Codex's year-long rise: 40M+ weekly users and its leader now runs all of OpenAI's core products
danshipper · x · 2026-10-16
Dan Shipper calls Codex one of the most important untold stories in tech: a year ago it was a scrappy corner of OpenAI whose cloud product hadn't found PMF and whose team was starting over. Less than 12 months later: Codex swallowed the flagship ChatGPT desktop app from the inside (it literally runs as com.openai.codex on your Mac); Codex plus ChatGPT for Work hit 40M+ weekly users across engineering and knowledge work; and its leader Thibault Sottiaux was elevated to run all of OpenAI's core products — ChatGPT, Codex, and the API. The playbook: training a dedicated model line separate from ChatGPT, with researchers and product tightly coupled.
Related event: Every's "How Codex Happened" Chronicles Codex's Comeback(13 posts)→
More from coding & agent
- Claude dev Felix Rieseberg's tutorial: 4 ways to be more ambitious with AI — daniel_mac8 · 2026-10-16
- Are the fastest GPU kernels now written by AI? Kernels are hyper-verifiable, argues one dev — fleetwood___ · 2026-10-16
- Anthropic lead engineer's 4-question prompt makes agents more ambitious, now a free skill — daniel_mac8 · 2026-10-16
- ChainForge dev shows 'feature map' for orchestrating subagents on large PRs — IanArawjo · 2026-10-16
- aiDotEngineer benchmarks agent orchestration pipelines, staging humans as Foreman and workers — vikvang1 · 2026-10-16
- Developer mass-produces 200 videos in hours using Claude Code + Hyperframes — mcraddock · 2026-10-16