The argument in one line.
Codex succeeded because it was not ChatGPT and not Claude Code, and folding it into ChatGPT as a toggle erases the developer-first brand identity that made it grow in the first place.
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
- You used the standalone Codex app or CLI and want to understand what actually changed in the ChatGPT Work rebrand.
- You track the AI coding agent landscape (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor) and care about how these tools position and brand themselves.
- You are evaluating open-source alternatives to vendor-controlled coding agents because you have been burned by a sudden product change before.
- You are a product or brand person curious how a rebrand can tank user goodwill even when the underlying features improve.
SKIP IF…
- You have never used Codex, Claude Code, or any AI coding agent -- the whole video is inside-baseball for that audience.
- You just want a neutral feature list of what is new in ChatGPT Work; this is an opinionated rant, not a release-notes summary.
The full version, fast.
OpenAI killed the standalone Codex app and folded it into a rebranded ChatGPT, collapsing Chat, Cowork, and Codex into one confusing surface under the ChatGPT name. Theo traces the death to four steps: OpenAI retired the dedicated codex model line, leaned hard into the app as the product surface, the app got genuinely good, and Codex's growth started rivaling ChatGPT's own -- so OpenAI redirected that momentum back into its flagship brand. His core argument: Codex worked precisely because it wasn't ChatGPT and wasn't Claude Code, it was its own developer-first identity with real allegiance behind it, and that's what the merge just destroyed. He closes by explaining why he built T3 Code, an open-source Codex/Claude Code orchestrator, specifically as insurance against a vendor doing exactly this.
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00:00 – 01:44
01 · Cold open: Codex is dead
Theo explains he loved the standalone Codex app, then reveals OpenAI folded it into a rebranded ChatGPT experience under the same icon the same day.
01:44 – 03:21
02 · Sponsor: Blacksmith
Ad read for Blacksmith, faster/cheaper GitHub Actions CI runners.
03:21 – 06:20
03 · Tour of the new ChatGPT Work app
Screen-share walkthrough of the merged app: Chat, Cowork, and Codex collapsed into one confusing UI, with Chat now a pop-up instead of the main surface.
06:20 – 09:57
04 · What's actually new
Unified plugins for PDFs/spreadsheets/Slack/Notion, multi-folder projects, an improved computer-use browser, the Sites beta, faster performance, and better mobile reliability.
09:57 – 12:41
05 · Sponsor: DNSimple
Ad read for DNSimple, DNS and domain management via CLI/API.
12:41 – 16:02
06 · The branding history of Codex
Codex has meant five different things since 2022 (model, CLI, model again, desktop app, now a ChatGPT feature) versus Claude Code, which has always meant one thing -- the CLI.
16:02 – 18:24
07 · Why OpenAI actually did it
The whiteboard argument: OpenAI killed the dedicated codex models, leaned into the app, the app got good, and Codex's own growth started rivaling ChatGPT's.
18:24 – 20:07
08 · Fidji Simo's exit and the real thesis
Fidji Simo, OpenAI's CEO of Applications, stepped back for health reasons; Theo lands his thesis that Codex worked because it wasn't ChatGPT and wasn't Claude Code.
20:07 – 26:50
09 · T3 Code origin story and the fallout
Why Theo built his open-source T3 Code as insurance against exactly this kind of vendor decision, then a closing rant on the brand equity and motivation OpenAI just gave up.
Lines worth screenshotting.
- OpenAI's Codex app is now literally ChatGPT with the Codex icon hidden three menus deep in Appearance settings.
- The new ChatGPT app collapses three prior surfaces -- Chat, Cowork, and Codex -- into one UI, and Chat is now a pop-up window instead of the app's main purpose.
- OpenAI stopped training dedicated codex coding models and folded that training into its main model line, meaning a standalone Codex model likely never returns.
- The stated reason Codex's training got folded into flagship models is that long-running agentic task completion turned out to be valuable far beyond coding.
- Codex was reportedly seeing 5x or greater month-over-month growth before the merge, enough that OpenAI bought Super Bowl ad time for it specifically.
