Ed Bayes, a designer on the Codex team, explained how the tool has changed his workflow. Bayes said Codex now integrates with project management tools like Linear and communication platforms like Slack, allowing team members to assign coding tasks directly to an AI agent. “You can add Codex, and essentially you can now delegate matters to Codex,” Bayes told Ars. “Code is literally your teammate in your workplace.”
This integration means that when someone posts feedback in a Slack channel, they can flag the Code and ask it to fix the issue. The agent will create a pull request and team members will be able to view and make changes in one thread. “Basically, it's like this type of colleague and shows up wherever you work,” Bayes said.
For Bayes, who works on visual design and interaction patterns for Codex interfaces, the tool allowed him to contribute code directly rather than passing specifications to engineers. “It kind of gives you more leverage. It allows you to work across the entire stack and essentially be able to do more things,” he said. He noted that OpenAI designers are now prototyping functions by building them directly, using Codex to handle implementation details.
Command line version of OpenAI code, running in a macOS terminal window.
Credit: Benj Edwards
OpenAI's approach treats Codex as what Bayes calls a “junior developer” who the company hopes will develop into a senior developer over time. “If you were hiring a junior developer, how would you hire them? You give them a Slack account, you give them a Linear account,” Bayes said. “It's not just a tool that you access in a terminal, it's something that comes to you and sits within your team.”
Given this approach from teammates, is there anything left for people to do? When asked, Embirikos made a distinction between “vibration coding“, where developers accept AI-generated code without careful consideration, and what AI researcher Simon Willison calls “Vibration engineering“, where people stay up to date. “We're seeing a lot more vibration in our code base,” he said. “You're asking Codex to work on it, maybe you'll even ask for a plan first.” Go back and forth, repeat the plan, and then you are aware of the model and carefully review its code.”
