OpenAI Codex has a physical reset button — no finance meeting required
Codex keeps hitting users with surprise resets, and it turns out there's literally a physical Reset button behind the whole thing. Tibo Sottiaux, the OpenAI executive in charge of Codex, says Reset started as a way to say sorry. The team iterates fast, and occasionally a config change breaks the product for half an hour, so they'd toss extra credits to make up for it. Later, after new releases and record user numbers, Reset slowly became a celebration.
And there's no layer of approval to get through. Sottiaux says he doesn't need to pull marketing and finance into a meeting first. "I press it whenever I want," he says, "whenever it feels right."
Even better — there's a physical Reset button in his office. On August 19, Sottiaux said someone gifted him a fancy hardware Reset button; he followed up with a photo of it, deliberately placing a Codex figurine next to it for scale. So far, though, the physical button hasn't been pressed even once.
Codex recently passed 20 million active users, and the reset ritual has turned into a running community bit. What started as a bug-compensation move eventually grew into product culture.