arstechnica

Ars Technica explores the growing influence of AI coding tools among software developers, highlighting how these tools are now integral to the development process, including their own enhancement. In recent interviews, OpenAI employees disclosed that their AI coding agent, Codex, is primarily responsible for its own development. Codex, launched in May 2025, serves as a cloud-based software engineering agent capable of writing features, fixing bugs, and proposing pull requests. It operates within sandboxed environments linked to user code repositories and can execute multiple tasks simultaneously. OpenAI provides Codex through various interfaces, including ChatGPT, a command-line interface (CLI), and IDE extensions for popular platforms like VS Code, Cursor, and Windsurf. The name 'Codex' traces back to a 2021 model based on GPT-3 that powered GitHub Copilot, emphasizing its legacy in AI-assisted coding. The current CLI version of Codex shares similarities with Anthropic's Claude Code, reflecting a competitive landscape in AI coding tools.