- A large share of Codex's userbase used it precisely because it was not ChatGPT -- people who wanted ChatGPT were already using ChatGPT.
- Fidji Simo, OpenAI's CEO of Applications overseeing ChatGPT, mobile, and Codex, stepped back to an advisory role for health reasons around the time of this rebrand.
- As much as a quarter of the users of an open-source coding tool community are reportedly running a forked or patched version rather than the official build.
- The Codex CLI's underlying app server still isn't fully closed off, meaning third-party clients can currently still connect to Codex models without going through the new ChatGPT app.
- Company-internal organizational logic for a merge like this can look sound from inside the building while reading as pure confusion to the outside market.
- A brand that developers actively wear as merch and organize meetups around is a level of loyalty a chat-toggle inside a general consumer app cannot replicate.
Codex worked because it wasn't ChatGPT -- and that's exactly what got erased.
WHAT TO LEARN
A sub-brand's loyalty often comes from what it isn't as much as what it is, and folding it into the parent product to chase its growth can destroy the thing that made it grow.
01Cold open: Codex is dead
- A rebrand that hides the old icon three menus deep in settings signals to loyal users that the brand itself was never the priority.
- Naming confusion compounds over time -- a name that's meant five different things in three years erodes trust before any rebrand even happens.
03Tour of the new ChatGPT Work app
- Collapsing three distinct surfaces (chat, work, code) into one UI without a clear new mental model makes onboarding harder even when individual features improve.
04What's actually new
- Genuine feature improvements don't offset a confusing structural change -- users notice the friction before they notice the upgrades.
06The branding history of Codex
- A name that's meant five different things in three years erodes trust before any rebrand even happens.
- Compare against a brand that's meant exactly one thing the whole time -- that clarity is itself a competitive advantage.
07Why OpenAI actually did it
- When a smaller product inside a company starts outgrowing the flagship, absorbing it into the flagship is a plausible internal move but a risky external one.
- Success metrics that look great in an internal review (5x growth) can also read as a threat to the parent product's dominance.
08Fidji Simo's exit and the real thesis
- Users of a developer-facing tool often choose it specifically because it isn't the general consumer product from the same company.
- Community loyalty strong enough to produce merch and meetups is a signal that the product has an identity worth protecting, not just features worth reusing.
09T3 Code origin story and the fallout
- Betting on a single vendor's tool without a fallback plan is a real risk -- an open-source alternative built ahead of time is what turns a sudden vendor change from a crisis into a shrug.
- Internal organizational logic for a merge can be completely sound and still land as confusing or hostile to the people actually using the product day to day.
Terms worth knowing.
- Codex CLI
- OpenAI's open-source command-line coding agent; the only remaining open-source surface of Codex, and the underlying engine that both the official app and third-party clients connect to.
- ChatGPT Work
- OpenAI's rebranded, non-dev-focused mode inside the unified ChatGPT app, aimed at giving non-developers the same computer-use and task-automation abilities that made Claude Code's Cowork mode popular.
- App server
- The background service hosted by the Codex CLI that lets external clients (the official ChatGPT app, or third-party tools) connect to and drive Codex sessions.
- Computer use
- An AI agent capability that lets the model control a real browser or desktop -- clicking, typing, navigating -- to complete tasks the way a human user would.
- T3 Code
- Theo's free, open-source coding-agent client that can orchestrate Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, and Cursor from one interface, built as an insurance policy against any single vendor changing or killing its own app.
Things they pointed at.
21:10productT3 Code
13:18toolClaude Code
Lines you could clip.
00:59
“The Codex app is now ChatGPT.”
17:37
“The harsh reality is that Codex was too good for Codex.”
19:48
“A big part of why Codex is doing well is because it wasn't ChatGPT.”
25:31
“It's a fundamental failure to understand how people think about these things and talk about these things.”
Word for word.
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metaphorstory
00:00Not a particularly well kept secret that I really, really loved the Codex app when it dropped. And I wanna be clear about this. I'm referring to the Codex app.
00:07I know it could be confusing because Codex was the first OpenAI model for doing code all the way back in like 2022, 2023 if I recall. Codex was also the CLI that they put out for working with agents back in 2025.
