Codex

Codex is an AI coding agent from OpenAI. It's built to take a task, work on it on its own in the background, and hand you back a pull request you can review. The closest thing we have to an autonomous developer.

How people actually use it

Think of Codex as a junior developer that can work for you, but needs a review on what they do. You hand over a task, it works in the background, and you get back code you can approve or send back.

People typically use it for bounded tasks. Fixing a bug ('the login button doesn't work on mobile'), adding a new feature, writing tests, updating dependencies, tidying up documentation, refactoring old code. The kind of thing you'd otherwise do yourself but can comfortably delegate as long as you read the result carefully.