Wu: OpenAI team is maintaining a 100% Codex-written codebase without manual coding
Sherwin Wu · OpenAI’s head of platform engineering on the next 12-24 months of AI | Sherwin Wu · Feb 12, 2026 · at 13:05
Sherwin Wu, Head of Platform Engineering at OpenAI, discusses how developers handle agent failure modes and OpenAI's internal experiments with autonomous coding workflows.
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“So there's a team that that's actually doing an experiment right now with an open AI where they are basically maintaining a 100% code expert and code base. So, you know, like, you know some, you know, you'll have the AI write code, but you'll obviously end up like rewriting a lot of it and you might need to like double track and change things. But this team is just fully code expelled and just like leaning in entirely. And they run into the exact problems that you're describing, which is like, you know, their challenge is, you know you know, I want to get this thing, this feature built, but I can't get the agent to do it. And so usually there's an escape hatch where, you know, then you're like, all right, I'll roll up my sleeves and like figure it out. And then instead of using codecs, I might use like tab complete and cursor and things like that. But this team for the experiment, this team doesn't have that escape hatch.”
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