Fireside Alpha

@firesidealpha · Twitter · 2026-07-25 20:41 UTC

Sam Altman reveals building Codex was a "crazy kamikaze mission" to beat Claude Code and that most of the best coders he knows now use Codex. "We were way behind Claude Code, and it seemed like a kind of crazy kamikaze mission to try to beat them with a coding app." "The consensus is that this kind of thing never works, and you just move on to the next one. It's a fool's errand to try to win when someone else already has momentum in a particular product category." "But we decided we thought it was really important. We asked a team to do it, and they performed a legitimate, unbelievable, very rare in the history of business thing." "Now it is the product that most of the best coders I know use." "That felt like an impossible thing, but if we hadn't asked the team, hey, we have a really important but extremely hard mission for you, it just wouldn't have happened."