The debate over the future of software developers has intensified as artificial intelligence tools continue to advance. Now, OpenAI has revealed that it has already built and shipped a product internally without any human-written code.
In a recent post on X, Srinivas Narayanan, Vice President of Engineering at OpenAI, said his team delivered an internal beta product where every single line of code was generated by Codex AI agents. “We shipped an internal beta of a product with zero human-written code — every line was generated by Codex agents, boosting velocity (by) 10x,” he wrote. “Here are some lessons from how the team did it. Great work (by) the team in pushing the boundaries of what software engineering looks like in the Codex world.”
In a detailed blog shared by OpenAI Developers, the company explained that the team relied entirely on Codex to build the product. The AI agent opened and merged 1500 pull requests to create a complete working system. The product is now being used by hundreds of internal users.
Codex is an AI system powered by ChatGPT that functions like a software developer. Unlike traditional coding assistants that only suggest snippets, Codex can handle broader tasks. It writes full features, generates tests, refactors code, fixes bugs and manages pull requests.
OpenAI said human engineers are still involved, but their roles have shifted. Instead of writing code, they define tasks, outline detailed requirements in prompts and assign them to Codex agents. The AI then produces the application logic, documentation, test coverage and infrastructure updates.
Engineers review the AI-generated output through pull requests, inspect changes and approve or request revisions. “What’s different is that every line of code — application logic, tests, CI configuration, documentation, observability, and internal tooling — has been written by Codex,” OpenAI said. “We estimate that we built this in about 1/10th the time it would have taken to write the code by hand.”
The development adds fuel to the wider industry debate. Other companies are also building similar tools, including Anthropic’s Claude Code and Google’s Antigravity.
Elon Musk recently said, “Code itself will go away in favour of just making the binary directly. The next step after that is direct, real-time pixel generation by the neural net.”
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