OpenAI Codex will be "primitive" in 2-3 months; pivoting beyond laptop-constrained development
Thibault Sottiaux, who leads core products at OpenAI, posted on X on August 4 that today's version of Codex will seem "primitive in 2-3 months" and that the team is "about to go through another major evolution in how we use AI at the frontier." Sottiaux noted that "the next generation of models need more than your laptop," signaling a strategic pivot away from laptop-bound development workflows. This aligns with OpenAI's June acquisition of Ona, a company specializing in secure cloud development environments, which the company framed as part of "the next phase of Codex."
The context: Codex launched a new GPT-5 model in early July 2026 and has already surpassed 8 million users. Earlier in July, OpenAI cut pricing 80% for GPT-5.6 Luna ($0.20 per million input tokens) and 20% for GPT-5.6 Terra, signaling both demand acceleration and readiness to scale. Sottiaux's statement suggests the next iteration will involve persistent cloud agents that continue working even after the developer's laptop is disconnected, moving Codex from a developer tool to an agent platform.
For practitioners evaluating Codex, this is a clear signal that the current experience (8M users, recent GPT-5 launch) is early-stage. The team is building toward agents that manage multi-step, long-running tasks in cloud environments without laptop tethering. The timeline (2-3 months to "major evolution") and admission that frontier models need more compute suggests infrastructure-level changes (potentially involving GPUs or distributed agents) are imminent.
Sources
- Primary source
- thenewstack.io
“Given some of the results I'm seeing recently, it's pretty clear Codex is a good harness. But it will seem primitive in 2-3 months and we're about to go through another major evolution in how we use AI at the frontier. The next generation of models need more than your laptop.”