Definition
Plain language
OpenAI's family of code-writing AI products, including command-line coding agents.
As stated in the literature
OpenAI's line of coding-specialized models and the agentic coding products built on them, including command-line and IDE-resident agents with filesystem and shell access.
Why it matters: It's one of the flagship product lines for moving AI coding from chat-window suggestions into autonomous work on real repositories.
For example, a developer runs an OpenAI Codex CLI agent that opens a pull request to refactor a service across a dozen files.
Heard on the show
“And to estimate that honestly without running infinite rollouts, they borrow the unbiased estimator from the original Codex paper.”Episode 011 — When RL Actually Teaches Agents Something New, And When It Doesn't