OpenAI says Holiday Extras rebuilt its travel app with Codex and shipped eight releases in two weeks, each with at least three features. The 44-year-old travel company said it wants to be first to use AI to grow the business.
Can staff outside engineering really ship software customers use? At Holiday Extras, the answer is yes, with guardrails.
Codex, OpenAI's coding agent that reads a codebase and edits multiple files while running commands and tests, gives that idea a path to production, as described in developer guides. Holiday Extras staff said everyone from CEO Matthew to call center agents has access. That access matters because its Builder Platform provides a safe place to deploy Codex-built work, the staff said.
This is the fifth rebuild of the app, the team said. The prior version took more than a year of design and testing with engineers, while the new prototype took two days and reached production in two weeks with engineers, the team said. A finance staffer who worked as an accountant for decades rebuilt costly finance systems and improved them, according to OpenAI, which still leaves engineers in the loop for production.
What happens next is dream-to-screen time, the interval between an idea in the morning and working software by arrival at work. Holiday Extras leaders said that interval is shrinking toward zero and has changed their ambition. Watch whether that Builder Platform model holds once non-engineers ship beyond prototypes.
