Ben Goodger

Thrilled to announce ChatGPT Atlas, a new browser for the next era of the web. Download at chatgpt.com/atlas So proud of our amazing team this morning. I hope you’ll give it a try!

@gerardsans Codex is a tool, like programming languages, that makes the practice of engineering vastly more efficient to those already in the field, and the field accessible to vastly more people.

@bengoodger Calling agentic coding “engineering” is generous. Where exactly is the engineering? Which parts of the SDLC does OpenAI Codex actually handle, requirements, architecture, verification, operations? Or just code generation?

The profound shift that's happened to the field of engineering in the past three months is staggering almost to the point of disbelief. Using Codex is like being thwarted by machine code for years and finally discovering HTML+JS. If you are not using these tools as an integral part of your daily routine you're behind. Now is the time to catch up.

Codex is the biggest thing to happen to technology since ChatGPT.

@morqon there are no dumb questions!

@bengoodger i hereby resign from asking dumb questions, and thank you!

Major feature drop this week - sign into multiple ChatGPT accounts! Now you can easily keep your work & personal chat & browsing sessions separate! This was a tricky one to get right - proud of the team! 🥳 👇

@morqon This is already possible (even before today's release!) -- just go to the browser profile menu at the top right of the Atlas window > Edit or add profile > Add profile

@bengoodger think i can see why not, but a friend asks: can you support multiple profiles with one chatgpt account? they ask from the perspective of a consultant who wants to separate work from personal without having separate work subscriptions

Hi, Ben here from the Atlas Engineering team. Codex App is an Electron app - Electron makes it relatively straightforward to take a web-based app and run it across different platforms. While Electron is itself built on browser foundations (Chromium), it's actually not super straightforward to build a modern web browser using Electron - specifically because of the need to be able to embed third-party/untrusted content within a very sophisticated webview. Chromium provides this API below the surface, but in C++. Atlas is thus built as a native app, leveraging the Chromium C++ layer and Swift on MacOS. To make this run on Windows we are porting the Swift code to run on Windows too (this actually works!) It's a substantially more complex engineering task however than bringing up a new Electron platform. We've made a lot of progress on our Windows build however, and we're excited to share it with you soon.

@adamhfry Codex App for Windows released a few weeks after Mac. Why is Atlas on Win taking so long?

Another week, another ChatGPT Atlas release! You can now sign in to multiple ChatGPT accounts (personal, work, school) with separate profiles. We've heard from our users that this was one of the biggest blockers to using Atlas everywhere in their life. Hit “update” in the top right to get the latest, or download at chatgpt.com/atlas

@mweinbach @lafaiel Thanks for the tip, we'll check it out. Sometimes we have built/run with a different set of flags vs. official Chrome.

@lafaiel cc @bengoodger might want to take a look at this fwiw

I don’t think people realize how limited the workloads are that actually make good use of multithreading. Even with the same GPU, the Premiere Pro performance gap between a 64-core Threadripper and an 8-core 9700X is only about 20%. Why? Because for the parallel processing parts, the GPU’s encoder performance matters a lot.

UPDATE: An issue that prevented Apple's iCloud Passwords extension from working in Atlas has been fixed in macOS 26.3.1. If you are reliant on this extension please make sure you apply this OS update!

An example of a cool little feature from our demos meeting a few weeks back is available to you now in this week's Atlas update: When finding text in pages (⌘F), if you get no matches, Atlas can now show you similar matches as well! Just hit "Find similar matches" below the find bar. For example, I was in New Zealand last week and now I need help translating from Kiwi English to American English.

@rohindhar Why not just do auctions (as they do in e.g. New Zealand) and let buyers fight it out with full transparency?

Have heard two stories lately of sellers in San Francisco accepting an offer And then moments later a much higher offer comes in that they then have to decline In the two cases I heard about, the cost of prematurely accepting the offer was $250k and $400k

ChatGPT in Atlas goes beyond Q&A and helps you organize your life on the web.

@steipete @OpenAI @openclaw Welcome!!

