OpenAI Codex Sees 10x Usage Surge Amidst Major Feature Rollouts

OpenAI's AI-powered coding assistant, Codex, has experienced a remarkable tenfold increase in usage over the past two weeks, according to a recent statement from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. The surge in adoption coincides with significant new feature releases aimed at integrating the agent more deeply into developers' workflows.

"Really cool to see how much people are loving codex; usage is up ~10x in the past two weeks!" Altman stated in a social media post, adding, "lots more improvements to come, but already the momentum is so impressive." This rapid growth underscores the increasing reliance of developers on AI tools for software engineering tasks.

Codex, powered by codex-1 (an optimized version of OpenAI's o3 model), functions as a cloud-based software engineering agent. It is designed to automate and assist with various coding responsibilities, including writing features, answering codebase questions, fixing bugs, and proposing pull requests for review. Each task operates within its own isolated cloud environment, preloaded with the user's repository.

Recent updates have significantly enhanced Codex's capabilities and accessibility. OpenAI has rolled out an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) extension, offering support for popular platforms like Visual Studio Code and Cursor. This allows developers to seamlessly move coding tasks between cloud and local environments without losing context.

Furthermore, Codex now supports GitHub code reviews, enabling automatic pull request checks that validate code behavior against its intent and dependencies. The updated Command Line Interface (CLI) has also been rebuilt to leverage GPT-5's agentic coding capabilities, featuring a modern terminal interface and image input options. These advancements aim to solidify Codex's role as a collaborative partner for developers, boosting productivity and streamlining the software development lifecycle.