OpenAI and Codex with Thibault Sottiaux and Ed Bayes

AI coding agents are rapidly reshaping how software is built, reviewed, and maintained. As large language model capabilities continue to increase, the bottleneck in software development is shifting away from cogeneration toward planning, review, deployment, and coordination. This shift is driving a new class of Agentic systems that operate inside constrained environments, reason over long time horizons, and integrate across tools like IDEs, version control systems, and issue trackers. OpenAI is at the forefront of AI research and product development. In 2025, the company released Codex, which is an Agintiq coding system designed to work safely inside sandboxed environments while collaborating across the modern software development stack. Thibault Sotio is the Codex Engineering Lead and Ed Baze is the Codex Product Designer. In this episode, they join Kevin Ball to discuss how Codex is built, the co evolution of models and harnesses, multi agent futures, codex's open source CLI, model specialization, latency and performance considerations, and much more. Kevin Ball or Kay Ball is the vice president of engineering at Mento and an independent coach for engineers and engineering leaders. He cofounded and served as CTO for two companies, founded the San Diego JavaScript meetup, and organizes the AI in action discussion group through Latent Space. Check out the show notes to follow Keball on Twitter or LinkedIn, or visit his website, keball.llc. Hey, guys. Welcome to the show. Hey. Hey. Thanks for having us. Yeah. I'm excited about this one. You guys are doing some really interesting stuff, and I wanna dig in. But let's start with you a little bit. Can you each give a little bit of your backgrounds and then how you got involved with codecs and what you do there? Yeah. I'm a product designer on codex. I've been at OpenAI for just over a year. And before that, I worked in robotics and generally kind of at the intersection of design and research. And, yeah, I've been on the codex team for about six months. And with each model release, each product release, I've just got more and more into the coding side and excited to chat about, yeah, how he's on the team today. And I'm Thibo. Joined about the same time as you actually been tinkering and thinking about AI intelligence systems for as far as I can remember. It's one of the first programs I tried to write as a kid. And then over time, just it got more and more fascinating. I feel like today is like really this it's come to life, right, where I finally have the thing that I was trying to build like when I was seven, where, you know, actually, like, I'm able to type in my terminal and get, like, an intelligent response back and, like, have, like, this little assistant in my computer. So it's actually wild, like, to think about that, that has come true. But, yeah, joined OpenAI about, like, a year and a half ago. None of this was possible. …