00:20Then Codex became a special version of the model that you could use with the CLI, then it became the app, then it became the website, and became all these other things. And .
00:30But I still loved the app. I loved it so much that I built my own open source clone just in case it started to have regressions or other issues, and so I could use it with other harnesses and models. Today OpenAI announced an overhaul of their app called ChatGPT Work, and with this, an all new ChatGPT experience.
00:47I actually have it open right here, but you might notice something. It says ChatGPT, but the icon is Codex.
00:54That's because they stuffed all of Codex into ChatGPT. The Codex app is now ChatGPT. When I clicked the little update button in the bottom earlier because I was in Codex and I wanted the latest version, I ended up installing the new ChatGPT, and I am not very happy about it.
01:13There are a couple things in this overhaul that are actually quite impressive, but there's also an absolute disaster of marketing to be discussed here too. And I'll be frank, I'm disappointed.
01:24I knew they were going to do this change for a while now, because I had friends at OpenAI reach out to me concerned, asking for me to help them jump in front of this rebrand because so many people were so concerned about it, and it seems like they weren't successful. I have feelings about this, and they're not very good.
01:44I'm too frustrated to do a good transition joke, so let's just roll the sponsor, and then I'll dive into all of my frustrations. You've probably heard me talk about today's sponsor before. It's Blacksmith.
01:52But listen, okay? I really need you guys to check this out, because it has fundamentally changed how we think about CI for my entire company. The numbers speak for themselves.
02:01We're doing almost a thousand runs a day on Blacksmith, and the vast, vast majority of them are under two minutes long, even the equivalent run on GitHub would have been significantly longer, sometimes as long as ten minutes. It almost sounds too good to be true.
02:1360% cheaper and two to 10 times faster, but it just is. You sign up your GitHub org, you swap the runs online in your GitHub runner, and you're good. But it's so much more than that.
02:23If it was just the faster runners, it would be the easiest recommendation in the world. But once you see how much better things like their observability are, where you can actually dig in and figure out what's going on across your services, it's night and day difference.
02:35I've had to use GitHub Actions for a few specific things like, you know, publishing through the trusted OIDC flows through NPM, and I forgot how much worse all of the tooling was. And the moment I went back to Blacksmith because I had a bug in some runner, instantaneously was so much easier to figure things out.
02:51They also have an awesome monitoring flow where you can pick specific projects and workflows to monitor for specific triggers. For example, if there's a thing that you don't want your agents to ever do and you have a throw in your lint rules, this can set up a system to ping you when that happens and keep track of where and when those things are happening.
03:07Can you guys keep a secret? I don't know if I should talk about test boxes yet, but they're also really cool. It uses their existing infra for near instant spin up of Docker images to run your agents to do real work.
03:16It's so cool. If this ad was longer than your CI, fix it today at swaydev.link/blacksmith. Good to have you back.
03:22First, I'm gonna do my best to try and explain why they made this change and the cool things that were added, and then I'm gonna rip them a new one because I think this is really stupid.
03:33And then it opens Safari for me to sign back in with. Even better. And now I have to scan a fucking QR code in order to do the pass key off because it won't use a fucking browser?
03:43Thanks, Anthropic. I should not have done that because they removed work. That was really dumb of me.
03:48We're gonna have to do a little bit of magic in the edit quickly because everything fucking sucks now. I'm sorry. Anyways, to show what was on my screen approximately forty five seconds ago, there were three tabs in the Claude app.
04:02You had the standard Claude app, the home, which was for chat and whatnot. You had work, which was a thing we'll talk about in a second, and you had code, which was a bad interface for Claude code, which is the Claude code we all know and love, but in a GUI inside of the Claude app. That middle option that vanished was called work, and it was their attempt to take the things that make Claude code magical for non dev tasks and make those accessible for non devs.
04:27Sorry, it was called co work, not work, my bad. And co work's been moved to now be part of this section here where you have chat and you have co work, and separately, have code. There was an interim window where they had three options though.