I'm joining @OpenAI to bring agents to everyone. @OpenClaw is becoming a foundation: open, independent, and just getting started.🦞 steipete.me/posts/2026/ope…

I use @OpenAI’s browser Atlas every day, and this week, I got to talk to the team building it. Ben Goodger (@bengoodger), Atlas’s head of engineering, and Darin Fisher (@darinwf), member of technical staff, are legends of the browser world. They’ve worked together on Netscape, Firefox, Chrome—and now Atlas. I had them on @every’s AI & I to talk about agentic browsers, the future of the web, and what it’s like to build a browser with Codex. We get into: - If agents can browse for you, do traditional websites become obsolete? Ben and Darin don’t think so. Yes, we’ll hand off tedious tasks—but there’s still plenty we’ll want to do ourselves, like travel planning or window shopping. Darin used a metaphor: He loves taking Waymos, but he also loves driving stick; sometimes you want to be chauffeured, other times you want the satisfaction of being in control. - A browser that knows when to step in. Browsers have always been like a taxi, ferrying you to a destination, but agentic ones are more like tour guides, helping you decide where to go in the first place. Ben says that Atlas is built to balance both: The interface stays minimal and familiar, but ChatGPT sits at the heart, ready when you need it. - How the Atlas team uses Codex to move faster. After coding browsers by hand for decades, Ben and Darin say that building with AI feels fundamentally different. More than half of Atlas's code was written by Codex. They've found it especially useful for navigating the complex Chromium codebase, prototyping quickly, and learning new techniques, like how to set up a particular animation or nail a UI effect. - The craft of coding with AI. AI coding tools can feel like a loss to veteran engineers: The work gets faster, but less personal. Darin acknowledges that tension, describing coding as therapeutic—almost like art—but sees Codex as a way to offload the monotony while preserving the satisfying craft. Ben agrees, arguing that a human’s role is the context behind a decision that is likely not in the code itself. This is a must-watch for anyone curious about the future of the web and how we will interface with it. Watch below! Timestamps: Introduction: 00:01:57 Designing an AI browser that’s intuitive to use: 00:11:51 How the web changes if agents do most of the browsing: 00:15:24 Why traditional websites will not become obsolete: 00:25:06 A browser that stays out of the way versus one that shows you around:00:29:00 How the team uses Codex to build Atlas: 00:39:51 The craft of coding with AI tools:00:44:47 Why Ben and Darin care so much about browsers: 00:52:33

@signulll I was in Pompeii and there were frescoes on some of the walls on the main street that the tour guide described as advertising. I'm sure there was a flicker of tension between those frescoes and architectural beauty, but it seemed quaint in retrospect. Nothing new under the sun.

ads were rarely a moral discussion for me personally. you just need to look at incentives. e.g. once ads exist, the company is permanently at war with itself. the ads team optimizes for impressions, engagement, & monetization. the product team optimizes for user value. you’ve bifurcated the company in some ways. you can see this end state everywhere. google search drowned in sponsored sludge. facebook optimizing for engagement loops that just happen to maximize ad yield. once revenue is downstream of attention, the product degrades into whatever extracts the most of it. show me the incentives & i’ll show you the outcome.

You know that feeling when you're barreling down the runway and you start to tilt back a little as the front wheels leave the ground. Yeah that one. And that sense of.. "this is fast, but it's the slowest I'll go for a while... only faster from here..."

@idevelop yeah I thought about writing "instead of assembly" but just knowing how much compute goes into producing optimized assembly it felt like that was a bridge too far... today. who knows what will come in the next few years!

@bengoodger i've been thinking about this too. if you take the extreme case, of course no one would jump from prompt to assembler code. in-between abstractions, especially deterministic ones, at the very least shorten the amount of work an llm has to do / how many tokens it needs to wrangle.

I am intrigued by what this means for tools whose goals were human developer ergonomics. Like why write SwiftUI at all if you can just have your agent write UIKit/AppKit?

(In my mind, an engineer is someone that understands whatever tools they need to solve the problem, and then solves it...)

I remember a senior engineer telling me, way back when I was an intern writing JavaScript, that people who wrote JS weren't "real engineers". lol. In retrospect that seems like a dumbass take, so... we are once again entering a time of dumbass takes. Be warned!

While I think it's natural to feel a sense of loss wrt the underlying code, is it really any different to the sense of loss when we stopped doing memory management by hand, or stopped writing machine code? Abstraction just keeps moving higher up the stack...