In November they launched the Sora app for Android and, within 24 hours, users generated more than one million videos. How do you go from an internal prototype to the number-one spot on the Play Store in less than a month? The main answer: a small team supported by Codex and a work discipline designed to leverage AI, not to let it run without guidance.
How they did it: team, pace and results
A team of four engineers worked alongside Codex between October 8 and November 5, 2025. They consumed around 5 billion tokens and delivered the production release in 28 days. In numbers: globally launched app, 0.1 percent crash rate (99.9% crash‑free) and more than one million videos created in the first 24 hours.
They didn’t use a “secret model”: they used an early version of GPT-5.1-Codex, the same one available to developers via CLI, IDE extensions, or web. The strategy was clear: few people, lots of amplified capacity from Codex, and careful architecture.
Why four engineers and not a huge team? Because adding people late usually worsens coordination. Here, instead of adding bureaucracy, they bet on boosting individual productivity with Codex while keeping high technical quality.