04:41They had home, which is normal chat, they had co work, and they had code. And the concept of co work is really cool because it turns out having access to your computer, the ability to run commands, computer use, and all these other things is valuable outside of traditional dev work. I know this because the non devs on my team have been using it heavily for all sorts of different stuff.
05:00With Cowork, you can use the files on your computer, you can use the browser that you have open, you can update your PowerPoint slides, you can do all sorts of work like tasks that aren't writing software. The reason they built this is the power of Claude code as a harness, not as a tool for writing code, but as a tool for using your computer to get real work done.
05:20And it seems like OpenAI wanted to do something similar, which is why they have rebranded Codecs to be a feature in ChatGPT. Instead of the ChatGPT app being for chat, and codex being for, well, codex, ChatGPT is now a UI for codex, as well as a UI for work, which is a separate thing that doesn't appear to do anything.
05:41I just clicked in, shows the exact same stuff on the side here. But it should, hypothetically speaking, allow for non devs to get some of the benefits that we see from ChatGPT. You might be a bit confused because I mentioned before that this is ChatGPT.
05:55So where is the chat? We have work, we have codex. Well, you go down a bit here, you see chat is an option, because chat is no longer the thing you use the ChatGPT app for.
06:05Chat is now a pop up in the ChatGPT app. Needless to say, I think that's really stupid. And I think the people who use the ChatGPT app for ChatGPT are going to be more pissed than the people who use the Codex app for code.
06:17And now I wanna talk about the cool things that have been introduced. They have all of these fancy plugins for PDF management, spreadsheets, presentations, sites, which is a cool new thing that's pretty competitive with Lakebed My Cloud, so we'll talk about it in the future.
06:30And all these fancy plugins for Gmail, Slack, Notion, Google Drive, lots of other things. Seems decent so far. You also have the ability to choose which folders or projects you're working in.
06:41And when you create a new project, you're no longer just saying this folder is what we're working with. You are picking an existing folder in your computer, and you can even select multiple to be used in a given project. It no longer maps in my head the way that I'm used to with, you know, everything else.
06:59We make a new project and we click here to edit it. Why can't I pick files for it?
07:06Is this because I'm in work mode? It is. Great.
07:08So if I switch over here and I add a project, next, new oh, did they change this?
07:15That's annoying. The last time I tested this, you could have multiple folders in a project, but I don't think you can do that anymore. Weird.
07:25A lot of the UX has been changing kind of rapidly and not in ways that I love, but the point of all this is that it's easier for non technical people to use codecs to give it access to things on your computer and do things. I wanna talk more about the good things, so I will do my best here. Obviously, the Sites beta is included.
07:44I briefly mentioned that earlier. It is pretty cool. The plugins between ChatGPT and Codex have been unified, so there's just one layer for all of that.
07:51The computer use stuff had a massive improvement, including things like multi tab and enterprise auth for browsers, as well as much faster computer use. The way that Andrew describes the difference between the Codex mode and the Work mode is the interface.
08:05Codex is built to show you code, diffs, and PRs, while work keeps those details abstracted away. You pick one or you can move freely between them. When you want to quickly explore an idea or get an instant search result, chat is now in the app too with the instant and pro models, search widgets, and seamless handoffs into work or codex tasks.
08:22The in app browser is much better at helping ChatGPT work across the web with support for authenticated sites, multiple tabs, and file downloads. Your tabs will stick around too. It's also worth noting that the official ChatGPT browser called Atlas was sunset as part of all of this with the expectation that you'll use the browser in the ChatGPT app instead.
08:40Which to the five people who really really liked the stuff going on with Atlas, I am sorry, probably not the best replacement. As I have mentioned many times about 5.6, it is way better at computer use. So when you combine it with the new computer use capabilities of the app, it's really really cool.
08:55Five six has better taste at front end, yada yada. It can visualize data and things well, which is cool. Codec side got some updates including editing files directly in app, seeing and reviewing PRs without having to leave the app, accessing Pro Mode in chats, and then handing off the context to Codecs.
09:09This is actually pretty cool. I do a lot of like talking about an idea with Pro and then have to copy paste the context. Having a built in handoff is actually kind of cool.
