An open-source spec for Codex orchestration: Symphony. | OpenAI

OpenAI's Symphony is an open-source specification that turns issue trackers like Linear into automated control planes for coding agents. By assigning an autonomous agent to every open task, it eliminates the need for engineers to micromanage individual AI sessions. This shift from supervising code to managing deliverables has resulted in significant productivity gains and a 500% increase in landed pull requests.

Key Points

• The primary bottleneck in agentic workflows is human attention spent supervising and context-switching between interactive coding sessions.
• Symphony reorients engineering workflows around deliverables (issues/tickets) rather than active sessions, turning the issue tracker into an orchestrator.
• The system allows for parallel execution of complex task trees (DAGs) and speculative exploration, significantly lowering the cost of code changes.
• Symphony is provided as a language-agnostic specification (SPEC.md) to encourage the community to build custom versions for their own environments.
• The workflow uses Codex's 'app server mode' to interact programmatically via JSON-RPC, enabling more scalable and reliable agent management.