Ma: Industry will build an agentic software engineer within two years
Josh Ma · ChatGPT Codex: The Missing Manual · May 16, 2025 · at 6:59
Josh Ma, an OpenAI engineer on the ChatGPT Codex team, describes his conviction that an autonomous software engineer was imminent.
0:00 / 0:05exact quote · 5.7s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“Whether or not I was involved in the next two years, I think we were going, we are going to build an agentic software engineer.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Josh Ma
Josh Ma: Software engineering stays human-centric due to review and deployment
“As long as you see humans and AI writing it, like maybe there's a world where it's only AI's maintaining a code base and the assumptions change, but the moment you start to break that fourth wall and a human's coming in, doing code review, deploying the code, …”
Josh Ma: AI agents naturally infer code style without explicit instructions
“For agents, I don't think you have really had to tell code style. It looks at your code base and just writes code that's consistent to that. Whereas like a human's not going to take its time sorry, their time to go through the code base and you know, follow al…”
Josh Ma: ChatGPT Codex cuts off internet access during agent execution
“Once the agent starts running, right what we actually do today, and we're hoping to like evolve on this, is we'll cut off internet access because we still don't fully understand what letting loose an agent in his own environment is going to do.”
Josh Ma: Codex focuses on pushing single-shot autonomous software engineering
“I think what we see as, like, the role of Codex here is to really push Frontier on that sort of single-shot autonomous software engineering.”