OpenAI Upgrades Codex With Computer Use, Image Generation Capabilities

OpenAI, on Thursday, released a major update to Codex, its coding-focused platform for desktop. The new update brings computer use, image generation, native access to the web, and other personalisation tools to users, significantly upgrading the usability of the tool. The new features are first arriving on macOS and will be rolled out to Windows and the integrated development environment (IDE) soon. Interestingly, the capability arrived the same day Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.7, which also focuses on bringing improvements to software engineering.

OpenAI's Codex Gets New Capabilities

In a post, the San Francisco-based artificial intelligence (AI) giant announced a new update for Codex. The developer and enterprise-focused product is now gaining several new features that will widen its use case. Making the announcement, the company also highlighted that Codex is now being used by more than three million developers who use the platform every week (weekly active users or WAU).

The most noteworthy addition is computer use. Codex can now autonomously operate the user's desktop and control a large selection of apps and tools. By using specific agents, it can see and process the content on the screen, click on icons, and type text in text boxes and documents. The feature can work in the background, meaning the user has the option to either monitor Codex or do their own work in the meantime. This capability is first coming to macOS.

Codex can now also work natively with the web using an in-app browser. Users can comment directly on pages to provide precise instructions for the AI agent. However, the feature is limited to locally accessing web applications. Alongside, the platform can also generate and edit images using the GPT-image-1.5 AI model.

OpenAI claims that these capabilities will be helpful for developers who want to use Codex for frontend tasks, testing, and iterating on projects. Image generation is also useful for creating visuals for product concepts, frontend designs, mockups, and games.

To broaden the use cases of Codex, the company has also released more than 90 additional plugins to let the agentic tool gather context and take action. Some of these include Atlassian Rovo, CircleCI, CodeRabbit, GitLab Issues, Microsoft Suite, Remotion, Render, and Superpowers.

Other improvements include support for incorporating GitHub review comments, running multiple terminal tabs, and connecting to remote devboxes over SSH in alpha. Further, OpenAI is also releasing memory in preview, which will allow Codex to remember context from previous conversations and sessions. These can be personal preferences, corrections, and researched information.