OpenAI has pushed Codex well past its roots as a coding assistant. In an update rolled out on April 16, 2026 and expanded through the week, the company's desktop app now drives other applications on your computer, runs its own in-app browser, generates images, remembers context across sessions, and supports more than 90 new plugins. The company is openly calling it a super app — an ambition it's building in public rather than announcing as a finished product.
Head of Codex Thibault Sottiaux summed up the direction plainly: "We're building the Super App in the open and evolving it out of the Codex app." With roughly 3 million weekly users and around a million more signing on each month, the update reframes Codex as OpenAI's bid to own the autonomous-agent layer on developer and knowledge-worker desktops.
Computer use comes to the desktop
The headline feature is background computer use, available on macOS at launch (excluding the EU, UK, and Switzerland for now). Codex can now see, click, and type on the operating system with its own cursor, and multiple agents can operate in parallel while the user keeps working. OpenAI says it has been using the same capability internally for Codex's own quality assurance — a tell that reliability matters to the team more than flashy demos.
Paired with that is a new in-app browser built around OpenAI's Atlas. It currently supports opening local and public pages and letting users leave page-level comments that Codex can then act on. Full browsing and analysis features are expected to follow in later previews.
Images, memory, and scheduled automations
Codex can now generate and refine images using gpt-image-1.5 directly inside the app, at no additional cost — useful for stitching screenshots, design mockups, or UI references into a working session. A new memory system carries over preferences and corrections between sessions, and heartbeat automations let Codex schedule future prompts, monitor long-running tasks, and resume work across multiple days.
The plugin expansion is equally broad: JIRA, CircleCI, GitLab, and Microsoft's productivity suite are among the 90-plus new integrations, each combining skills, app connections, and MCP servers to widen the agent's reach across enterprise toolchains.
Why it matters
The practical implication is that OpenAI is stacking agent capabilities in one desktop surface rather than distributing them across a family of standalone tools. With GitHub review handling, multi-tab terminals, remote SSH in alpha, and a file sidebar for PDFs and documents, Codex is positioning itself as the default AI layer in front of a developer's workflow — not a sidekick opened when something breaks.
Personalization features — along with computer use in the EU and UK — are not yet available for Enterprise, Edu, EU, and UK accounts, with OpenAI saying those rollouts will follow soon, and some capabilities remain in preview. But the shape of the product is now clear: Codex is where OpenAI wants autonomous desktop work to live, and the pace of its rollout suggests competitors will need their own super-app answer quickly.
