How OpenAI’s Codex Team Uses Their Coding Agent

TL;DR: Today, we’re releasing a new episode of our podcast AI & I, where Dan Shipper sits down with two members of the team building OpenAI’s coding agent, Codex, Thibault Sottiaux, head of Codex, and Andrew Ambrosino, member of technical staff on the Codex app. Watch on X or YouTube, or listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

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A little after 4 p.m. PT on Super Bowl Sunday, a wave of people took their eyes off the game to download a coding agent. It wasn’t the wings, the beer, or Bad Bunny that inspired them. It was one of the many AI ads that aired—specifically, OpenAI’s plug for its coding agent, Codex.

Thibault Sottiaux, head of Codex, and Andrew Ambrosino, a member of technical staff on the Codex app, say their systems came under heavy load almost immediately after the spot aired. Even better, a lot of people also reached out to tell them that the ad inspired them to build, they told Dan Shipper on AI & I this week.

The conversation caps off a few busy weeks for the Codex team: Since the start of February, they’ve shipped a desktop app, GPT-5.3 Codex—a new flagship model—and a research preview of a model that’s almost too fast to follow. The momentum is showing up in the numbers, too. Usage has grown fivefold since the start of the year, and more than a million people now use Codex each week. Dan talks to the pair about the strategy decisions behind what they’ve built, the workflows they rely on inside Codex, and how a lightning-fast model potentially solves the next bottleneck for coding agents.