, later merging into the ChatGPT desktop app and helping Codex+ChatGPT for Work reach 40 million weekly active users. As a result, Codex became the foundation for OpenAI’s core products rather than a standalone coding tool.