OpenAI launches research preview of Codex AI software engineering agent for developers

Just days after reports emerged suggesting OpenAI was buying white-hot coding startup Windsurf, the former company appears to be launching its own competitor service as a research preview under its brand name Codex, going head-to-head against Windsurf, Cursor, and the growing list of AI coding tools offered by startups and large tech companies including Microsoft and Amazon.

Windsurf launches in-house AI models

According to Windsurf, SWE-1, the largest and most capable AI model of the bunch, performs competitively with Claude 3.5 Sonnet, GPT-4.1, and Gemini 2.5 Pro on internal programming benchmarks. However, SWE-1 appears to fall short of frontier AI models, such as Claude 3.7 Sonnet, on software engineering tasks.

Cursor’s System Prompt Leaked : What It Means for Developers

The recent leak of Cursor’s system prompt has sent shockwaves through the tech industry, offering an unprecedented glimpse into one of the most advanced AI coding assistants on the market.