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Codex, Behind the Harness

Conference Context

Session Description

Agents have evolved a lot in the last year both in capabilities and in the overall structure. Increasingly sandbox-powered coding agents are breaking out to do general purpose work. In this talk we’ll be taking apart the open-source Codex agent harness. Understand how it works, what makes it so suitable to do work beyond coding tasks, how it handles key aspects like context management, tools and file system access. We’ll also tie these back to concrete actions you can take to bring these patterns into your own agents, whether you are building on top of the Codex agent or building your own.

Media Evidence

Building voice agents with OpenAI — Dominik Kundel, OpenAI (speaker-match related prior/adjacent AI Engineer video; captions: English auto-captions).

Evidence Graph

This evidence graph is generated from currently linked source material: official schedule text, related video pages, cached transcripts, visible slide text, dense/reconstructed slide pages, and AI slide-classification audits.

Media Signals

Agent Reading Notes

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Transcript Status

Related video transcript availability: English auto-captions. Treat this as supporting context, not a recording of this exact scheduled session unless later confirmed. Not fetched yet.

People

Supporting Slides

Slide Evidence

Synthesis

Synthesized Breakdown

Codex, Behind the Harness ## Conference Context - Date/time: 2026-07-01 · 1:30pm-1:50pm - Track/room: Agentic Engineering · Track 8 - Speaker(s): Dominik Kundel - Session type/status: session · confirmed - Track: Agentic Engineering - Room: Track 8 - Session type: session - Status: confirmed ## Session Description Agents have evolved a lot in the last year both in capabilities and in the overall structure. Increasingly sandbox-powered coding agents are breaking out to do general purpose work. In this talk we’ll be taking apart the open-source Codex agent harness. Understand how it works, what makes it so suitable to do work beyond coding tasks, how it handles key aspects like context management, tools and file system access.

Speaker And Company Context

Topics Covered

Derived Links And Source Material

Novel Concepts / Clever Methods

Evidence Boundary

This synthesis is based on the official schedule and linked source pages. It should be revisited when exact session recordings or transcript-backed secondary sources are available.