OpenAI Launches New AI Coding Tool

"OpenAI unveiled a research preview of a new software engineering agent on Friday, pushing forward in one of the most in-demand areas for artificial intelligence tools.

The agent, known as Codex, will be able to perform several tasks at the same time, including writing code, fixing bugs, running tests and answering questions about a customer's codebase, OpenAI said.

It is built on a model called codex-1, a version of OpenAI's o3 reasoning model optimized for software engineering, and will be available to ChatGPT Pro, Team and Enterprise users.

OpenAI said it is now looking to double down on coding, a red-hot area that has seen rising investment from Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Anthropic and startups like Anysphere, which developed the popular tool Cursor. "There are lots of good AI systems out there," said Srinivas Narayanan, vice president of engineering at OpenAI. "Competition is clearly there."

OpenAI is also in talks to acquire AI coding startup Windsurf for $3 billion, according to a Bloomberg report. Narayanan declined to comment on the potential acquisition. Windsurf declined to comment.

While OpenAI is the 800-pound gorilla when it comes to consumer-facing AI chatbots, it doesn't have the same status in coding, according to Wayne Chi and Valerie Chen, doctoral students at Carnegie Mellon University who built a system for evaluating model performance for software engineering.

So far, the Sonnet models from OpenAI competitor Anthropic are the go-to choice for many developers, according to Chi and Chen.

And while different models have different strengths in various areas of coding, the Sonnet models seem to have some staying power with the developer community, said Chi, but things are changing so fast it is too early to declare a winner.

OpenAI said its GPT-4.1 model has seen rapid adoption since its launch and is the best performing non-reasoning coding model in some comparison tests. Codex will transform the way developers work by helping them delegate more tasks, OpenAI said. Many of today's coding tools work in tandem in real-time with developers.

Codex works on its own in the cloud and delivers an output in one to 30 minutes.

OpenAI also said the tool can do a better job than its competitors at inferring an organization's coding style." [1]

1. EXCHANGE --- OpenAI Launches New AI Coding Tool. Bousquette, Isabelle; Lin, Belle.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 17 May 2025: B10.