Ex-OpenAI engineer pushes back on Codex origin story: it began as an internal infra tool
dotey · x · 2026-09-08
Thibault Sottiaux, a former OpenAI engineer, challenged a circulating narrative about Codex's origins with three points:
- Codex started as an internal tool, explicitly aimed at building the highest-leverage tool to accelerate OpenAI's own infrastructure buildout.
- He finds the "Meta vs non-Meta" framing unenlightening: people from older tech companies were surprised by how far OpenAI had pushed Python scripts and wanted to scale further.
- OpenAI built plenty of infrastructure and internal tools over the past few years — it wasn't just waiting for AGI to appear.
The thread reflects ongoing industry debate over the internal origin story of Codex, with others (including Tibo) offering counterpoints.
Related event: Ex-OpenAI Engineer Disputes Popular Codex Origin Story(2 posts)→
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