OpenAI says human attention is the bottleneck, so it built a system to let agents manage themselves

OpenAI introduced Symphony, an open-source spec and reference implementation for self-managing Codex agents.

Symphony uses Linear tickets as a state machine so agents can claim, execute, and hand off routine coding tasks while humans review results.

OpenAI says the workflow boosted merged pull requests in some internal teams and helps reduce coordination overhead.

Ambiguous work still needs direct developer oversight, but the approach points toward more autonomous AI coding workflows.