Hey there,

This week OpenAI has announced a major change coming to Codex, their coding agent. Over the past year, Codex has been quietly evolving into something bigger than just a developer tool. On Tuesday, OpenAI made this new shift official with three new releases. This week we’ll cover what’s new in Codex and look at where the platform is heading. 

What is Codex?

Before we get into the specifics of what’s changed, we need to look at what Codex is. Codex is OpenAI’s coding agent that was originally launched to assist developers with coding tasks such as writing, reviewing, debugging, and shipping code. Unlike more basic coding tools, Codex works as an autonomous agent that can take on full tasks on its own before reporting back with any changes. You can access it through its standalone app or the command-line interface. Its connection to GitHub makes it a great tool for accessing large codebases and projects. This is just a quick overview, but I might do a full deep-dive on Codex itself in a future newsletter.

What Changed 

OpenAI’s announcement centers around three things: new role-specific plugins, a new feature called Sites, and an editing tool called Annotations. The goal of these features is to make Codex more widely applicable to non-technical users such as marketers, designers, researchers, and more. OpenAI shared that over 20% of Codex users aren’t developers and so this update was for them. This number is likely to grow as tools like Cowork have become increasingly popular with non-developers. 

The New Features

The new plugins within Codex are built around six specific roles. Each plugin “bundles the relevant apps, skills, instructions, and workflows.” In other words, you don’t need to create and optimize any workflows but instead just select a plugin and get started. The current plugins include data analytics, creative production, sales, product design, public equity investing, and investment banking. By packaging tools, integrations, and knowledge, Codex plugins will help streamline the Codex experience for even more users. 

Sites is a new sharable, interactive environment where Codex builds and deploys custom web apps. These can be dashboards, planners, project boards, and so much more. Essentially Codex now allows you to vibe code small, sharable web apps that are only accessible to you and your team. You can think of these as Codex’s equivalent to Claude’s artifacts. These sites aren’t just static creations and will stay up-to-date with the information you give them. Unfortunately Sites is currently available to ChatGPT Business and Enterprise workspaces only. 

Annotation features are already available through Codex in terms of editing code and websites. This new update however expands this feature to documents, spreadsheets, and slideshows. Codex can now directly edit these documents, further transforming this from a code centric tool to an all around work partner. 

My Thoughts

Seeing these changes to Codex isn’t surprising when you look at the success Anthropic has had with tools like Cowork. For a while now it’s felt like OpenAI has lost the first-mover advantage but announcements like this make it clear that they are still capable of creating tools for the larger AI community. The new role-based plugins seem like a great way to help nontechnical users get the most out of Codex by significantly lowering the barrier to entry. All that being said, I’m a little disappointed that many of these updates are only available for Business and Enterprise users and not included in the individual paid plans.