09:17There's the all new Ultra Mode for your most demanding work. Not really a feature with this Codex staff. And the most important piece here, if you've grown deeply attached to the Codex app icon, you can keep it.
09:29I am one of the people that did not like this change and ended up going in, hopping in appearance, scrolling all the way to the bottom where I saw this tiny little dock icon where you can choose between chat GPT icon and the Codex icon. And this is the only proof of Codex's existence remaining, other than the little callout here.
09:49They do plan on doing more with this ChatGPT Codex merge, but they wanna do it thoughtfully, not just smash two things together with a toggle and call it a day. Sure. There's also a list of nice small improvements, much better performance.
10:02I've noticed this. The Codex app has been overheating my computer a lot lately, and right now, I don't feel almost any heat coming from it at all because the new ChatGPT Codex implementation seems to be more effective.
10:14My honest guess is that this is what they've been using internally for a while, and the updates to the Codex app are just keeping it safe and porting things over without actually testing it. So it's not super surprising to me that the Codex app has had problems lately because I don't think they're using it. And the reason that Codex was good is because so much of OpenAI was using it.
10:33Now they've moved over to this unified app, I would expect it to be pretty solid and could continue improving over time. They also cleaned up settings, they made the model picker and slider better. I do really like this, sliding between the options once you have the model picked.
10:46It's cute. It's not as bad as before. Faster, more reliable mobile connections.
10:50This is huge. The mobile stuff was so garbage, basically gave up on it and just bullied Julius into building it for us for t three code, which we'll talk about in a bit. New docs already has been better.
10:59I found that when I Google search for things like the CLI install for codecs, I can actually find it. Programmatic tool calling with code mode, useful. Nice to see that they finally added that.
11:09And better video rendering on SSH hosts for when you're connecting to codecs over SSH on another machine, you can get video back through the SSH as a connection method now, which is cool, but yeah, I'm I'm sticking with t three code. Okay.
11:22I think I've done my best to cover the positives so far, which means it's time for me to crash the fuck out a bit. Agents have gotten really really good at building websites.
11:32They still struggle with one important piece though, the DNS. It's crazy how obnoxious DNS can be even just for deploying one small site. Once Once you're trying to do more complex things like set up sub domains for users that they can configure themselves, let users bring their own domains over, programmatic registration and more, you start to run into a lot of problems, especially when you want your agents to drive these things.
11:53DnSimple has existed for a while with the specific goal of making DNS simpler, and I already loved using them for every service I built that required DNS that could be configured dynamically. If I wanted users to be able to register domains or sign up for things, DnSimple made it trivial to do. Their SDKs are still the best I've ever seen for managing domains, but they went a step further.
12:12The CLI is unbelievably cool. It's crazy just how far ahead they are from every other domain management service I've used.
12:19Most of them have dashboards that take thirty seconds to two minutes to load. DN Simple has a CLI that responds almost immediately with whatever request you have or more importantly, whatever request your agents have. If you had to think about DNS zones more than once in the past six months, I implore you check these guys out.
12:34They really know how to do it right. If And you use my link, you'll get $10 of credit when you sign up. Check them out now at swaydev.link/dnsimple.
12:41As I mentioned at the start of the video, Codex had its problems in branding. Codex went from a special model to a CLI to new versions and treatments of a model, to a desktop app.
12:53And the result is that to this day, when somebody says, I'm using Codecs, I don't know what they're referring to.
13:00It could be the CLI. It could be GPT five three Codecs. Maybe they found a way to host that old Codex model back in the original Copilot days.
13:09I don't know. Maybe it's the app. Hard to know.
13:11For comparison here, when I say I'm using Claude Code, it's pretty clear what I mean. If I told you guys I was using Claude code, what am I referring to? Am I referring to a model, an app, a CLI?
13:26If I tell you I'm using Claude code, what do you think I'm using?
13:30See how almost every single reply is the CLI? It's because that's what people think of when they hear Claude Code. No one thinks about a special Claude Code model.
13:39Very few think about the app, it's clear. It seems like even Anthropic doesn't think about the desktop app too much. Claude Code refers to the CLI.
