OpenAI is pushing toward a future where AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) meaningfully benefits everyone, and that starts with tools that feel effortless and intuitive to use.
“When you think about the AI products we have today, they’re already very useful, but they can require a lot of thought and effort,” said Alexander Embiricos, a member of OpenAI’s product staff.
Instead of operating as a separate chatbot, what if an AI agent could truly work with someone? “We imagined this idea of a software engineering teammate,” Embiricos said. “So we built Codex, OpenAI’s coding agent.” Because the team spends much of their day in Slack, bringing Codex directly into that conversational layer was a no-brainer. “When you use Codex in Slack, you don’t have to switch out of a tool or change context,” said Embiricos.
As a member of OpenAI’s technical staff, Kiriti Badam found integrating with Slack particularly well-suited to Codex for three reasons:
- Clear, well-written documentation: “It was very easy for Codex itself to read the documentation and implement a feature,” said Badam.
- A dedicated developer sandbox: “You can create a sandbox on the side, test with it, and let Codex actually write code for you in the Slack bot, essentially building itself,” he said.
- Block Kit’s visual builder: “Just drag and drop to see exactly how your message should look, take the markdown snippet, put it in your code, and now you have that feature readily available,” said Badam.
The result is a teammate-like experience that blends seamlessly into the team’s workflow. “If you put Codex inside Slack, it can figure out what it needs as context,” Badam said. “We don’t want an extra ticket system that relies on a human to capture the right threads.” Now, when he asks, “Can you take care of this?”, Codex reads the thread, understands the environment, and starts the task automatically.
Looking ahead, the team sees this as a step toward an even more fluid form of collaboration. “We’re all jamming about what you can do with Codex right now, and what you can do with Codex in Slack,” Embiricos said. “How can we enable a future where you have a teammate that’s proactive and ambient? We’d love to build a future where things are just happening in Slack.”
