Ed Bayes, a designer on the Codex team, described how the tool has changed his own workflow. Bayes said Codex now integrates with project management tools like Linear and communications platforms like Slack, allowing team members to assign coding tasks directly to the AI agent. “You can add Codex, and you can now basically assign problems to Codex,” Bayes told Ars. “Codex is literally a teammate in your workspace.”
This integration means that when someone posts feedback in a Slack channel, they can tag Codex and ask them to fix the problem. The agent creates a pull request and team members can review and iterate on the changes on the same thread. “It comes down to approaching this type of colleague and showing up wherever you work,” Bayes said.
For Bayes, who works on the visual design and interaction patterns for Codex's interfaces, the tool has allowed him to contribute code directly instead of passing specifications to engineers. “It kind of gives you more leverage. It allows you to work across the stack and basically be able to do more things,” he said. He noted that designers at OpenAI now prototype features by building them directly, using Codex to handle the implementation details.
The command-line version of OpenAI codex running in a macOS terminal window.
Credit: Benj Edwards
OpenAI's approach views Codex as what Bayes called “a junior developer,” which the company hopes will evolve into a senior developer over time. “If you were to onboard a junior developer, how would you onboard him? You give him a Slack account, you give him a Linear account,” says Bayes. “It's not just this tool that you go to in the terminal, but it's also something that comes to you and sits within your team.”
Given this team-mate approach, will there be anything left for people to do? When asked, Embiricos made a distinction between “vibe coding,” where developers accept AI-generated code without close scrutiny, and what AI researcher Simon Willison calls “vibe engineering,” where people stay informed. “We're seeing a lot more vibe engineering in our code base,” he said. “You ask Codex to work on that, maybe even ask for a plan first. Go back and forth, iterate on the plan, and then you're aware of the model and review the code carefully.”