13:47Codex refers to a bunch of different things and none of them are properly aligned, and the result is confusion and brand failures. But they started to fix this. The first step in the fix was killing the codex models.
14:01Previously, they were training specific versions of the models to be better at code. They stopped doing that because they folded all those behaviors into the traditional, like, main models. That's why we never got a normal five three.
14:11We only had five three codex, and then they folded those learnings into five four, and we'll probably never see a codex model again as result. That was a huge step forward. The next big thing they did was really lean into the app.
14:23It's been clear for a bit now that the Codex CLI is not their focus. It recently got some improvements, but a lot of those improvements were for me bullying the team into fixing things, threatening to file some slot PRs if they didn't. But there were a ton of just like broken UI UX things in it.
14:39Like when you open it, if the wrong model selected and you typed slash model too fast, it would fail because it was still trying to set up and connect to the MCP servers. It was just like obviously annoying and bad UX in ways that were trivial to fix. We're talking like twenty minutes of work max, maybe like 50 to a 100 lines of code.
14:59And they just weren't bothering, because the whole company had moved over to the app. And while that has problems, and while I wish the CLI, which is the only remaining open source surface, got a little better, got a little more focus, honestly.
15:12I understand why it hasn't been the focus, and I'm just thankful that they've kept the app server in as good of a state as they have. If you're not familiar with what I mean there, the Codec CLI hosts a server that lets you connect to it through apps. Like, you know, the official Codec, sorry, the official ChatGPT app in Codex mode, but also things like t three code.
15:30So those things helped a bunch. The biggest thing that helped with Codex's brand though was that the app got good. It was decent at launch, but it continued to improve.
15:38It kept on adding awesome things that were unique to Codex. Things like the computer use capabilities that are just not at the same level in any other tool right now. And all of that combined with how generous the subscriptions were and how good the models have gotten at coding resulted in a huge resurgence of the Codex brand despite their attempts to shove pets in our faces.
15:59And all of this led to Codex growing massively. OpenAI couldn't stop bragging about it. They were seeing five x or more growth every month consistently.
16:07And it had gotten massive. They were buying Super Bowl commercials just for Codex. But here's where things start to spiral.
16:14As soon as Codex became default behavior for the model, when they folded the Codex models in, the need to fold more in became apparent. The reason that they folded Codex's training in to the main models is because the things Codex did were useful outside of code. Being able to do really long running agentic work is valuable.
16:35It lets you complete tasks that otherwise couldn't be completed using LLMs. I would argue that when five four dropped and confirmed they were no longer doing codex models, the inevitable end of codex was kind of painted on the wall.
16:48And as codex kept getting better and better, and ChatGPT kind of, I don't wanna say faltered or anything, but it wasn't improving at the same rate. It was hard to not stare at these two things, where one is ChatGPT, the thing that makes your business most of its money that is massive and super popular and well used by almost a billion people.
17:06And even this much smaller thing, Codex, that is way more capable, that's improving way faster, that everyone loves, it's hard to not stare at these two things and be like, oh, yeah, Codex, that should be ChatGPT, because then they'll like it even more than they'll keep using, and our growth will be focused in on where we are going.
17:24And obviously, all of the benefits of Codex, like its ability to do things on your computer, are very valuable as a harness helper, whatever you wanna call it. The harsh reality is that Codex was too good for Codex.
17:37Since the team did so well making Codex awesome, to the point where I know a lot of people who made the move entirely away from ClaudeCode and Anthropic Models, myself included for a while up until Fable. Those people made the shift for a reason, and it was because Codex had improved such an absurd amount. Obviously, wanted to expose all of that capability to ChatGPT, but my honest guess is also a bit of a team shuffling thing here, where they had the goal of trying to get these incredible engineers building Codex, all of the awesome people they had hired from everything from marketing to DevRel to general comms and management of folks like myself.
18:12Obviously, the engineers building the app, as well as the insane people who are doing all the Mac computer use hacks. Ex Apple employees doing a lot of that, by the way. It's super crazy.
18:21I get why they wanted to fold that into the cash cow of ChatGPT. But that On the topic of the company structure, I do think they've had some issues with the breakdown between research, apps, ChatGPT, and dev stuff like Codex.
