OpenAI’s Codex is part of a new cohort of agentic coding tools

Last Friday, OpenAI introduced a new coding system called Codex, designed to perform complex programming tasks from natural language commands. Codex moves OpenAI into a new cohort of agentic coding tools that is just beginning to take shape. From GitHub’s early Copilot to contemporary tools like Cursor and Windsurf, most AI coding assistants operate as an exceptionally intelligent form of autocomplete. The tools generally live in an integrated development environment, and users interact directly with the AI-generated code. The prospect of simply assigning a task and returning when it’s finished is largely out of reach. But these new agentic coding tools, led by products like Devin, SWE-Agent, OpenHands, and the aforementioned OpenAI Codex, are designed to work without users ever having to see the code. The goal is to operate like the manager of an engineering team, assigning issues through workplace systems like Asana or Slack and checking in when a solution has been reached. For be ... Read full article.