Dan Shipper@danshipper3h ago

Codex is one of the most important untold stories in the history of technology. A year ago, it was a scrappy effort in a quiet corner of @OpenAI. Its cloud product hadn’t found PMF, and the team was starting over from scratch. Less than 12 months later: - Codex swallowed the flagship ChatGPT desktop app from the inside (it literally runs as com.openai.codex on your Mac) - Codex and ChatGPT for Work hit 40M+ weekly users across engineering and knowledge work - Its leader @thsottiaux was elevated to run all of OpenAI’s core products, including ChatGPT, Codex, and the API How did they pull it off? They trained their own dedicated model line, separate from ChatGPT, with researchers and product builders sitting on the same team They built four different products in a single year (cloud → terminal → IDE sidebar → a desktop app with no code editor at all) as every model leap made a new form factor possible They used Codex to build Codex—so a handful of people could prove a new product in weeks instead of arguing for it in meetings I had a front-row seat to the whole arc—from their failed Cloud launch, to OpenAI’s offices the night before GPT-5 dropped, to the day Codex took over ChatGPT. And I spent months interviewing @gdb, @thsottiaux, @embirico, @mia_glaese, @aambrosino, and @edbayes to get inside how it all went down. Here is the full, behind-closed-doors story of the team that remade OpenAI: https://every.to/p/how-codex-happened We’re pushing the boundaries of how stories like this are told. This piece is completely agent-native—designed to be read alongside your agent inside ChatGPT’s in-app browser: - Every interview transcript is included in full: Click any quote and you (or your agent) can see the exact conversation it came from. - Built for your agent to explore: Ask your agent to pull out product lessons for your team, cross-examine the transcripts, or find insights I missed when writing the piece. It’s a story about the future of software—built to be read with an agent: https://every.to/p/how-codex-happened