OpenAI has launched a new macOS app for Codex, its AI-powered coding tool, as competition intensifies around agentic software development — a fast-emerging approach where AI agents independently handle complex programming tasks.
The release marks a significant step in OpenAI’s effort to close the gap with rival tools such as Claude Code and Cowork, which have gained traction among developers experimenting with multi-agent coding workflows and new human–AI collaboration interfaces.
The rise of agentic software development
AI is already reshaping how software is written, with large portions of routine coding increasingly delegated to autonomous agents and sub-agents. Rather than acting as simple assistants, these systems can plan, execute, and iterate on tasks with limited human input.
Over the past year, agentic coding tools have moved quickly from experimental concepts to production-ready products. While OpenAI introduced Codex as a command-line tool in April and later added a web interface, competitors have been faster to package similar capabilities into developer-friendly applications.
The new macOS app signals OpenAI’s push to catch up — and potentially regain ground.
What the new Codex app offers
According to OpenAI, the macOS Codex app is designed to support multiple AI agents working in parallel, enabling more complex workflows and faster development cycles. The app integrates agent skills, shared state, and other advanced workflows that have become standard in modern agentic systems.
The launch comes less than two months after the release of GPT-5.2-Codex, OpenAI’s most advanced coding model to date. The company hopes the combination of a more powerful model and a more flexible interface will be enough to persuade developers currently using rival tools to switch.
“If you really want to do sophisticated work on something complex, 5.2 is the strongest model by far,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said during a press call. “However, it’s been harder to use, so taking that level of model capability and putting it in a more flexible interface, we think is going to matter quite a bit.”
How it stacks up against competitors
Benchmark results paint a mixed picture. GPT-5.2 currently leads TerminalBench, which measures performance on command-line programming tasks. However, competing agents from Google’s Gemini 3 and Anthropic’s Claude Opus have posted comparable scores, falling within the benchmark’s margin of error.
Results from SWE-bench, which evaluates an AI model’s ability to fix real-world software bugs, show a similarly tight race, with no clear winner. Analysts note that agentic workflows remain difficult to benchmark accurately, and real-world developer experience can vary widely even among top-tier models.
New features aimed at developer productivity
Beyond raw model performance, OpenAI is betting on workflow improvements. The Codex app introduces background automations that can run on a schedule, queue results, and allow developers to review outputs later. Users can also select different agent personalities — such as pragmatic or empathetic — depending on how they prefer to work.
For OpenAI, the most compelling argument remains speed.
“You can use this from a clean sheet of paper, brand new, to make a really quite sophisticated piece of software in a few hours,” Altman said. “As fast as I can type in new ideas, that is the limit of what can get built.”
Why it matters
As AI-driven development tools mature, the competition is shifting away from raw model capability alone toward usability, workflow design, and developer experience. OpenAI’s macOS Codex app reflects that shift, positioning agentic coding not as a niche experiment but as a mainstream development approach.
For developers and startups — including those across Africa’s growing tech ecosystem — these tools could significantly lower barriers to building complex software, compress development timelines, and reshape how small teams compete at global scale.
The race for agentic coding dominance is far from settled. But with this launch, OpenAI is making clear it intends to remain a central player.
