An email popped up in my inbox today: “You can just build things, enjoy 6 months on us.”
Sender: the Codex team at OpenAI. The first line, in big letters: “You’re in.” Then: “Thanks for maintaining open source projects.”
I stared at that line three times and couldn’t help laughing out loud.
A while back I filled out their Codex for Open Source application on a whim. Didn’t expect much — I just listed the PRs I’d submitted to context-mode, plus my own byf and dev-skills.
Quick math: ChatGPT Pro is $200 a month, so half a year is $1,200. Honestly, saving that money feels great, but what made me happiest was actually this line from the email: “reviewing changes, maintaining releases, keeping quality high.”
The most annoying part of open source was never the coding — it’s reading a stranger’s badly formatted PR in the middle of the night, debugging issues you can’t reproduce, and re-testing piles of fiddly edge cases before every release. None of that turns into a slick demo video, and none of it is worth flexing on Twitter. The best treatment you normally get is an emoji reaction on an issue, or a flat “thx.”
And today, someone said “thank you for maintaining open source” formally, in writing, and threw in six months of Pro on top.
It’s a noreply address, so I can’t write back — but the mood is genuinely great. Codex gets to run hard for the next six months. Now, back to fixing issues.
