Codex is less than a year old, but the AI coding platform may be the key to OpenAI's dream of a superapp -- a theoretical one-stop shop for ChatGPT, its Atlas browser and Codex. OpenAI said that Codex, not ChatGPT, will be the foundation for this app.
"We're actually doing the sneaky thing where we're building the super app in the open and evolving it out of the Codex app," Thibault Sottiaux, engineering lead for Codex, told reporters during a briefing this week.
Codex has been a popular app of choice for AI developers and vibe coders. As of now, OpenAI says Codex has more than 3 million weekly users. But nearly half of Codex use is for non-coding tasks, according to OpenAI. So the company on Thursday announced a series of updates to make Codex more integrated into every part of your work day, not just coding. The biggest news is that Codex can work across many of your computer's apps, not just ChatGPT. This is the "first phase" of making Codex the foundation for a future super app, Sottiaux said.
Codex can run multiple agents across your desktop apps. There are more than 100 new plugins available for developers, including Atlassian Rovo, CircleCI, CodeRabbit, GitLab Issues, Microsoft Suite and Neon by Databricks. But you can also give Codex access to your Slack, Notion and Google apps. The idea is that Codex will be more helpful if it has access to more of your digital work life. It has an improved memory, so it can learn and adapt to your work style.
Codex can be used as a kind of personal assistant; it's agentic, which means it can autonomously handle tasks. The new Automations tool lets you set reminders for Codex to run repetitive tasks, called "heartbeats," like constantly scanning your messages and prioritizing what needs your attention. You can also set it up to give you briefings at the beginning and end of your days.
Developers can also now work from in-app browsers, so you can preview projects you're building in Codex from the app, and see them as they would appear in a web browser. This makes it easier to see the final product and make changes. You can leave comments on the browser page, and Codex's agents will make those changes. AI image generation is also coming to Codex (GPT Image 1.5), so you can make those iterative changes with photos, too.
Coding platforms like Codex have been all the rage for AI companies this year. Anthropic released Claude Code earlier this year, stunning enthusiasts and Wall Street with its advanced capabilities. OpenAI recently introduced a new, relatively cheaper $100 per month plan with higher Codex usage limits -- half the price of the usual ChatGPT Pro plan. Developers and vibe coders tend to need those more expensive plans because those requests use more tokens and are more compute-intensive.