Vibe Check: GPT-5 Codex Can Code for 35 Minutes Straight—If You Ask Nicely

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GPT-5 Codex is OpenAI's latest update to its coding agent, launching today with two major improvements: dynamic thinking time and seamless hand-offs between local and cloud environments. The handoff is OpenAI's vision for coding: AI that works like a colleague who keeps going when you step away from your desk.

What’s new

1. New model (GPT-5 Codex). GPT-5 Codex is a fine-tuned variant for coding that chooses its own “thinking time.” It answers trivial queries immediately and can stay with multi-step refactors for much longer when needed.
2. Hand-off between VS Code, web, and (eventually) command line interface (CLI). With GPT-5 Codex you can start coding in VS Code (a popular code editor built by Microsoft), and then hand the job off to Codex Cloud before you close your laptop. Because the task is now running on OpenAI’s servers instead of your machine, it keeps going while you’re offline—something local execution can’t do. Eventually this will ship for Codex CLI, too, but for now it’s only available in VS Code.
3. Better code reviews. OpenAI is also releasing a code review bot that runs your repository in its own space, executes checks, and can apply fixes on GitHub—catching deeper issues than a bot that only reads your code.
4. Availability and costs. GPT-5 Codex is set to power the web-based version of Codex and be selectable in the CLI and VS Code extension, with pricing aligned to GPT-5.

Codex learns to think—and keeps going

The main event of this update is that Codex can run a fine-tuned variant of GPT-5, made specifically for coding. GPT-5 Codex dynamically selects its own “thinking time”: It returns immediate results for trivial questions, like, “What folder are we in?” and thinks longer for hard tasks. This is a similar pattern to the one OpenAI first used with GPT-5 in ChatGPT, and now it’s coming to your programming environment.

Dynamic thinking time makes GPT-5 Codex much more usable. You can have a back-and-forth conversation with it, instead of only sending it off to do work for minutes at a time.

The other important change...

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