18:36And I think that this announcement from Vidji is a pretty damning issue. To the credit of OpenAI, it seems like she was having a lot of severe health issues that are the main reason she has been taking leaves and is now moving to an advisory role. But this is the individual whose role was previously the CEO of applications at OpenAI.
18:56She was brought in in an attempt to focus in on the product side as its own business and really make great apps like the ChatGPT mobile app, the ChatGPT site, and then as well Codex.
19:07And it seems like they've struggled a lot with doing this correctly, and she has personally struggled quite a bit too, which is why she has decided to leave. It does not appear that she's leaving on bad terms.
19:19Sam Altman's even said that he's really sad about it, but is very grateful for all that she has done at OpenAI, and even grateful for her friendship and who she is as a person, wishing her a speedy recovery. Again, health seems to be the driving issue, but when the driver has health issues, .
19:36And since she is the one in charge of driving OpenAI's application development, this isn't great.
19:42That's also the mistake. Because part of why Codex was doing well wasn't just that it was so good. A big part of why Codex is doing well is because it wasn't ChatGPT.
19:52Codex users didn't want ChatGPT. If they did, they would be using ChatGPT. They wanted Codex.
19:57A large part of that is the functionality that Codex has, but a lot of it is that it's its own surface built by and for devs focused entirely on our use case and our needs as developers. I made a post earlier today about my feelings here.
20:12Codex rebranded to ChatGPT, Claude is spamming me with Excel plugins, xAI is bragging about how good Grok is at PowerPoint. I knew the AI Labs focused 100% of their effort on software devs thing, but it's sad having it all end at once.
20:25This is kind of how it feels for me. The dev stuff that all the labs have been focusing on is still very valuable, but it's time for them to try and branch out beyond developers, trying to expose the awesome functionality of Codecs and of Claude Code to people who aren't just writing code.
20:42But I think they made a huge miscalculation by doing this. Not only were people using Codex because it wasn't ChatGPT, they're also using it because it wasn't Claude Code.
20:51And as such, they started building an allegiance to it. Everything from people showing up at events wearing Codex merch to people getting really hyped to talk about it. I even know people who have been trying to make Codex specific meetups happen.
21:03Codex is a brand that went way beyond OpenAI and ChatGPT. It was a brand that felt built for developers, and it was resonating with them a lot.
21:12It resonated with me so much that I ended up making my own clone of the Codex app. I try to not shill my stuff constantly, but you know what? It's fully open source and free, and doesn't make us any money.
21:23I'm gonna talk about t three code a little bit. The Genesis moment that led to me building t three code was actually during the early testing of the Codex desktop app. Because I liked the Codex app so much that the random performance issues that appeared a few days into testing frustrated me deeply, so deeply that I wanted to make sure I could fix it myself if it broke.
21:43And when they told me they did not intend to make the desktop app open source despite the CLI being open source, but that the CLI was how the Codex desktop app worked through all of the app server stuff, I realized it might be time for us to make our own open source alternative so that if we do have these types of problems, we'll be good.
22:02We can fall back to an open source project that can be modified by us, can be pinned to an old version, can be fixed by us, whatever you need to do to make sure t three code behaves how you want it to behave, you can do now. To be frank, as much as I loved the Codex app, I didn't trust OpenAI to not screw it up in some way.
22:22Whether it's performance issues, whether the models just stop getting better and I wanna use it with different models, whether they make some UI change that I hate or I guess kill it entirely, I wanted to make sure I had a solution that I could trust and that you guys could trust too, because it's open source. So you do whatever the hell you need to it.
22:39And that's why we have this steal our code legally button at the bottom because I want you guys to be able to use t three code for whatever the hell you want, and a lot of people have. There are forks of thousands of users and as many as a fourth of our users are running a fork or a patched version of some form. And I love that.
22:55I wanna support that. I want people to be able to change their editor experience however they want to. And I'm more thankful than ever that we did this, because I don't wanna use this version of Codex.
23:08I just don't. I don't like having all of these things I don't use all the way at the top here, especially on my smaller screen. I don't like that the combination of that and Pin Chats means that Projects is so far down the UI now.
