Tech Feed - January 29, 2026

Articles and podcasts from the software engineering world.

Software Engineering Daily

OpenAI and Codex with Thibault Sottiaux and Ed Bayes

Here is a comprehensive summary of the podcast episode "OpenAI and Codex with Thibault Sottiaux and Ed Bayes":

Opening context: The guests are Thibault Sottiaux, the Codex engineering lead, and Ed Bayes, the Codex product designer at OpenAI. They discuss how Codex, an AI coding agent system, is built and its implications for the future of software development.

Key discussion points and insights:

• The co-evolution of Codex models and the surrounding "harness" (tools, interfaces, sandboxing) is crucial - the two are developed together as an integrated agent system.
• Codex uses strong sandboxing to ensure safety, but this can create some user experience challenges that the team is working to address.
• Codex is being used across OpenAI for diverse tasks beyond just code generation, like code review, documentation, data analysis, and more by both technical and non-technical teams.
• The team sees the future shifting from a single "holy grail" model to more of a multi-agent ecosystem, where different specialized models collaborate.
• Latency and performance are key considerations as Codex gets deployed closer to users' machines and integrated into more real-time workflows.
• The open-source Codex CLI allows the community to inspect and contribute to the system, which the team sees as important.

Notable technologies, tools, or concepts:

• Codex models (5.1, 5.2, Codex-specific variants)
• Sandboxing and safe execution environments
• Multi-agent systems and model specialization
• Codex CLI and IDE integrations
• Latency, performance, and GPU locality considerations

Practical implications or recommendations:

• Codex can enable non-technical users to build prototypes and applications to support their workflows, blurring boundaries between disciplines.
• The team is exploring ways to better expose Codex's capabilities and enable more user customization/control, while maintaining simplicity.
• Future developments may include more primitives for managing and coordinating multi-agent systems, as complexity increases.
• Overall, Codex represents a shift towards AI-powered software development that the team sees continuing to evolve rapidly.

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