IDEs are a thing of the past and I couldn’t be happier about it.
So here’s the new AI-builder-focused Codex App. With one game-changing feature that most people will miss.
I was chatting in a thread with Addy Osmani yesterday (I swear I had no idea this was coming) about how I didn’t think IDEs were going to be the future interface. Claude Code has proven that extracting people from IDEs with a focused tool wasn’t just possible, but honestly preferred. The AI.dev website from Google is a dream come true for AI-first apps.
And this Codex app has a bunch of new ideas.
Multitasking with Multiple Agents
This targets programmers and gives the ability to multitask effortlessly, allowing folks to run multiple agents that concurrently perform tasks. I end up waiting quite a bit for LLMs, and so far I’ve been filling that up with mining minerals in Valheim — but no longer.
That feature allows you to work with multiple agents in parallel and keep agent changes isolated with worktrees, just like Cursor does. That’s great, but that’s still not my favorite feature.
Reusable Capabilities with Skills
There’s also the ability to package your tools into reusable capabilities with skills. Those are table stakes these days, but it’s core to a new developer workflow. Slash commands are foundational to automation, and this brings it all together.
This is basically everything I wanted in a new tool. I can’t say I love it better than Claude Code, but it’s definitely more visual.
The Feature I Love Most: Automations
When I’m working and I release a new feature, there’s a bunch of things I want to happen: generate new tests, run tests, commit, increase the version number, update the readme and other documentation, update the package.json, fire up a new release and changelog.
Today those usually happen as a slash command sequence that takes me out of the flow. What they should be are automations… in the background… to be picked up automatically. I handle some of that with GitHub Actions today, but having an integrated way of working with them feels natural.
Pretty incredible they released something available to absolutely everyone including Free and Go.
Alright OpenAI, you made me wait for it, but it was worth it. Dang it! Nicely done.