23:22I don't want sites as a special button built into my UI here. I don't want chat as a pop up window that happens when I'm just trying to write some goddamn code. I don't like this direction at all, and what I like even less is the erosion of the Codex brand, because it was starting to do really well.
23:39Codex had grown to the point where it was an actual competitor to QuadCode, and now it's a lot harder to talk about that.
23:47And this is why I think they really fumbled here. Having codex is like a little call out here is nice and all, but it's not the same. It doesn't get people excited to talk about how you're using codex instead of quad code.
23:59Rocero put this really well in chat. Instead of hey man, you gotta try codex, it's now hey man, you gotta try the codex mode in the new ChatGPT desktop app. Yep.
24:07Even people like Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, sent emails to Sam Altman about how excited they were to use codex to accelerate and do work never possible before. Codex, that's over.
24:17To put it simply, this is one of those changes that just hurts motivation. Both the motivation of the people using Codecs to share it with others, but also the motivation of the team building it. I know a lot of people that joined OpenAI to work on Codex, the coding experience.
24:35And now Codex is just a toggle inside of the ChatGPT app. It's just a bad decision. Company organization wise, this might make sense.
24:44And if you're the type of person who works at OpenAI and is thinking about these things constantly, the layers here don't matter as much. But this is a really common mistake for people who work on one thing full time.
24:55They lose their ability to take a step back and see how the world perceives it. And in this case, the world's perceiving this as very confusing. A bunch of people opened up their ChatGPT app today to have it turned into a code editor with a chat button and a pop up shoved into it.
25:12A lot of developers installed an update for Codecs just to have the app replaced with ChatGPT, and now when they tab around, it says and shows the ChatGPT icon instead.
25:21And maybe if they go find this hidden menu, they can make it at least look like the Codex icon, even though it says ChatGPT under it. It's just dumb. This is just not the right path.
25:32It's a fundamental failure to understand how people think about these things and talk about these things. But at least they haven't taken the app server yet, which means other tools can still use Codecs without leaving behind developers.
25:46Because my fear now is that the things we need as devs are gonna be deprioritized as ChatGPT has new features they wanna shove into this top left section. I've never been so thankful to have done a sloppy open source project as I have with t three code.
25:59I still can't believe how far it's come, and I'm so thankful for people like Julius making it what it is today. It was a Hail Mary bet that was kind of hedging on the possibility of codecs getting worse.
26:11I will be real, I was not hedging on the possibility of codecs becoming a toggle, but here we are. I don't think I have anything else to say on this one. I am just sad to have lost one of the brands and apps that I genuinely really liked.
26:24I let OpenAI know ahead of time what I thought about this change. They didn't seem like they wanted to hold it back, and I guess I wish they did. I have nothing else to say about this.
26:33It's a sad way to kill a brand that was growing and was well loved within the developer community, And I wouldn't be surprised if they started to see sentiment shift as a result of this seemingly simple change. I got nothing else to say on this one. I'm gonna go play around with the new model because at least that's really good.
26:48Until next time. Peace nerds.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
Theo starts by declaring his love for OpenAI's Codex app -- then reveals that on the day of filming, OpenAI quietly killed it, folding Codex into a rebranded ChatGPT under the same icon. What follows is his case for why that was a branding disaster.
Named ideas worth stealing.
12:54list
Why Codex Died (the whiteboard breakdown)
- Killing the codex models
- Really lean into the app
- The app got good
- Codex was too good for Codex
Theo's live-built causal chain for how OpenAI's own success with Codex led directly to Codex being absorbed into ChatGPT.
Steal forany postmortem on why a beloved sub-brand got merged into a parent product
How they asked for the click.
VERBAL ASK
21:10product
“steal our code (legally)”
Soft, transparently-labeled self-promotion for his own free open-source tool rather than a hard sell -- framed as an origin story, not a pitch.
MENTIONED ON CAMERA
FROM THE DESCRIPTION
PRIMARY CTAWhere the creator wants you to go next.
OTHER LINKSAlso linked in the description.
Visual structure at a glance.
